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, and gives your spare Surtling Cores something to do.

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 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.

Lock a station to one input

Press G while looking at a smelter or kiln to cycle what it accepts: unlocked → each valid input in turn → unlocked. A smelter can be pinned to Copper Ore, a kiln to Fine Wood.

A locked station refuses everything else, and its item menu only offers what it wants — no more dropping tin into the iron smelter, or feeding your good wood to the charcoal pile.

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

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.

Fuel is one pool, so once cores and coal are mixed the boost runs until the core fuel is spent rather than tracking individual cores.

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, and UseVanillaShader draws the mod's models with Valheim's own shader so they weather, wet and take snow like the rest of the world.

There is also a FuelEfficiencyBonus per piece. The game stores coal-per-bar as a whole number, so this rounds hard — on a vanilla smelter, which burns 2 coal a bar, nothing below 0.5 changes anything at all. The tooltip only reports a saving that actually landed, so you can see immediately whether your setting did something.

Updating keeps your config. When a shipped default changes, a setting only moves if you had left it at the old default — anything you tuned yourself stays exactly as you set it.

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

1.1.5

• Fixed: the Stoker's Chest ate ore and fed almost nothing. The Deep North update added an argument to the game's own "add ore" call, so every attempt failed: the ore left the chest and never arrived. Worse, the failure ended the whole feeding pass, so only whichever station happened to come first got its fuel and everything behind it was skipped — which looked from the outside like a chest feeding something other than the stations standing next to it.
• The chest now calls the station first and takes the item second. If a call ever fails again, your ore stays in the chest rather than going nowhere.
• One station failing no longer ends the pass. The rest are still fed, and it is logged once.
• New FeederChest / Stations setting listing which stations the chest serves — charcoal kiln, smelter and blast furnace by default. The game's smelter class sits behind more stations than those three, so the chest could quietly top up anything else in range that smelts. Leave the setting empty for the old feed-everything behaviour.

1.1.4

• New models for every piece. All five were rebuilt from designs staged against the game's own stations: a crank blower for the Smelter Bellows, twin bins for the Stoker's Chest, a gantry bin for the Ore Hopper, an A-frame rick for the Wood Rack, and a stoked hearth for the Kiln Vents.
• The blast furnace takes upgrades now, with two pieces built at the black forge:
  • Furnace Tuyeres — +25% speed, one coal a bar instead of two, and +6 ore
  • Charging Ramp — +10 ore and +20 fuel capacity
• A locked station shows what it is locked to. The ore's own icon floats at the spot you feed it, so a row of smelters can be read from across the base instead of one hover at a time. Its size, height and range are configurable, and it can be turned off.
• The ore lock key moved from G to N. The Deep North update took G for the radial action wheel, and that wheel has no entry in the keybind menu, so the two were fighting over the same press. A key you had already rebound yourself is left exactly as you set it.
• The blast furnace is added to UpgradeStations for existing configs too, without disturbing anything else you had tuned.
• Fixed: the build menu could keep showing a piece's old picture after its model changed. Icons are now drawn from the model that actually ships.

1.1.3

• Updated for Valheim's Deep North update. The update changed several game functions this mod relies on, which stopped all four upgrade pieces from loading and left smelters without the mod's extra features. Everything works again.
• Now requires Jotunn 2.30.0.

1.1.2

• Fixed: the Smelter Bellows model was built from two tapered halves meeting narrow end to narrow end, which is an hourglass rather than a wedge. It is now a proper bellows: wide at the back, narrowing to the nozzle, with iron strapping across the back face.
• Fixed: the Ore Hopper's funnel was upside down, its rim floated in the air above the mouth, and its legs stood too far out to touch anything. It now reads as a funnel in a four-post frame, which is what it was always meant to be.
• The readme now documents what the upgrades actually do. The Bellows' fuel-efficiency bonus was listed as "-25% coal per bar", but the game stores coal-per-bar as a whole number, so 25% off a 2-coal bar rounds straight back to 2 and nothing changed. The setting is still there for anyone who wants to raise it; the station tooltip only ever reported savings that really landed, so it was never claiming otherwise in game.
• Added screenshots and a picture of the five pieces.

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