SkeletonCrew

Your Blood Magic summons stop being disposable. They take orders, hold a formation, come through portals with you, keep out of lava, and can be raised as one of six classes with its own weapon, its own place in the line, and its own way of fighting.

Client-side. Nothing is required of the server or of anyone else in your world.

What it changes

They obey. One key issues the three orders you actually want mid-fight — attack what you are aimed at, come back, hold this spot — and a menu covers the rest. A summon sent somewhere stays there until recalled, fighting what comes to it and returning to its post afterwards.

They are a crew, not a cloud. Pick who the next order applies to, everyone or one at a time, and place them individually before a fight. The HUD names the current order target so a crew that ignores three of its four members is never a mystery.

They come back. Summons follow you through portals instead of being left behind, are rescued when stranded, and regenerate out of combat rather than dying by attrition.

They have classes. Melee, Archer, Defender, Healer, Fire Mage and Ice Mage — each with its own kit, position, statistics and behaviour. Mages and healers hold the back line and are skipped by hostile target selection while a defender is close enough to be found instead; defenders lead, see further, and keep a short leash. The healer is a protection unit: it puts the staff's ward on whoever is taking the damage rather than on itself, and heals by urgency — the ally under attack, not the one with the biggest scratch.

They fight as one. Whatever is hitting a summon or you becomes the whole crew's target, so nobody stands watching a friend being killed. A distant fight is opened by a single summon — the longest reach in the crew — while the rest hold formation and receive the enemy where they stand, and they commit anyway if it will not come. A summon walks to a target it cannot reach and stops the moment it can, rather than holding one twenty-five metres away and never closing.

The crew is as strong as the caster who raised it. Mage armour and staves in your pack give your summons the full skill and progression bonus; leaving the staves at base gives you less of it. The base strength never changes, and it is measured once when a summon is raised — dying or changing gear cannot weaken a crew you already paid for.

They can work. Optional and off by default: send the crew to fell a tree, mine a node or clear an area, with tool tiers respected and your base left alone.

Controls

The fast orders are on one button, by tap count. Harvesting is menu-only on purpose: a tap commits the instant you press it, so a slightly-off aim used to set the crew working on whatever was behind your target. The menu issues the same order but names the target and the radius first.

An order that cannot be carried out is refused on screen rather than accepted and quietly failed — no path to the spot, tool tier too low, destination in lava.

Classes

F7, or the menu, sets what the next summon is raised as. Each class's kit is config, so a weapon can be swapped without a rebuild.

Groups

A crew is a shape, and assembling one a class at a time means cycling the class key between every cast. A preset names the shape once and raises the whole thing from a single cast — the menu's Summon group entry arms it.

Vanguard = 1d,2a,1r          Warband = 1d,1a,1r,1f,1i,1h
Casters  = 1d,1h,1f,1i       Skirmish = 1d,1a,2r

d defender, a attacker, r ranged, f fire mage, i ice mage, h healer. Write your own in the Classes.Presets setting.

A preset describes the crew you want, not a list of casts. Each time you cast it, it works out the difference: classes already standing are left alone, only what is missing is raised, and if there is no room it dismisses summons the composition has no place for to make some. Cast it with a full matching crew and it costs nothing and raises nothing.

A group costs more than a single raise but nothing like the sum of its parts — each extra summon adds a fraction of one summon's price, so a six-strong preset costs under twice a single cast rather than six times it. Nobody carries six summons' worth of Eitr, and a preset priced that way is a preset you can never use.

If there is not room under your staff's cap, or not enough Eitr for the whole group, it raises as many as it can and says so — the rest stay queued for your next cast. Picking a single class, by key or menu, turns the group off.

Caps: one Healer, one Fire Mage, one Ice Mage, two Defenders. Melee and Archer are uncapped — they fill whatever the Dead Raiser's own limit allows. At a class cap the raise becomes a warrior with a notice, rather than costing you the Eitr for nothing.

Progression: the specialist classes unlock as you craft the matching staff or shield, and each unlock makes the whole crew a little stronger.

Class statistics ride on top of the Blood Magic scaling rather than replacing it, so investment still decides how strong a crew is and the class only decides its shape — a defender is tougher and hits softer, a mage the reverse. Every number is config.

Stances

Stance governs what the crew does on its own initiative; an explicit order always wins.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.vash.skeletoncrew.cfg, created on first run. A selection — the file documents every key.

Once the file exists, it is the source of truth — changing a default in a new build does not alter a value already written there.

Multiplayer

Everything is client-side and scoped to your summons, identified by the follow record the game already keeps. Another player's crew is never adopted into your formation, your orders or your cap — including when the server hands you ownership of their summons because they walked away, which it does as a matter of routine.

One thing does reach other players, deliberately. Valheim stores a summon's limit on the summon itself and enforces it on whichever machine happens to be simulating the creature — so standing next to someone else meant their game applied the vanilla cap to your crew and dismissed the extras, while telling them their Dead Raiser was too weak. This mod writes the raised limit onto each summon it creates, so every client agrees on it, including players without the mod. That is the fix, not a side effect: it is the only way the cap survives being near another player.

Otherwise, players without the mod see ordinary summons behaving ordinarily.

Install

r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager: install from the site, or Settings → Import local mod → pick Vash-SkeletonCrew-<version>.zip.

Manual: drop SkeletonCrew.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Dedicated server: nothing to install. The mod disables itself on a headless process — there is no local player to own summons — so it ships as a client package only. Play on any server you like; nobody else needs it, and the server does not want it.

Requires BepInEx. Built for Valheim 1.0.12 and BepInEx 5.4.23. SkeletonCrew 1.2.1 and earlier do not load on 1.0.12, and 1.2.2 onward does not load on older Valheim.

Known issues

Stated plainly, because a mod page that pretends otherwise wastes your time when you hit them.

Lava is the hard one. Valheim's navmesh has no concept of lava — Pathfinding.AgentSettings knows about walking, water and swimming and nothing else — so the game will happily hand a creature a route straight through a channel and report it as a perfectly good path. This mod therefore checks the route itself, corner by corner, and stops or diverts where it can. It is a real improvement rather than a complete fix, and there are cases it cannot win:

• The last few metres of a chase are steered by the game, not by the mod, so a summon can clip the edge of a vein closing on something.
• Nothing prevents a summon being knocked or falling in.
• Where there is genuinely no way round, they stop rather than cross — which can look like hesitation at a shoreline, and is the correct answer.

A summon that ends up in lava climbs out, and is lifted to safe ground if it cannot get clear in time (Combat.LavaRescueSeconds). Expect scorched skeletons in the Ashlands, not a corpse pile.

Flying enemies. A skeleton with a sword cannot hit a Fallen Valkyrie hovering ten metres up, and no amount of AI work changes that. Melee summons will position under it and wait; archers and mages do the work. This is a Valheim reach limitation, not a bug in the crew.

Pathing in tight terrain. Summons use the game's own navmesh, so anywhere vanilla creatures snag — narrow ledges, steep rock, dense ruins — the crew snags too. The stuck detector notices and brings a summon back to you rather than leaving it stranded.

Vanilla still owns the swing. The mod decides what to fight, where to stand and when to close; the actual attack is Valheim's. A creature weapon that vanilla will not use in a given situation is not something this can override.

Ranged summons lose and re-take their target often. Measured at roughly ten times a minute for mages and archers, against about one for the melee line, and the overwhelming majority of it is Valheim's own line-of-sight check expiring — the back line stands behind the front line, which is exactly where the view is blocked. It costs some uptime rather than breaking anything, and it is the next thing on the list.

If something looks wrong, turn on Diagnostics.DeepTrace (on by default) and send a few lines of the log — each summon reports its role, intent, target and range, health, hazards, ward and weapon on one line, which is usually enough to name the cause without guessing.

Console commands

Diagnostics, for when something is not behaving and the log needs to say why.

Changelog

1.6.4

• "Dismiss spirits" reaches the ones that are far away. It only dismissed animals the game had loaded, and the menu entry itself disappeared when every animal was out of range - the one moment it was the only way to be rid of them. It now counts and removes the remembered ones too (the away rows on the panel), the way "Dismiss all" always has for skeletons.

1.6.3

• A portal takes the whole party. Recall.MaxTeleportSummons defaults to 20 (was 10): six skeletons and five spirits is eleven, and the log showed a portal bringing ten and leaving the last animal behind. A config written by an earlier version keeps its stored 10 - change it to 20.

1.6.2

• The spirits really do stop shoving you. Pass-through only covered each summon's main capsule, which is the whole body of a skeleton but only part of a bear or a moose - their limbs and trunk carry colliders of their own, and those kept shouldering you aside. Every solid part of every summon is now included, against you, the crew and each other.

1.6.1

• The spirits keep a fixed order (the order they were raised in) on the panel and in the F3 cycle, like the crew, instead of whatever order the game lists them in.
• The log's PACK summon line says what 1.6.0 made true: they take orders and are warded.
• Harvest and shovel log lines name the spirit (Bjorn, Boar...) instead of printing '' - the game gives the animals no hover name.

1.6.0

• The Spirit Caller's animals take orders. Everything on the command button and in the menu reaches them as it reaches a skeleton: attack what you aim at, move there, come back, hold and guard a spot, recall to you, harvest and shovel (single target and area), and they come through portals with you (skeletons first when the portal limit is reached). An order outranks what the animal was doing, a guard post is a leash rather than a pin, and standing orders stop the game unsummoning one you posted somewhere.
• Order target cycles through groups. With both staffs out, F3 goes ALL -> CREW -> SPIRITS -> each summon -> ALL, and the menu has Skeletons only / Spirits only. With one staff out the cycle is exactly what it was. Spirit rows on the panel now show the same marker and dimming as crew rows, and what they are doing in the crew's words (following, moving, holding, working...).
• Parking an animal with Use keeps it yours. The game blanks the owner's name on "stay"; the mod now puts it back for the animals as it always has for skeletons, so a parked animal stays in the list and keeps answering orders.
• Still vanilla for the animals: what they cost, how many you can have, how they fight and path when left alone, their health and damage. No classes, no formation, and stances do not apply to them. Left unordered they simply follow you the game's way.
• Spirit names read Moose, Bjorn, Wolf, Boar where the game gives them none, and one Alt + Use is one dismissal (the log showed each arriving twice).

1.5.3

• The healer wards the Spirit Caller's animals too. They were getting a bubble anyway - the staff's own cast and the healing shot put the game's red one on any friendly they touch - so leaving them out of the ward just left them in the old red bubble, a minute long, beside a crew in blue. They now get the same ward as everyone else: absorb plus the Northern Vengeance deflect, its visuals only, the same duration and Blood Magic scaling.

1.5.2

• The upgraded ward looks like Northern Vengeance. That staff's effect is a deflect and absorbs nothing (read from the game: it fires back at the attacker and never touches the incoming hit), so the ward keeps the Staff of Protection's absorb bubble underneath it - same strength, still scaled by Blood Magic. The red bubble is now simply not drawn on anyone carrying the Northern Vengeance effect: you see the frost orbs, you get both. Classes.HealerWardUpgradeVisualsOnly (default on); off shows both.

1.5.1

• The healer raises its barrier again. Valheim moved the Staff of Protection's bubble: it used to be the staff's consume effect and is now its attack effect, the same arrangement as Northern Vengeance. The ward code read only the old slot, found nothing, concluded nobody needed a ward, and never cast - silently, because a staff with no ward effect is a legal item. The red bubbles you still saw were a side effect of the healing shot, which stamps the staff's attack effect on whoever it heals (at the summon's staff level, so briefly). The ward now reads whichever slot holds the effect, for the healer's staff and the upgrade alike - so with Northern Vengeance unlocked a ward is the red absorb bubble and the deflect, on you and everyone bunched with you, lasting Classes.HealerWardSeconds. Found by 1.5.0's new log line naming the staff's effect slots.

1.5.0

• The Spirit Caller's animals are on the crew panel. A second list, SPIRITS [n], sits under the crew's with each animal's name, health bar and what it is doing (fighting, following, staying, or away when it is out of range). Out with only the Spirit Caller, it is the only list.
• They can be dismissed like a skeleton: Alt + Use on one (the hover text says so), or Dismiss spirits (n) in the crew menu. "Dismiss all" still means the skeletons only.
• They no longer shove you, the skeletons or each other - the same pass-through the crew has (Combat.NoPlayerCollision).
• That is all that changes for them. Which summons get this is General.PackPrefabs; their cost, cap, fighting and the game's own follow/stay on Use are untouched. An animal you park with Use stays listed for the session.
• The healer says why a ward did not go up. Every reason the barrier was skipped used to be silent, so a ward that never fires looked the same as one nobody needed. The log now names the reason once per change (Healer's barrier not cast: ...), the Healer warded ... line names the effects it placed, and world load prints the healer's own staff's effect slots beside the upgrade's.
• The ward upgrade, confirmed in play: Northern Vengeance's effect is a deflect with no absorb pool (SE_React), so the healer puts it on beside the Staff of Protection's bubble - you and the crew get both.

1.4.1

• The ward upgrade finds Northern Vengeance's bubble. 1.4.0's first world load confirmed the staff (StaffFrostOrbs is Northern Vengeance) and reported the upgrade off: that staff keeps its bubble as its attack effect (Staff_FrostOrbs), where the Staff of Protection keeps its own as a consume effect. The game delivers both the same way in the end, so the upgrade now takes the consume effect when there is one and the attack effect otherwise. The Ward upgrade log line names which, and the effect's type.

1.4.0

Checked against Valheim 1.0.15 - every hook resolves on the new game.

• Only the Dead Raiser's summons are managed. The mod used to recognise a summon by the despawn distance every summon has, which was the same thing as "a skeleton" until the game added the Spirit Caller. Its animals were adopted wholesale: casts repriced, the bear raised as a Healer and the moose as an Archer, their pathing replaced, an armed preset raising four animals from one cast - duplicates of one animal - and the cap then dismissing them on the spot. Identity is now a list of prefab names (General.CrewPrefabs, default Skeleton_Friendly), and one list answers both "is this creature crew" and "does this cast raise crew". Everything else - Spirit Caller, roots, trolls - is left entirely to vanilla: cost, cap and its own cull, classes, group raise, scaling, orders, teleporting. The log names each ignored summon and each non-crew cast once (IGNORED summon ..., Cast ... not a crew cast). A preset armed while you cast another staff stays armed for the next Dead Raiser cast.
• Dismiss and re-summon any Spirit Caller animals raised under 1.3.x once. They carry the inflated health and the class tag the old version wrote onto them.
• General.SummonPrefabPatterns is retired; a leftover entry in your config is ignored. If a Dead Raiser summon ever goes unmanaged, add its exact prefab name to General.CrewPrefabs.
• The cap raise no longer reaches other staffs. It was applied before the mod decided whose summon it was looking at, so a level 4 Spirit Caller would have been allowed six of each animal.
• The healer's ward upgrades with you. Once you have held the staff named in Classes.HealerWardUpgrade (default StaffFrostOrbs, the Deep North shield staff), the ward the healer puts on you and the crew becomes that staff's effect. The healer keeps the Staff of Protection in hand. If the new effect is another absorb shield it replaces the bubble; if it has no absorb pool (a deflect) it goes on beside the bubble, so protection is never traded away. The log says on world load what the item is called, which effect it carries and which of the two happened - look for Ward upgrade. The deflect's damage is not scaled by Blood Magic yet.

1.3.1

• New preset Volley = five archers and a healer. A config file written by an earlier version keeps its own Classes.Presets line; add | Volley=5r,1h there to get it.

1.3.0

• The crew shovels snow. In the Deep North, aim at deep ground snow, a snow-laden roof or a snow pile and the menu offers Shovel snow and Shovel all snow within N m. Each stroke is the game's own shovel stroke - the same terrain change, the same snow drops, the same roof and pile handling - so nothing here invents a mechanic. On an area order the crew spreads out over the patch, one spot each, and stops when the snow there reads as cleared. Needs a snow shovel in your bag (Shovel.RequireTool), whose strength and reach they borrow. Works inside your base: shovelling damages nothing, so the harvest guards do not apply. New Shovel config section.

1.2.2

For Valheim 1.0.12. Earlier builds of the mod do not work on it, and this one does not work on older Valheim.

• The mod loads again. Valheim 1.0.12 added a second version of a method the mod hooks to discount summoning Eitr, and the ambiguity stopped the mod's patching at startup - leaving it half-installed. Rebuilt against 1.0.12, with every hook checked against the new game.
• Summons draw their weapons correctly on 1.0.12. The game changed how it remembers what a character is holding; the fix that republishes a summon's weapon model was updated to match, including clearing a weapon from a summon whose hand is now empty.
• Grappling no longer fights your crew. 1.0.12 made any creature's failed jump pull on your grappling hook. Summons jump often while moving, so a crew on the move could keep turning a repel into a pull. Their failed jumps now do nothing, as they always did.
• Neutral wildlife is really ignored now. The filter added in 1.2.1 relied on the game's faction table, which counts every animal as the player's enemy - so it only ever excluded Dverger. Deer, boar and other animals are now left alone unless they are attacking you or the crew, or you order the attack.
• Multiplayer: the suppressed "Dead Raiser is not strong enough" notice now matches whatever text the staff uses, since 1.0.12 lets each staff carry its own.

1.2.1

Everything below the first heading is what changed since 1.0.2. The Defensive stance was rebuilt, and two long-standing ways to lose a crew were fixed.

Defensive is now a guard circle

• The crew holds a tight ring around you and does not leave it. Anything that enters the circle is attacked by everyone in reach; the ring re-forms the moment it dies or leaves.
• The ring faces the fight - defender between you and the enemy, warriors flanking, mages and healer on the arc behind you - and turns as a unit only when the fight has genuinely moved, rather than shuffling every time something sidesteps. It widens a little in contact so there is room to swing, and tightens again when things are quiet.
• Attackers outside the circle are faced and watched, never chased. Archers and mages return fire from their places; melee answer anything that comes within their own reach, because a swing where you stand is not a chase.
• New settings: DefensiveCircleRadius (default 14), DefensiveBubbleExpand, DefensiveBubbleSlack, DefensiveViewMultiplier. DefensiveReachMultiplier, DefensiveLeash and GuardTheOwner are retired; leftover entries in your config are ignored.

The crew stops getting lost

• Summons no longer get stuck in "Away". Travel far enough and the game unloads the zone your crew is standing in, and the mod could no longer see them to fetch them - they sat in the HUD until you dismissed and raised replacements. They are now recovered wherever they end up, however far that is.
• Portal travel is fixed. Four separate faults, any one of which cost you a crew:
  • A hop briefly leaves your summons belonging to nobody, and the mod would not manage a summon it did not own - so they arrived at the far end alive, but deaf to orders, until you dismissed and raised replacements. They are reclaimed on arrival now.
  • The protection that stops the game deleting a summon mid-hop ran for a fixed twenty seconds, while a portal hop can take longer. It now lasts exactly as long as the hop.
  • That protection was also never switched off, so one hop left it running for the rest of the session - hiding real problems instead of preventing them.
  • Stepping onto a portal twice in quick succession threw the crew to a destination you never travelled to, because the game quietly refuses the second hop.

Hold position, and other fixes

• Hold position holds. A posted crew no longer drifts around after you, no longer rotates when you turn on the spot from across the map, and forms a real ring on the spot you named. While you are away, the healer shelters in the middle of it - or the frailest summon if there is no healer.
• Neutral wildlife is ignored. Deer, birds and untroubled boar no longer count as threats, so the crew stops picking fights with the scenery. A boar you hit is a threat the moment it fights back, and you can still order the crew onto anything you like.
• Multiplayer: standing next to another player no longer culls your crew. Their game was enforcing the vanilla summon cap on your skeletons and quietly dismissing the extras - while telling them their Dead Raiser was too weak. The raised cap now travels with each summon, so every client agrees on it.

1.0.2

• Packaging fix. The DLL is back at the root of the zip, beside manifest.json, icon.png and the markdown. 1.0.1 moved it into BepInEx/plugins on the strength of the packaging guide; every Valheim package verified to install correctly uses the flat layout instead, so this matches them rather than the page describing them.
• The shipped manifest now carries only the five documented fields, in the order the reference packages use. author is gone from it — that field exists so the build can name the zip, and the real namespace comes from the team the package is uploaded under.

1.0.1

• Moved the DLL into BepInEx/plugins inside the zip, following the packaging guide's description of folder names deciding where files land. See 1.0.2.
• A proper icon: a bone skull with lit sockets, instead of the placeholder.
• Documentation corrected against what actually shipped. The install section no longer describes a dedicated-server package, because there is not one — the mod disables itself on a headless process, so it is client-only. The config table gained the thirteen settings added since it was written, and a Known issues section now states plainly where lava, flying enemies and vanilla's own pathing still bite.

1.0.0 — first public release

Everything below is what the mod does today. It was built over roughly eighty development versions; that record lives in the repository rather than here, because a changelog on a mod page is for deciding whether to install something, not for reading a diary.

Orders

• Three orders on one key by tap count: attack what you are aimed at (or move there), come back, hold this position.
• A crew menu on F1 for everything else, including both harvest orders.
• F3 picks who orders apply to — everyone, or one summon at a time — and the HUD names the current target so a partial order is never a surprise.
• A summon sent somewhere holds that exact spot until recalled, fighting what comes within the guard radius and returning to its post afterwards.
• Orders that cannot be carried out are refused on screen: no path to the destination, tool tier too low, target in lava.

Classes

• Six classes, chosen per summon before you raise it: Melee, Archer, Defender, Healer, Fire Mage and Ice Mage.
• Group presets — name a composition like 1d,2a,1r and raise the whole crew from one cast. Four are shipped and the list is config. The cast costs one summon's health and Eitr per summon raised, and the group is trimmed to the slots the staff still has free.
• Each carries its own kit, holds its own place in the formation, and has its own health, damage and resistance — all applied on top of the Blood Magic scaling, so investment still decides how strong a crew is and the class decides its shape.
• Defenders lead, see further and keep a short leash. Mages and the healer hold the back line, refuse to open fights, back off when badly hurt, and are skipped by hostile target selection while a defender is close enough to be found instead.
• The healer is a protection unit first. It puts the staff's ward on whoever is actually taking damage — the defender holding the line, or you — rather than on itself, because absorb applied before a blow cannot overheal and cannot arrive too late.
• It heals whoever is most urgent, weighing the damage landing on them rather than how much health they are missing, so a defender under attack outranks an archer standing safely behind with a scratch. One flat heal per cast, scaled up for large health pools, so its work is never confused with the out-of-combat regeneration.
• An ally about to die is healed immediately, outside the staff's ordinary cadence.
• Two menu rows heal without aiming at anything: "Heal me" and "Heal whoever needs it most".
• One healer, one fire mage, one ice mage and two defenders at a time; warriors and archers fill the rest. At a class limit the raise becomes a warrior with a notice rather than costing the Eitr for nothing.
• The specialist classes unlock as you craft the matching staff or shield, and each unlock strengthens the whole crew.
• The crew is as strong as the caster who raised it. Mage armour and staves in your pack give your summons the full skill and progression bonus; leaving the staves at base in iron armour gives you less of it. The BASE strength never changes, so a melee player's summons work as well as they always did — they simply do not get the specialist's multiplier. Measured once, when a summon is raised, and written onto it: dying or changing gear cannot weaken a crew you already paid for, and re-evaluation only ever raises it.

Fighting as a crew

• The crew fights one thing at a time. Whatever is hitting a summon or you becomes everyone's target, so a summon under attack is helped rather than watched.
• A distant fight is opened by ONE summon — the longest reach in the crew, so the archer where there is one — while the rest hold formation and receive the enemy where they stand. If it will not come, they commit anyway rather than waiting forever.
• A summon walks to a target it cannot reach and stops the moment it can, instead of holding a target twenty-five metres away and never closing.
• Self-defence outranks everything except your own orders: a summon being hit fights back even while walking to a post, holding a move order, or serving out a disengage.
• The formation holds while you WALK, not only when you stand still — defender ahead, the line flanking, casters and the healer behind you — and they jog to dress the line rather than sprinting laps around you.
• Anything attacking the crew is never "too far to bother with": a leash exists to stop them chasing a fleeing greydwarf across the map, not to make them stand there being shot at.

Staying alive

• Health, damage, physical and elemental resistance all scale with Blood Magic.
• Regeneration out of combat, so a crew is not lost to attrition between fights.
• Summons follow you through portals, and are rescued when stranded.
• They keep out of lava. Valheim's navmesh has no lava concept at all, so this is real work: the route they will actually walk is checked corner by corner, a way round is taken where one exists, they stop at the last safe spot where none does, and they are never told to STAND somewhere molten — formation slots and patrol points move off it. If something puts them in anyway, they climb out, and are lifted clear if they cannot. You walking in yourself is the one case they will follow.
• The Dead Raiser's cap is raised for a FULLY UPGRADED staff, which then supports six. A partly upgraded one keeps vanilla's cap - its own level - so the extra crew is something the staff earns rather than a flat handout.
• Summoning costs less health and Eitr than vanilla.
• The protection staff's shield absorbs more as Blood Magic rises. Vanilla ships that mechanism and feeds it a hardcoded zero, so stock it never scales.

Harvesting — optional, off by default

• Send the crew to fell a tree, mine a node, or clear an area of either.
• Tool tiers are respected, felled trees are worked into logs, and large nodes are shared while small ones are spread across.
• Your base is protected, including grown crops. Wood is exempt, because a tree in a base is a crop and felling it is the point of a tree farm.

Quality of life

• A crew HUD listing every summon, its health, what it is doing and its class, including summons that have walked out of range.
• An optional light on each of your summons, brighter on the one currently selected.
• Map pins for the crew.
• They walk through you and each other instead of shoving.
• Console diagnostics (skcrew_recon, skcrew_weapons, skcrew_prefabs) for when something needs explaining rather than guessing.