Admin Animals

Admins can turn connected players into vanilla animals, either with restricted actions or with normal tools and interactions available. No new radial menu action is added.

Install on the server and every client, with BepInEx and Jötunn. HearthBird is optional. Admin Animals also cooperates with the older combined HearthSort bird feature in the current Default profile.

Quick start

Enable Valheim's console with the -console launch argument and open it with F5. Commands do not require devcommands.

animalform "Player Name" boar 120
animalplay "Player Name" wolf
animalplay "Player Name" bird 300
animalform "Player Name" human

animalform restricts weapons, tools, building, demolition, repairs, item-on-object use and ordinary world interaction. Players can still move, chat, manage their inventory and eat/drink consumables. Inventory and equipment are retained; no items are deleted or converted.

animalplay permits normal weapons, tools, building, crafting, food, containers and world interactions. Human equipment is visually hidden with the human model, so tool effects can originate from an invisible tool. Native player animations still drive normal item use internally. Animal models display their native locomotion animations rather than wielding human tools.

Both modes are held by the server. Players cannot release themselves through HearthBird's toggle. Only an admin can release or replace a form; a configured duration also releases it. Reissuing a command replaces its mode and deadline.

Forms

Boar, deer, Neck, wolf, Lox, hen, chicken, hare, Asksvin, crow and seagull. bird means crow, rabbit means hare, and random selects an available form. animalform list reports the forms present in the running game.

The visual is attached to the existing player. There is no animal AI, second network creature, separate inventory, new animal health pool, taming, breeding, saddle or animal loot. Ground forms retain native player movement, camera and collision dimensions, including Lox. A large appearance is not a larger damage target and a tiny appearance is not a smaller ground hitbox. This keeps regular gameplay practical and avoids species-specific physics overhead.

Restricted birds use a compact physical capsule; tool-enabled birds keep player dimensions and eye height for normal construction and item targeting. Crow/seagull models are vanilla visuals, with collision-aware forward flight adapted from HearthBird.

Bird flight

• Jump takes off; aim with mouse/controller to steer. Flight moves continuously forward.
• Run sprints; crouch begins landing; jump cancels landing while energy remains.
• Full energy allows approximately 75 seconds of normal flight by default, or 65.2 seconds of sustained sprinting.
• Empty energy forces a landing while preserving bird form and the server lock.
• Recharge remains 60 seconds from empty to full while grounded or otherwise not flying. The forced-form energy pool is separate from HearthBird's voluntary-flight pool and saved in character custom data.
• Server-synced Bird.DrainMultiplier defaults to 0.2. Valid values are 0.01–1; normal flight uptime is approximately 15 / multiplier seconds. Recharge does not change.

Player hover names, overhead health/name displays and public map markers are hidden in both modes. The player's own normal HUD and chat identity remain available.

Duration and persistence

Duration is real elapsed time in seconds, including time offline and while the server is stopped. Omitted or 0 means until admin release. Negative, non-finite and more-than-one-year durations are rejected. Fractional seconds are accepted.

Forms are saved per world and authenticated account in BepInEx/config/AdminAnimals/world-<uid>.dat. Records survive reconnects, character changes, death and server restart. A new player body receives the form again. Death, loading, teleporting and certain bird-incompatible states temporarily suspend visual/flight handling without releasing the record. The last successful save is backed up as .bak. Save failures reject mutations rather than reporting a change that was not persisted.

An admin may release an offline account using its exact saved account ID from animalform status. New transformations target connected, spawned players only. A host's console is trusted; multiplayer admin requests are checked using Valheim's server-side ZNet.IsAdmin(authenticatedSocketHostName) decision. This preserves native Steam/platform ID normalization rather than relying on the local exact-match PlayerIsAdmin check that caused the Arena Combat issue.

Client gameplay restrictions operate in cooperating modded clients. They are not an anti-cheat guarantee against a deliberately modified client.

Compatibility and restoration

Admin Animals yields any existing voluntary bird controller before applying its own visual. Optional hooks reject bird toggles while locked, including server requests. It does not edit or replace HearthBird/HearthSort DLLs. If an installed bird mod changes the expected interface, Admin Animals disables itself with a clear log message rather than running with an escape route.

Human restoration checks clearance for the original bird-resized capsule. If necessary, it uses a remembered clear position or a bounded nearby search. If none is clear, restoration waits while allowing movement with normal gravity; it does not expand the body into a wall.

Bone/scale/cosmetic mods, tool reach, each animal's appearance, gamepad flight, reconnects and multiplayer behavior still require an in-game compatibility check with your profile. Ground forms deliberately keep human gameplay dimensions; their appearance may overlap a doorway or room wall.

See COMMANDS.md for every command and VALIDATION.md for the checks and live test checklist.

Building

Copy build.local.props.example to build.local.props and set the game/profile paths. Run dotnet build AdminAnimals.csproj -c Release and powershell -File scripts/Package.ps1. No game DLLs are included in the distributable.

Version 0.1.0 is an initial build awaiting live gameplay validation.

Changelog

0.1.1

• Fixed invisible ground animal forms by cloning only the native Visual subtree, keeping creature gameplay components out of the clone entirely.
• Validate renderers before hiding the player; visual failures leave the human appearance visible while retaining the admin lock.
• Normalize visual LOD/render visibility and disable animal animation events that require removed gameplay helpers.
• Guard the HUD visibility hook against destroyed/null character references.
• Diagnosed from the reported session: Unity refused to remove Humanoid while CharacterDrop required it, leaving broken clones in the character registry and causing Awake/IsTamed/EnemyHud errors.

0.1.0

• Added admin-only animalform and animalplay commands, with quoted targets and optional durations.
• Added eleven vanilla forms, random selection, native animal sounds, and crow/seagull flight.
• Added persistent per-world account locks, timed expiry, offline release and release-all recovery.
• Added server-native admin checks and optional compatibility with standalone/combined bird mods.
• Forced bird flight defaults to 20% normal drain and unchanged 60-second recharge; exhaustion lands instead of releasing the lock.
• Initial build and automated checks; live rendering and multiplayer validation remain.