Smelter Upgrades

Your workbench and forge get better when you build things next to them. Your charcoal kiln and smelter never did — they are exactly as slow on day 400 as they were on day 1, they hold a queue you cannot see, they happily accept the wrong ore, and they must be hand-fed forever.

This mod fixes all four.

Upgrade pieces

Build these near a kiln or smelter and it gets better. The station's level and active bonuses show in its tooltip, and a spark stream connects each upgrade to the station it feeds — the same way a chopping block connects to a workbench.

Every upgrade now raises its station's capacity as well as doing its own job. Build both kiln pieces and the kiln goes from 25 wood to 55. Build both smelter pieces and it holds 26 ore and 40 coal.

Only one of each type counts per station, so you cannot ring a smelter with five bellows.

Recipes are deliberately spread across biomes — Black Forest through Plains — so upgrades are earned rather than free on your first day.

Surtling Cores as fuel

Smelters and blast furnaces accept Surtling Cores as a high-grade fuel. One core is worth 4 coal and doubles smelting speed while it burns. The fuel tooltip shows how much core fire is left.

Cores also buy portals and smelters, so burning them is a real trade-off rather than free power.

Lock a smelter to one ore

Press G while looking at a smelter to cycle its accepted ore: unlocked → each ore in turn → unlocked. A locked smelter refuses everything else, and its item menu only offers the ore it wants — no more dropping tin into the iron smelter.

The key is rebindable in the game's own controls menu.

See the queue

Hovering a station draws its input queue as item icons under the crosshair, grouped as icon x4, so you can tell what is actually in there without emptying it.

Stoker's Chest

A chest that quietly tops up every smelter and kiln in range with fuel and ore from its own inventory. It respects the ore lock and never overfills.

Configuration

Everything is configurable in BepInEx/config/zl.smelterupgrades.cfg — every bonus, every range, the core fuel value and speed multiplier, the feeding interval, and the hotkey.

Each upgrade piece also has a ModelPrefab setting if you would rather it wore a different model.

Turn on DebugLogBaseStats to log each station's untouched vanilla stats, which is the honest way to tune the numbers for your own balance.

Multiplayer

Every player on the server needs this mod installed, and so does a dedicated server. The custom pieces cannot spawn for anyone who does not have it.

Installation

Use a mod manager, or install Jotunn and drop SmelterUpgrades.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Uninstalling

Remove any pieces this mod added before uninstalling. Valheim deletes prefabs it no longer recognises, so a Stoker's Chest left standing will vanish and take its contents with it.

Contact

Got an idea? I'd love to hear it — new upgrades, feature requests, balance thoughts, or just to say it's working for you. Find me on Instagram: @lg_9d

Changelog

1.1.1

• Fixed: the 1.1.0 capacity increases never reached anyone who already had a config file. BepInEx only adds missing keys to an existing config, it never rewrites a value that is already there, so updating players silently kept the old numbers. Configs now migrate when a shipped default changes, and any value you customised yourself is left alone.
• Fixed: pieces could be drawn with different shaders from one another, so one would light like a foreign import while the rest matched the world.

1.1.0

• Every upgrade piece now raises its station's capacity as well as doing its own job
  • Kiln Vents: +15 wood (kiln 25 -> 40) on top of its +25% speed
  • Wood Rack: +15 wood, up from +10
  • Smelter Bellows: +6 ore, on top of its speed and fuel efficiency
  • Ore Hopper: +10 ore (was +5) and +20 coal capacity (was +10)
  • Both kiln pieces together take it to 55 wood; both smelter pieces to 26 ore and 40 coal
• Added contact details for feedback and feature requests

1.0.0

Initial release.

• Upgrade pieces for the charcoal kiln and smelter: speed, input queue, fuel capacity and fuel efficiency
• Surtling Cores usable as fuel in smelters and blast furnaces, worth 4 coal and doubling speed while they burn
• Lock a smelter to a single ore type with a rebindable key (default G)
• Input queue shown as grouped item icons on hover
• Stoker's Chest, which feeds fuel and ore to nearby stations
• Recipes gated across biomes from Black Forest to Plains
• Every bonus, range, rate and hotkey exposed in the config