Swmarly Valheim Better Fists Weapons

This BepInEx mod gives every vanilla Unarmed/Fists weapon the normal vanilla knife special attack.

What it changes

Fist weapons such as the Fenris claws no longer perform the unarmed kick when middle-clicking. Their secondary attack is replaced with the same attack definition used by Valheim's knives, including:

• the knife secondary animation and hit shape;
• the knife attack timing and stamina cost;
• the knife's special-attack damage multiplier;
• the fist weapon's own slash audio and visual effects from its primary attack;
• the normal weapon damage and Fists/Unarmed skill scaling of the equipped fist weapon.

The mod copies the live knife attack at runtime instead of hardcoding a multiplier. That keeps the behavior aligned with the installed Valheim build and with any knife-balance changes that happen before the item database is built.

Multiplayer and dedicated servers

Install the mod on the dedicated server and on every client. The change is made to each peer's local item database; it does not add a new item, recipe, or network protocol. Having the same version everywhere keeps the attack definition and combat behavior consistent for all players.

The plugin also loads in the dedicated-server process. The server does not need to render the animation, but loading the same item-data patch there avoids having different weapon definitions between the server and clients.

Compatibility

The patch runs after Valheim builds ObjectDB. It looks for a knife item with a real secondary attack, then applies a clone of that attack to actual fist-weapon items whose skill type is Skills.SkillType.Unarmed. Valheim's PlayerUnarmed placeholder is explicitly excluded, so empty hands retain the normal vanilla unarmed kick. Non-item entries in ObjectDB.m_items are also skipped.

If another mod deliberately changes knife or fist secondary attacks, the final definition present when ObjectDB.Awake completes is what this mod mirrors. Load order can therefore matter when another mod also edits these same attack fields.

Building

The project targets .NET Framework 4.7.2 and expects these paths:

• Valheim: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Valheim
• BepInEx: the BepInEx directory inside the Valheim installation

Override them when necessary:

dotnet build src -c Release `
  -p:ValheimManagedDir="D:\Games\Valheim\valheim_Data\Managed" `
  -p:BepInExCoreDir="D:\Games\Valheim\BepInEx\core"
python scripts/package.py

The GitHub Actions workflow downloads the current dedicated-server assemblies and builds the Thunderstore package automatically.