WeenieHutJrDifficultyManager

Choose what you keep when you die. The game's Casual preset keeps only what you are wearing and holding; this mod lets you tick, slot by slot, what stays with you: your equipped gear, each of the eight hotbar slots, and the arrow, consumable and food slots of the DraggableUI mod. Everything else goes to your grave as usual. Or keep it all and never see a grave. And choose which skills a death lowers: by group (Combat, Life, Movement), skill by skill, or none. Set in the config file or in game through the ModSettings mod.

How it works

You die. Instead of the game's death penalty, the mod walks through your inventory and sorts every item: kept or to the grave. Kept items stay exactly where they are, worn items stay worn, so you respawn ready to go. The rest is moved into a grave at the spot where you died, in the same cells they had in your inventory, so taking the grave back puts them where they were.

Death mode (General.DeathMode), the mode this mod runs in:

What WeenieHutJr can keep, each with its own switch, all on by default:

• Equipped: what you are wearing and holding. Armour, cape, belt, trinket, the weapon and shield in your hands and the arrows loaded in your bow. This is what the Casual preset keeps.
• Slot1 to Slot8: the hotbar, the top row of your inventory, keys 1 to 8. Whatever sits in a ticked slot stays, equipped or not: your spare weapons, your pickaxe, your hammer, the stack of food you keep in slot 8.
• Arrows, Consumables, Food: the three arrow, three consumable and three food slots of the DraggableUI mod (1.1.1 or later, by the same author). Without DraggableUI, or with its Extra slots switched off, these three settings have nothing to match and do nothing.

Quest items never drop, as in the game. Nothing in the grid below the hotbar is ever kept in WeenieHutJr; that is what the grave is for.

Settings in game. With the ModSettings mod installed (a separate mod by the same author), the gear button beside Skills in the inventory screen lists this mod. Open it for the General section and the KeepOnDeath section. Pick the mode, click On/Off on each slot. Every change is written to the config file at once and applies to your next death.

Skills. In the game, a hard death (more than ten minutes after your last one) lowers every skill by a quarter of its level and wipes the progress toward the next level. The mod lets you say which skills are kept. Everything is off by default, so out of the box skills drop as in the game. Three group switches cover the families, each skill has a switch of its own, and an All switch keeps every skill. As in the KeepOnDeath section, true means keep: a skill is kept when any of the three says so, the All switch, its group, or the skill itself, and lowered only when none does.

Want deaths to cost only your fighting skills? Switch Life and Movement on. Want to protect just Cooking and Farming? Leave the groups off and switch those two skills on. No skill loss at all? KeepSkillsOnDeath.All = true. The skills that do drop lose exactly what the game would take, so the world's "skill reduction rate" modifier still applies to them. Skill settings work in every death mode; DeathMode is about items.

World settings. The mode replaces the world's death penalty for items: a world set to Hard or Hardcore drops items as the ticks say when you run WeenieHutJr, and deletes nothing. One exception: a world set to "no item loss" keeps everything in the game, and the mod keeps everything too, whatever the mode. For skills, a world whose death penalty is Hardcore wipes every skill to zero through a different path, and the mod leaves that alone; the skill switches shape the ordinary quarter loss only.

Installation

With a mod manager (Thunderstore Mod Manager, r2modman, Gale): install it from the mod list, or click Install with App on this page. BepInExPack is installed alongside it. Install ModSettings too if you want to change the settings in game, and DraggableUI 1.1.1 or later if you want the Arrows, Consumables and Food switches to have slots to keep; both are optional.

By hand: install BepInExPack_Valheim first. Then unzip this package and put WeenieHutJrDifficultyManager.dll in Valheim\BepInEx\plugins\WeenieHutJrDifficultyManager\.

Multiplayer

Client-side only. Only the player who wants to keep their things needs the mod. In Valheim the dying player's own game decides what goes into the grave, and neither the server nor the other players check it, so the mod works on any server, dedicated or not, with nothing installed anywhere else. Other players die by the world's rules unless they install it too.

That also means it is an advantage the world's settings did not grant. On a server you share, say so, or agree on the mode with the others.

Configuration

BepInEx\config\rhenn.weeniehutjrdifficultymanager.cfg, created on the first start. Every entry is read at the moment of death, so a change applies to the next death.

[General]
Enabled = true
DeathMode = WeenieHutJr

[KeepOnDeath]
Equipped = true
Slot1 = true
Slot2 = true
Slot3 = false
Slot4 = false
Slot5 = false
Slot6 = false
Slot7 = false
Slot8 = true
Arrows = true
Consumables = true
Food = true

[KeepSkillsOnDeath]
All = false
Combat = false
Life = true
Movement = true
ModdedSkills = false

[KeepSkillsPerSkill]
Swords = false
Knives = false
Clubs = false
Polearms = false
Spears = false
Axes = false
Unarmed = false
Bows = false
Crossbows = false
ElementalMagic = false
BloodMagic = false
Blocking = true
Dodge = true
Pickaxes = false
WoodCutting = false
Fishing = false
Cooking = false
Farming = false
Crafting = false
Ride = false
Jump = false
Sneak = false
Run = false
Swim = false

With that file you keep your gear, the two weapons in slots 1 and 2, the food in slot 8 and everything in DraggableUI's slots; slots 3 to 7 and the grid go to the grave. A hard death lowers your weapon and magic skills but not Blocking or Dodge, and none of the Life or Movement skills, whatever their own switches say.

Seeing what the mod decided

BepInEx\LogOutput.log gets one line per death: Death: WeenieHutJr, 14 item(s) kept (equipped 5, slot 1 1, slot 2 1, arrow slot 2, food slot 3, ...), 9 to the grave, or nothing for a grave when everything was kept. On a hard death a second line follows: Death: 9 skill(s) lowered by 25% (Swords 42.3>31.7, Bows 55>41.3, ...), 6 kept (Cooking, Farming, ...). With Debug added to LogLevels in BepInEx\config\BepInEx.cfg, there is one line per item, with its cell and why it was kept. At start, DraggableUI is not installed: the Arrows, Consumables and Food settings match nothing or DraggableUI 1.1.0 has no ExtraSlotKindAt (added in 1.1.1) tells you when those three settings cannot work.

Known limits

• The food you have eaten (the three food buffs) is lost on death as in the game; the Food setting is about the food items in DraggableUI's Food slots.
• Items are sorted by where they sit at the moment of death. Something you moved from the hotbar into the grid a second before dying is in the grid.
• WeenieHutJr never keeps the grid below the hotbar. Use SuperWeenieHutJr for that.
• With DraggableUI's Extra slots off (its [ExtraSlots] Enabled, or its quiver yielded to BetterArchery), the Arrows, Consumables and Food settings have no slots to match; the game's grid rows are sorted as grid.
• A soft death (within ten minutes of the last) costs no skills in the game, and none with the mod either. Hardcore's full skill wipe is a different path and is not changed.
• Skills from other mods are known only by number, so one switch (ModdedSkills) covers them all.

Bugs and feedback

Found a bug? Email a screenshot and the steps to reproduce it to [email protected], with the mod version and your BepInEx\LogOutput.log attached. I check that inbox once a week.

Changelog

1.0.0

• First release.
• Three death modes: Vanilla (the world's setting), WeenieHutJr (tick what stays with you) and SuperWeenieHutJr (no grave, every item kept).
• WeenieHutJr keeps, each with its own switch: your equipped gear, each of the eight hotbar slots, and the arrow, consumable and food slots of DraggableUI 1.1.1 or later. The rest goes to your grave in the cells it had.
• The world's "no item loss" setting is honoured in every mode.
• Choose which skills a hard death keeps: an All switch, group switches for Combat, Life and Movement skills (and one for skills from other mods), and a switch per skill. All off by default, so skills drop as in the game.
• Settings are edited in game through the ModSettings mod.
• Valheim 1.0, BepInExPack_Valheim 5.4.2351.