SignLink

Put glyph art, coloured text and pictures into your world as sign text. Every player sees them, with or without the mod, because they are ordinary signs saved in the world. Only the player who makes them needs SignLink.

Floor mural	Ceiling fresco
Glyph art	Signposts and labels
QR code	Tilted

Links: GitHub (source, documentation) · Wiki · Nexus Mods · Thunderstore · Buy me a coffee

What it does

• Ready-made art. Over 200 pieces in 15 groups: glyph art (pictures drawn with letters and symbols: Huginn and Muninn, a dragon ship, Eikthyr, Mjolnir, Jormungandr and more), pixel art (the cat and its friends, a boar family, necks, hens and chicks, forest animals, bears, wolves and moose, seals, fish and sea serpents, a fjord at dusk) and kitchen icons for chest labels. The animated ones go on moving; switch Moving off for a still.
• Text with templates. Write coloured text, or put ready pieces in a click: a coloured block to paint a wall or a floor, a label, a symbol from a palette (runes, arrows, frames, emoji), a two-colour pattern, a QR code that phones read.
• Pictures on signs. PNG, JPG or GIF (its first frame) become sign text in game, sized in metres (phone photos the right way up). A sign shows up to 50 000 pixels; a bigger picture goes over copies of the sign stacked a fraction of a millimetre apart, so it stays one flat, seamless picture (up to a million pixels, in single player). On a server every player who arrives downloads it first, at 150 KB/s at best, and the objects around it wait behind it, so a multiplayer world has hard limits: at most 300 KB on one sign and 600 KB for all the SignLink signs within 100 m, every player's (a bar on the window shows how full the area is). The window shows the wait and the limits before you place anything; single player has none.
• Transparency. See-through parts of a PNG stay empty (and cost nothing), half-transparent parts stay half transparent.
• Any pose. Tilt a sign from standing to face up (a picture on the floor) or face down (read from below, for a ceiling), rotate it, resize and move what it holds along its face. The place you set stays put whatever the tilt.
• Move or turn the sign itself from a millimetre to a metre at a time (buttons, arrow keys or the Turn slider, 3 Place), as far as the game still holds it up (up to 5 m: a sign standing on a floor goes metres towards or away, one on a wall barely off it) and any angle, without making it again. Steps show for you at once; Apply sign coord changes makes them everyone's, a tilt and a rotation too, Undo steps takes them back. Where the game would not hold the sign up, the steps and the pose still show, and only the button is refused, in red.
• Animations saved in the world. They play for every SignLink player on a shared clock and survive restarts; players without the mod see the first frame.
• Glowing or lit. Pictures glow in their own colours day and night, or take the scene's light like normal sign text.
• Multiplayer-safe. Every sign of a picture stays under 400 KB, below the 512 KiB a sign can carry over the network, always.

How to use

1. Install with r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager (BepInExPack Valheim is installed with it).
2. Put your pictures (PNG, JPG or GIF) into SignLink/images in the game's own data folder, next to your worlds (on Windows %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\SignLink\images) (Open folder on the Picture source opens it). Folders inside it are fine: the list shows them, → opens one and ← goes back up; a sign remembers its picture's folder. Six public-domain paintings and a moving GIF are already there to start with (Van Gogh, Hokusai, Michelangelo, Monet, two by Arbo, and Muybridge's galloping horse).
3. In game, build a sign where the picture should go, then press PageUp (or type /signlink in the chat; the key can be changed or switched off on Settings, and the game's own sign editor has an Open in SignLink button).
4. Select the sign on 1 Sign: Pick in view (the window hides until you click a sign; the one under the cursor wears a white frame), or choose it from Signs nearby. Opening the window does not take the sign you look at. E on a sign that already holds a picture, or Open in SignLink in the game's sign editor, opens SignLink on that sign: on 3 Place to edit a sign SignLink made, on 2 Content for a new one; the hotkey does the same while a sign is selected. A selected sign stays selected while the window is closed, until you go far from it. Until a sign is selected, 2 Content and 3 Place stay grey.
5. 2 Content: pick a built-in piece under Art, pick a Picture file, or write a Text, look at the preview and the cost, and set its light (glowing, or lit by the scene like the game's own sign text). A picture has a Resolution (how many pixels wide it is: the only thing that sets what it costs; a new picture starts at Max (multiplayer), the most that fits a server, and Native takes every pixel the file has) and a Width in metres, which makes the pixels bigger or smaller (with Fine Width steps, on by default, the exact size takes a few pixels more or less). On Text the templates write ready pieces in a click: a coloured Block in metres (paint a wall or a floor, translucent if you like), a Label, a Symbol from a palette (arrows, shapes, frames, runes, symbols, emoji), a Pattern in two colours, a QR code of a link or a text (phones read it; error correction, size and colours to choose). The live preview shows every pick (a piece, a picture, a text) on the selected sign, for you only, until step 6 puts it on.
6. 3 Place: size it, move it, tilt or turn it if you like (the highlight shows where it goes), then press the button at the bottom (Update content, Update sign or Update sign and content: what changes). Nothing goes on the sign before that.
7. To change it later, select its sign: 2 Content and 3 Place show what it was made with. On 3 Place the Content group's changes have their own Apply content changes, Undo and Reset to default; Undo changes at the bottom drops everything not applied yet.
8. 1 Sign: copy, paste, clear or delete it. Made with tells which SignLink version made it. Moving the sign itself a little (buttons or arrow keys) is on 3 Place in the Sign group (Positioning fine-tune); standing it up, laying it down, tilting and turning it there too (Rotations), an empty sign too.

1 Sign	2 Content	3 Place

Every slider takes a typed value too, and Shift + mouse wheel over a slider's row turns it a fine step a notch (Tilt and Rotate 1°, Right 5 cm, Width about a pixel, Resolution to the next it makes); the plain wheel scrolls the window.

The window shows what a picture costs before you place it: how many signs, how much it adds to the world save, and how long every player who arrives waits for it on a server (the download at 150 KB/s at best, then the build).

Multiplayer and servers

• Nobody else needs the mod to see your pictures. The server needs nothing either.
• Hard limits in multiplayer. On a server every player who arrives downloads all the signs around them, and the buildings there wait behind them. So in a world others share (on a server, or hosting with Start server) SignLink stores at most 300 KB on one sign and 600 KB for all the SignLink signs within 100 m (every player's together; vanilla signs do not count: the game keeps each small). The window's title shows how full the area is, and the Area bar on 2 Content shows it with what you picked in place of the sign's content. Over a limit the button stays grey and says why; making a sign lighter or deleting it always works. Single player has no limits.
• A picture larger than one sign creates extra signs (the stacked copies) without using materials, in single player and in multiplayer alike; the multiplayer limits above keep them small. Wards are always respected.
• Each copy of a picture is a sign that no player placed: the hammer takes it down, and it drops nothing for SignLink players (when a copy's data is owned by a player without the mod, their game drops a piece of wood). The Delete button on the Sign tab removes a whole stack.
• Another player's picture can be edited without its file: SignLink reads it back from the sign itself. Its size and place change freely, its Resolution only goes down (the sign holds no more pixels), and a moving GIF stays still on your computer (whoever has the file still sees it move). Wards are respected.
• Copy and Paste on the Sign tab carry what made a picture or a piece and how it sits, so the pasted sign edits like the original; a moving piece pastes moving.
• A pose survives restarts.
• A sign moved under Positioning fine-tune shows only for you until Apply sign coord changes, which makes its signs again where they stand: every player sees it there at once (everyone near loads the picture again). Reset to default puts it back where and as it was built, for everyone.

Settings

Settings are on the window's Settings tab; each one is also a line in the config file BepInEx/config/PetyusPolisz.SignLink.cfg (its sections are named below):

Manual install: copy SignLink.dll into BepInEx/plugins. Keyboard and mouse only (no controller). A dedicated server does not need it.

Uninstall: remove it in the mod manager, or delete BepInEx/plugins/SignLink.dll. The pictures stay as ordinary signs. Optional: delete the SignLink folder in the game's data folder (your images), BepInEx/cache/SignLink/ (thumbnails) and BepInEx/config/PetyusPolisz.SignLink.cfg.

Known limits

• A picture moved off its sign is picked by the sign's board (where the sign stands), not by the picture.
• Big pictures take a moment to appear when a player walks up (about 13 µs per pixel, on every player's game).
• Without SignLink, pressing E on a picture sign opens the game's editor; pressing Enter there cuts the sign's text to 50 characters (Escape leaves it alone). Such a player's game also slows down while the crosshair rests on a picture sign's board up close (the game reads the whole picture for its hover hint). Hiding the sign in a wall or the ground, with only its picture out, avoids both.
• A GIF moves over its picture on every computer that has the GIF file in its SignLink images folder (give the file to your friends); everyone else sees its first frame. Its frames are not saved in the world.
• A GIF reads with up to 5 000 frames and 1 500 million pixels in all (about 720 frames of 1920 x 1080). To move, its frames are shrunk to at most twice the sign's pixels (and 1024 a side; SignLink 1.0.2); every moving GIF shares the GIF memory (256 MB; 512 or 1024 in Settings › Playback on a PC with the RAM), the same GIF on many signs counting once. A GIF whose frames at that size pass about four fifths of it (200 MB of 256) plays every second, third ... frame (the same speed); one too big to move goes on still. The Moving row says which before you put it on. A GIF beside you takes the room of GIFs idle far away or paused; one that waits for room starts the moment room frees.
• The live preview builds a piece, or a sign's content moved, of up to 40 000 glyphs; a bigger one shows only the highlight's rectangle until it goes on (a picture or a text always shows).

About this mod

SignLink is made by ChesTeRcs (team PetyusPolisz). It was written with Claude (Anthropic's AI) under their direction and tested on their worlds with Valheim 1.0.20. The code is MIT licensed (LICENSE); the art library is CC BY 4.0 (LICENSE-ART): playing with the pieces needs no credit, sharing the pieces themselves does. The six paintings and the GIF that come with it are public domain: The Starry Night (Van Gogh), The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai), The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo), Impression, Sunrise (Monet), The Wild Hunt of Odin and Valkyrien (Arbo), and Muybridge's galloping horse (1887).

SignLink lives on Thunderstore, Nexus Mods and GitHub (source, wiki, bug reports).

Art showcase

204 ready-made art pieces come with the mod, and 150 of them are animated (see them all):