WardZone

Wards whose circles touch form one chain and one zone. Inside the zone your base works as one place: the comfort level counts every comfort piece in the zone, and for the players written into a ward every workbench of the zone counts as near and CraftFromContainers pulls from every chest in the zone. The wards of a chain switch on and off together, and writing yourself into one of them writes you into all. The wards do not have to be active for the zone, and a zone holds up to 8 wards.

The zone

• A ward covers a circle of 32 m around it, the same circle it shows when you look at it. Two wards whose circles touch or overlap belong to the same chain, and the zone is the union of their circles. A lone ward is a zone of its own.
• Active or inactive does not matter for the zone. The zone is about where the wards stand, not about protection.
• One chain, one switch. When a ward's builder turns it on or off, every ward of the chain follows, whoever built them. As in the game, only the builder can switch a ward, so the chain is switched by any of its builders.
• One chain, one list. Writing yourself into a disabled ward (the use key, as in the game) writes you into every ward of the chain; doing it again takes you out of all of them.
• Limit. A zone holds MaxWards wards (8 by default). When a chain of touching wards is longer, the zone grows from the oldest ward of the chain, each time adding the oldest ward that touches it, and stops at the limit. The remaining wards are ordinary wards outside the zone, and they join when an older ward of the zone is removed. Set MaxWards to 0 for no limit.
• Look at a ward: the circles of every ward in its zone light up on the ground, and the hover text shows how many wards the zone has and its coverage in m². A ward left outside the zone says so in orange.
• After placing a ward you get a message: it joined the zone (and how many wards the zone has now), or the zone is already full and this ward stays outside.

Inside the zone

• Comfort, for everyone. The game counts comfort pieces within 10 m of you. Inside a zone it counts every comfort piece in the zone too, so the fire, the beds, the banners and the chairs of the whole base add up wherever you rest, whether or not you are written into the wards. The rest of the rule is unchanged: you still need a roof over your head, and the same piece type counts once.
• Chests, for those written in. With CraftFromContainers installed, crafting, building, kilns, smelters, fires and cooking stations inside the zone take resources from every chest in the zone, not only from chests within ContainerRange. This works for the builders of the chain's wards and for the players written into one of them; for everyone else CraftFromContainers keeps its usual range. A ward tells you in orange when you are not written in. Chests outside the zone keep working within the range as before. Private chests, chests in use and chests behind another player's active ward are skipped, as CraftFromContainers skips them. Tested with versions 4.0.30 to 4.0.70; other mods that pull from chests are not changed.
• Workbenches, for those written in. A workbench, forge, stonecutter or any other crafting station inside the zone counts as near everywhere in the zone: you can build, repair and remove pieces that need it anywhere in the zone, not only within the station's own range. Same rule as chests: the builders of the chain's wards and the players written into one of them. Crafting at a station still means standing at it.

Outside every zone the game and CraftFromContainers behave as without this mod.

Installation

Client-side: put it on every computer that should see the zones. A player without the mod switches and writes into wards one at a time, as in the game. Requires Jotunn. CraftFromContainers is optional: without it the chest part is off.

The server does not need the mod. If you install it on a dedicated server anyway, the server's Zone settings (MaxWards and the two switches) are sent to every player and replace their own.

• Mod manager: install it.
• Manual: put WardZone.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

The mod writes one value into each ward it sees for the first time: the moment it saw it, which decides the order of wards when a chain is longer than the limit. Switching a chain or writing into it changes the other wards the same way the game does when you use them one by one. Nothing else in the world is changed.

Config

BepInEx/config/qua8ion.valheim.wardzone.cfg.

Languages: English, Russian.