Better Man

Real armour stands, for real people.

Valheim's armour stand puts your gear on a rough wooden dummy. But the game actually ships two finished anatomical stands — one built on the male player model, one on the female — and nothing in the build menu ever references them. They have been sitting unused in the game files.

Better Man puts both of them in the Hammer. Now with custom skin tones!

What you get

• Four new pieces in the Furniture tab of the Hammer, in two matching sets:
  • Armour Stand (Male) and Armour Stand (Female) — ordinary skin, like a person
  • Wooden Armour Stand (Male) and Wooden Armour Stand (Female) — the same models carved in wood, for a traditional mannequin look
• Each set is independent, so you can turn either one off in the config
• They are the game's own assets, so they match Valheim's art exactly and need no extra files
• Fully functional: the same slots, poses and armour attachment as the vanilla stand
• Costs the same as the wooden one — 8 Fine Wood, 4 Iron Nails, 2 Leather Scraps, at a workbench

Wood Armor Stands	Regular Skin Armor Stand

Why this needed doing

The prefabs are complete and already set up as buildable pieces, but they were never finished off for players:

• The male stand's name is the localisation key $piece_armorstand_male, which has no entry in the game's text table, so it would display literally as $piece_armorstand_male
• The female stand was left pointing at the vanilla $piece_armorstand name, so both stands would have appeared in the menu under the same name
• Both shipped with the developer placeholder description "Horizontal"

This mod supplies the missing names and descriptions and adds the pieces to the Hammer. Nothing in the game files is modified — the pieces are registered at runtime.

Configuration

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BepInEx/config/TastyChickenLegs.BetterMan.cfg

• Lock Configuration - server admins only may change settings
• Male Stand - on by default. The skin-look male stand
• Female Stand - on by default. The skin-look female stand
• Wooden Male Stand - on by default. The wooden-look male stand
• Wooden Female Stand - on by default. The wooden-look female stand
• Match My Character - off by default. Copies your own character's skin tone onto the stands. Overrides the Skin Tone setting below.
• Skin Tone - Default leaves the player skin untouched. The alternatives tint the stands' skin, from Light down to Deep.

Only the skin-look stands are tinted; the wooden set stays wood by design. The build-menu icon keeps the neutral default look even when a tone is set, since the icon is rendered before the tint is applied.

There is no hair setting, on purpose. The game ships these stands with no hair at all - no hair meshes, no hair prefab list on the model, and no hair colour property on the shader - so a hair setting would do nothing visible and only raise the question of why. Skin is the part that works. Matching your character copies your skin tone; the stands have no hair to colour.

Languages

Ships with English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Hindi. Whichever language you play Valheim in is the one you get — no setting to change.

Where the game already has a word for something, the mod uses it. The French name is Support d'armure, German Rüstungsständer, Spanish Soporte de armadura, Chinese 装备架 — all matching vanilla, so the stand reads correctly next to the base game's own pieces.

Adding or fixing a translation needs no rebuild from me. Drop a file named

BetterMan.<Language>.yml

anywhere under your BepInEx/ folder, using the same language names Valheim uses (English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi, and there are more). Start from translations/English.yml in the mod, and translate only the text on the right — the keys must stay exactly as they are, they are what links the code to the file.

One honest caveat: Valheim's own Hindi support is very thin — roughly 2% of the base game's text is translated — so a Hindi player still sees English for most of the game itself. Everything this mod adds is in Hindi regardless.

Installation

Requires BepInExPack for Valheim and Jotunn. Drop BetterMan.dll into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/ or install with your mod manager.

Credits

Built with Jotunn and ServerSync by blaxxun.

My other mods

• Automatic Fuel
• No Smoke Stay Lit
• Honey Please
• Automatic Fermenters
• Drop More Loot
• Timed Torches Stay Lit
• Recycle Plus
• Forsaken Powers Plus