MidgardPlus

By Odin the Red · midgardplus.vardynbot.com

One mod to tune Valheim the way you want it, instead of twenty that fight each other.

Every setting starts at vanilla. Installing it changes nothing until you turn something on. Edits to the config apply while the game is running, so you can try a number and change it again without restarting.

Multiplayer

Settings are host-authoritative. Join a server and it hands you its settings, which override yours while you're connected. You get yours back when you leave.

So nobody has to compare config files before a session, and nobody can quietly hand themselves free building on someone else's world.

Everyone needs the mod, including the dedicated server. Only the host's settings get read.

What you can change

Quality of Life: stack size, item weight, auto-pickup range, portals carrying ore, skill loss on death.

Player: carry weight bonus, stamina regen, stamina cost, run speed.

Building: free building, ignore structural stability, build range.

Combat: enemy health, enemy damage, player damage. Creature-vs-creature damage is left alone, so tamed animals behave normally.

Production: smelter speed, fermenter speed, fireplace fuel duration, infinite fuel.

World: day length.

Companions: how many at once, health, star level, gear tier, recall distance.

Weapons, armour and tools never become stackable, whatever you set the multiplier to. Durability and quality are stored per item, so stacking them would wreck both.

What it adds

Companion Horn

Crafted at a level 2 Workbench for 10 fine wood, 2 bronze, 4 deer hide and 10 greydwarf eye.

Sound it and a Dverger turns up, already tamed and already yours, with a name everyone on the server sees. They fight whatever attacks you and won't turn on you, because they sit in the player faction rather than being a tamed enemy. Press E to send them ahead or tell them to hold, the same way you command a wolf.

Arm them in bronze, iron, silver or black metal, and give them up to three stars. Anyone who falls more than forty metres behind gets pulled back to your side, so you won't lose them the first time you take a portal.

Reinforced Chest

An iron-banded chest with an 8x4 grid. Built with the hammer under Furniture, for ten fine wood and four iron.

Recipes for found-only materials

Additions only. Every normal drop and spawn is left as it was.

Config

BepInEx/config/midgardplus.cfg, written on first launch with everything at vanilla.

Uninstalling

Remove the mod. Nothing the game ships gets modified, so there's nothing else to undo.

Notes

Content is always registered rather than config-gated, because a client and server that disagree about which prefabs exist can't stay in sync. Config controls behaviour, not whether things exist.

Multipliers apply to a captured vanilla baseline rather than the current value, so changing a setting repeatedly never compounds.

Changelog

1.2.3

• Leaving a companion behind now has a price. Dismissing one that was far away used to delete it, along with everything it carried. Now it stays where you left it until someone next goes near, then puts its bag and the gear you gave it on the ground there and goes. Want your gear back? Go and get it.
• Gear you give a companion is kept. The game never saves what a creature is wearing, so armour and weapons you gave one were gone the next time its area loaded, after you logged out for example. They are now saved with the companion and put back on when it loads.
• The kit a companion arrives in stays with it. A horn is not used up, so a companion that dropped its starting gear when it died or was dismissed was free gear on demand. Only its bag and what you gave it drop now, and kit it takes off is gone rather than left in its bag.
• Each role wears its own colours: warriors in the Dverger's red, gatherers in green, builders in blue. Their bodies keep the colour when they fall.
• Coming next now lists tames that follow you through portals, which a player asked for, and Viking companions. Ideas and bugs go to Discord.
• 1.2.0 to 1.2.3 can all play together.

1.2.2

Both of these came from a player's bug report. Keep them coming on Discord.

• A dead companion no longer leaves something falling through the ground forever. When a companion died it dropped the Dverger's own crossbows along with its bag. Those are made for the creature to hold, not to lie on the ground, so they fell through it, the game lifted them back up, and they fell again, on the spot where the companion died. They now go with the companion. Everything you gave it still drops, including a real arbalest. Crossbows already stuck in your world are cleared away the next time you are near them.
• Dismiss finds companions you told to stay. Telling a companion to stay wiped the only record of who it belonged to, so crouch and horn said you had none, and it stopped counting toward your summon limit. Companions now remember who called them. One you told to stay before this update is yours again as soon as you tell it to follow.
• 1.2.0, 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 can all play together.

1.2.1

MidgardPlus keeps growing, and a lot of what gets added started as a message from a player. Bugs, ideas and "this feels wrong" all go to Discord. The more you send, the better it gets.

• Builders leave seed for the next crop. Barley and flax go into the windmill and the spinning wheel, but they are also what you plant, and a builder would have ground up every one. It now leaves 20 of each in your chests. Anything you put in its own bag, it uses freely.
• The mod page shows what is coming next, and how to report a bug so it gets fixed quickly.
• 1.2.0 and 1.2.1 can play together, so nobody has to update at the same moment this time.

1.2.0

Everyone on a server updates together. This release adds a new companion, and a server and its players must agree on every creature in the game, so 1.2.0 will not connect to 1.1.x.

• A third companion: the Builder. Craft the Builder's Horn at a level 2 workbench from 10 fine wood, 20 stone, 10 resin and 10 greydwarf eyes. A builder looks after your base: it repairs damaged pieces, keeps fires, torches and hearths burning, and keeps smelters, furnaces, windmills, spinning wheels and the eitr refinery supplied.
• It follows your rules. It only repairs what players built, needs a workbench in range where the piece does, and stays out of wards you are not permitted in, the same as your own hammer.
• It uses your chests carefully. Fuel and ore come from its own bag first, then from chests near the thing it is feeding, under the same rules as crafting from chests. It never feeds wood into a kiln, so the wood you stored for building stays yours.
• It does not overfill anything. The game's own fuel and ore calls do not check how much a station can hold, so the builder works that out itself before adding a single piece.
• Tell it to stay and it works where it stands. It only walks off to a job while following you, and gives up on anything it cannot reach rather than walking at it forever.
• New setting Builder work range, 20 metres by default; 0 stops it working. Gatherer combat strength now covers builders too.
• Remote dismiss knows about builders, so a lost one can be sent home like any other.

1.1.13

• A companion's body stays where it fell. When a creature dies, the game hands its body the speed it was moving at and never limits how fast that body may fall. A companion that died while dropping, or just after being pulled back to you, drove its body straight through the floor and out of the world. Companion bodies now start at rest, a little above the ground. Every other creature dies exactly as before.
• The log records how fast a companion was moving when it died, so if a body ever misbehaves again there is a number to look at.

1.1.12

• Tools, weapons and armour can be crafted from chests. Their recipes stayed greyed out even with every ingredient sitting in a nearby chest. Some recipes carry ingredients that only count at a different kind of station; the game skips those and never shows them, but the chest check counted them anyway and failed on something that was not needed. It now applies the same test the game does.
• Only chests you could open yourself are used. Loot chests in dungeons and other containers no player built are left alone, graves and companion bags are never touched, and a chest set to private is used only by whoever built it. Carts and ships you built still count.
• No duplicated materials on servers. A chest only saves changes made by the machine that owns it, so taking from a chest someone else's game owned did not stick and the items came back. The mod now takes ownership first, the same way opening a chest does.
• Building stays honest. A piece that needs a workbench can no longer be placed without one just because a chest holds its materials, and chests no longer unlock recipes or pieces you have not discovered yet.
• "Any one of these" recipes are left to the game. It takes their ingredient from your backpack when crafting, so offering them from chests produced a Craft button that did nothing.
• When chests are not enough, the log says why: which ingredient is short, how many chests were usable, and why the others were skipped.

1.1.11

• Crafting from chests, rebuilt. Chests are now tracked as they load instead of being found with a physics search, so how a chest's colliders happen to be built no longer decides whether it counts, and the recipe screen stops running a physics query every time it refreshes.
• The recipe screen shows what the chests add. An ingredient covered by nearby chests used to still read 0/8, so a craft that was going to work looked as if it would not. It now reads 3+5/8: three carried and five in chests, against eight needed.
• Chests inside someone else's ward are left alone, the same as if you tried to open them by hand. Your own wards still let you in.
• The log says whether it is on. The first time you open a recipe list it records whether crafting from chests is switched on, and every craft that takes from a chest is logged. A switched-off setting can no longer pass for a broken feature.

1.1.10

• Dismiss companions you have lost. A companion left behind in a zone nobody is near stops being a creature and becomes a saved record, so there was nothing to walk up to and send away. Crouch and sound either horn twice within four seconds to dismiss every companion you own, wherever it is. Nearby ones drop their bags on the ground first. Far-away ones cannot, because nothing is loaded there to drop anything from, so what they carried goes with them, and the message says so.
• On a server, the server does the far-away search. A client only holds the zones around it, so it would find the companions near you and miss exactly the lost ones. The server works out whose companions they are from your connection rather than from anything your game sends, so nobody can dismiss someone else's. Nearby dismissal works even on a server still on 1.1.9; the far-away part needs the server updated too.
• Other players' companions no longer use up your limit. Every companion within range counted against Companions per player, so on a server a friend standing next to you could stop you summoning at all. Only your own count now.

1.1.9

1.1.8 went out before it had been played properly, and it showed. Everything below was found by playing it. If you are on 1.1.8, update.

• Gatherers actually gather. A freshly summoned gatherer read its role before the summon had written it down, took itself for a warrior, and stood still. It now keeps checking, reacts within a second rather than four, and walks to things up to Gatherer reach away instead of only noticing what lands at its feet.
• Opening a gatherer's bag no longer locks up the screen. 1.1.8 gave gatherers a 6x4 bag, and the container screen started throwing an error every frame and holding on to your cursor - the fault 1.1.4 fixed, back again. Both companions carry 5x3 bags.
• The bag repair no longer deletes things. When it tidied a bag, anything that would not fit back in was destroyed. It is now dropped on the ground beside the companion.
• One weapon at a time. Companions put on the best item of every weapon type at once: a club, a greatsword, a bow and a torch. They now wear one weapon, one shield or torch (none with a two-handed weapon) and one of each armour piece, and take off anything extra.
• Your companions no longer shoot you. A crossbow bolt fired past you hit you on the way through. Companions can no longer hurt you or each other.
• Borrowed attacks come from the right place. When a companion cannot swing what you give it, it borrows an attack animation from the Dverger's own weapons. That list was read after its gear had been swapped, so it held a club and a piece of armour. It is now read from the Dverger itself.
• Crafting from chests could be handed the wrong list. The chest search cached its result without noting how far it had looked, so a gatherer searching near you could leave its smaller list for your crafting to reuse.
• Edits to the config really do apply while the game is running. This has been promised since 1.0.0 and was never true: nothing re-read the file, so every change, including the launcher's, waited for a restart. The file is now watched. Companion gear still only affects the next companion you summon.
• Gatherers put things in chests as they go rather than waiting until they are full.
• If you had 1.1.8: BepInEx keeps any value already in your config, so Gatherer reach will still say 8. The new default is 20; set it yourself.

1.1.8

• Two kinds of companion. The Companion Horn still calls a warrior. A new Gatherer's Horn calls someone who would rather carry than fight: it picks up what is lying on the ground, and once its bag is full it walks the haul to your chests. It arrives in the starter kit, carries a 6x4 bag instead of 5x3, and hits for half what a warrior does, so it can look after itself without doing your fighting for you. Built at a level 2 Workbench for fine wood, leather scraps, deer hide and greydwarf eyes.
• Crafting from chests actually works now. It used to move materials into your backpack first, which quietly failed whenever your backpack was full: anything that could stack onto something you already carried went through, and anything needing a free slot did not. That is why it looked like only arrows and torches could be made. Materials now come straight out of the chest, so how full you are stops mattering. Reported by CintheDragon, thank you - it was a real bug, not you.
• And you can see it working. Ingredients covered by nearby chests no longer flash red at you, and hovering one tells you how many are in the chests around you.
• Companions no longer stand still after a reload. Valheim stores who a tame is following on the creature itself; this mod set the follow target directly and never wrote it down, so the moment the world reloaded a companion forgot who it belonged to and simply stopped.
• They no longer sink through your floor. Both summoning and recall dropped a companion at the height of your feet, which put it inside the boards when you were standing on a built floor. Both now stand it on whatever solid surface is actually under it.
• "Frightened" was the wrong word. Valheim shows any alerted tame as frightened, which is right for a boar and backwards for something holding a sword. A companion that has spotted trouble now reads as On guard.
• They will stand by a fire. Dvergr avoid flame, and companions inherited it, so they backed away from your hearth and dropped whatever they were fighting to do it.

1.1.7

• The launcher grew up. Presets you can try without losing your own tuning, search across all 29 settings, export and import so a host can hand their rules to everyone else in one file, an update check, an automatic config backup before it writes, and a clean uninstall that keeps your settings. Download it from https://midgardplus.odinthered.dev.
• The mod itself is unchanged from 1.1.5. This release is the documentation for the above.

1.1.6

• The download works on Linux now. Since 1.1.3 the package stored its paths with backslashes, which the zip format does not allow. Windows quietly forgives it; Linux does not, so unpacking gave one file named plugins\MidgardPlus.dll instead of a plugins folder, and nothing loaded. Packaged properly again.
• The launcher is on the site. A Windows app that installs BepInEx, Jotunn and this mod, gives all 29 settings a proper control, and starts the game. See the README, or https://midgardplus.odinthered.dev.
• The one-line installer no longer points at a fixed version, so it always installs the newest release rather than whichever one it was written against.
• The mod itself is unchanged from 1.1.5.

1.1.5

• Companions fight with the weapon you give them. Handing one a sword equipped it but never swung it, and a few seconds later they went back to their crossbow. MonsterAI picks what to attack with by reading AI values on the item, and player weapons carry none, because nothing in vanilla asks a creature to swing a player's sword. Those values are filled in now. The rig is checked first: a weapon the Dverger cannot physically swing borrows an animation from one of its own melee weapons rather than leaving the companion standing there.
• They put their own crossbow away. A bow and a melee weapon sit in different equipment slots, so both stayed equipped and the AI kept choosing the bow at range. Arm a companion yourself and the kit it was born with goes in its bag, where you can take it back.
• Gear tiers actually replace the loadout. m_randomItems was left alone, so a companion got the tier you asked for plus the Dverger crossbow on top.
• Clearer refusal when a server and client disagree. The mod now declares its network compatibility, so joining without it names MidgardPlus and the version instead of failing vaguely. A server cannot install the mod for you: nothing on a vanilla client is listening, and a server able to push code your machine then runs would be a back door, not a feature.
• Companions no longer out-fight you. Health and star level already scaled to your best weapon skill, but damage did not, so a companion carrying the Dverger's own Mistlands crossbow hit like Mistlands however early you were. Weapon damage now scales with the same figure, and the value is stored on the companion so it survives a reload and is the same for everyone on a server. An existing companion keeps the strength it was summoned with.
• Companions can be handed gloves, and 1.1.x versions stay compatible with each other.

1.1.4

• The companion bag works. Opening it used to throw an error every frame and take your mouse cursor with it, so you could see the bag but never touch anything in it. The bag was pointed at the companion's own body inventory, which is a different shape than the grid drawn over it, so the interface kept reading past the end of its own slots. The bag now has its own 5x3 inventory. Companions saved by the older build get repaired the first time you open them.
• Gear your companion by hand. Drop a weapon, shield or armour in the bag and they put it on within a few seconds, handing back whatever they were using so you can take it away. They will not swap down to something worse, so a bag used for hauling will not strip their kit.
• Companions start in rags. Club, wooden shield and cloth: the low tier is the new default, so kitting them out is something you do rather than something you are given.
• Their bag spills when they die. Anything you handed them drops on the ground instead of being destroyed along with the companion.
• Craft from nearby chests. Workbench and forge recipes now count and pull materials out of chests around you. Off by default; turn it on under 8 - Containers.
• Companions can wear gloves now, and feed themselves from food left in the bag.

1.1.3

• Superseded by 1.1.4 six minutes after it went up. Nothing here that 1.1.4 does not also carry; use 1.1.4 or newer.

1.1.2

• Dedicated servers load the mod now. It declared a BepInEx process filter for valheim.exe only, so servers running valheim_server.exe logged "Skipping [MidgardPlus] because of process filters" and never loaded it. Settings are host-authoritative, so the one machine that most needed the mod was the one refusing to load it. Reported by Symoji, thank you.
• 1.1.1 was published without this fix by mistake. Use 1.1.2.
• Companions carry a bag. Hold E on one to open it. In this version opening it could freeze the screen and take your cursor; the next release fixed that.

1.1.1

• If Jotunn is older than 2.30.0, the mod now says so on screen and in the log instead of letting the game fail deep inside Valheim with a MissingFieldException. That failure looks like a character respawning forever and is impossible to diagnose from the symptom.
• Discord link added for bug reports and ideas.
• 1.1.0 identified itself as 1.0.0 in the BepInEx log. This release was meant to fix that but still said 1.1.0; 1.1.2 is the first to report its own version correctly.

1.1.0

Update if you are on 1.0.0. That version pins Jotunn 2.29.2, which throws a MissingFieldException on PieceTable.m_availablePieces with current Valheim and leaves a character stuck in a respawn loop. This release requires Jotunn 2.30.0, which fixes it.

New: companions scale to your weapon skill. A fresh character gets a companion that helps rather than one that clears the Black Forest without them. Strength, star level and gear tier all rise with your best weapon skill.

• Scale companion to player skill (default on) and Companion minimum strength (default 0.35, the fraction of full strength at skill 0).
• Companion gear now defaults to Auto, which picks a tier from your own skill: Dverger gear below 20, then Bronze, Iron, Silver, and Black Metal at 80+. Set a tier by name to override, or Default to keep the Dverger loadout.
• Star level is earned too, so a beginner does not get a two-star companion.

1.0.0

First release.

• 25 settings across quality of life, player, building, combat, production, world and companions. All default to vanilla behaviour.
• Host-authoritative config sync. A server pushes its settings to clients on connect, and clients revert to their own on disconnect.
• Live config reload, no restart needed.
• Companion Horn: summons a tamed, commandable Dverger companion with a synced name, configurable gear tier, star level and auto-recall.
• Reinforced Chest: an 8x4 buildable chest.
• Craftable Chain, IronNails and Tar. Existing drops and spawns untouched.