Changelog — AwayFromHome

[1.0.0] — The Keeper Stone

The first public release.

A Valheim server forgets the places you are not standing in. Walk away from a pen and the taming stops. Walk away from a smelter and — on a dedicated server with nobody logged in — it does not advance by a single second, no matter how long you leave it. Away From Home gives those places somebody to run for.

Build a Keeper Stone where you care about, and a keeper rotates through every stone on the server in turn, loading each site and simulating it as though a player were standing there. The stone is not a signpost. It holds your supplies, puts food out for your animals, reloads your furnaces, and draws the boundary your livestock are kept inside.

🔴 Install it on the server, not only on your client

This is the one thing that can cost you something. The mod registers a new build piece. Valheim does not politely skip an object whose prefab it cannot resolve — ZNetScene calls ZDOMan.DestroyZDO and the object is gone permanently. A client-only install therefore destroys every Keeper Stone that has been placed, silently, and nothing brings them back. Server and clients, same version, same sitting.

🍄 A site is a thing you build

• A Keeper Stone: 10 Mushroom, 10 MushroomYellow, 5 SurtlingCore, from the hammer's Misc tab, no crafting station needed. Hammer it back down to move it.
• The stone is the whole interface. There is no menu for regular players. You build it, you look at it, and it tells you what it is doing — where it stands, whether the keeper is there now or waiting its turn, what is in its slots, how big its leash is, and how many furnaces it is keeping stocked.
• The stone is the registration. There is no separate list to fall out of step with the world, and destroying the stone unregisters the site with no bookkeeping at all.
• MaxSitesPerPlayer (default 3) is the mod's real economy. Rotation time is shared: every extra site lengthens the cycle for everyone on the server, and a cycle slower than about 55 minutes starts costing smelters production between visits. Enforced on both ends — the hammer refuses to place past the limit, and the server independently tends only that many per character, so an edited client config gains nothing. Over-limit stones stand untended rather than being destroyed.
• AdminBypass (default on) exempts admins, remembered on the stone so it survives the admin logging off. Stated honestly: MaxSitesPerPlayer is a courtesy dial for keeping the rotation short, not a security boundary, and never was.

🥕 The stone feeds the pen

• Six slots. Open the stone with E and fill it like a chest. The contents are saved with the stone, travel with it, survive restarts, and drop on the ground if it is ever knocked down. An empty stone is a perfectly normal resting state — it will never delete itself for being empty.
• It puts food out, and here is exactly what that means. Valheim's animals have precisely one way of finding food: they look for a physical item lying in the world near them. There is no container path anywhere in the game — an animal can stand pressed against a chest full of carrots and starve. So a "container that feeds animals" can only be built one way, and this is it: the stone places one real serving on the ground in front of itself and replaces it once it has been eaten. From your side that is the feature — the animals walk up to the stone and eat what is in it. This is what lets an unattended taming actually finish instead of stalling at whatever percentage it reached when the food ran out.
• Deliberately not built: silently crediting the animal a meal it never ate. It would have been cheaper and would work even with the animals frozen, and it deletes the feature — nothing to watch, nothing in the pen, and no way to tell a working feeder from a broken one.
• It is careful with your food. One serving at a time, never a second while the first is still lying there; only when an animal near the stone is genuinely hungry; only an item that hungry animal will actually eat; and never while a site is still loading, when the animals are held still and the food would only tick down its despawn timer. A serving nobody present can eat is released rather than left to block the pen — that single rule is the difference between a mixed pen that tames and one that deadlocks behind one uneaten piece of meat.
• Kept animals near a feeding stone have their food-search range widened to reach it. Valheim's default is 5 m and measured from the animal, so without this most of a 12 m pen could never notice a serving at the stone. Applied to the live creature only, never saved, and reverts by itself when the area unloads.
• AutoFeed (synced, default on) turns the whole thing off. Leaving the slots empty does the same.
• Known: the slots open for anyone who can walk up to the stone, like an unlocked chest — or exactly as your ward already decides, if the stone stands inside one. Only the leash is restricted to its owner.

🔥 The same six slots reload your furnaces

• The stone restocks smelters, charcoal kilns, blast furnaces, windmills, spinning wheels and eitr refineries around it — ore into the hopper, coal onto the fire.
• Why it matters more than it sounds. Giving a furnace back the time an empty server owed it (below) means it genuinely burns through its load while nobody is there — and then stops, because nobody is there to reload it. A full hopper is about seventeen minutes of a rotation that can run for days.
• How it works, exactly: the stone walks the same path your own hand walks. It asks the furnace whether it accepts the item, then takes it out of the slots, then calls the game's own add-ore / add-fuel. Nothing is created, nothing skips a check, and a furnace that would refuse an item from you refuses it from the stone. It only restocks pieces the same machine already owns, so the hand-off is a single step with no half-completed transfer possible in between.
• It will not spend the pen's dinner on a furnace. Barley is a lox's food and a windmill's input; flax is the same story with a spinning wheel. Anything a tameable creature near the stone eats is reserved for it, so one stone can hold food and fuel side by side. Turning AutoFeed off lifts the reservation — a stone that does not feed animals is a pure supply depot.
• RestockProduction (synced, default on) and ProductionReachMeters (synced, default 24 m). The reach is deliberately not tied to the leash: the leash is a pen for animals, this is an arm's reach for a workshop, and wanting a big pen is no reason to want your stone feeding a neighbour's furnaces on the far side of the site.
• Deliberately not built: collecting the output. Vanilla already spits finished bars onto the ground by itself, and a stone that hoovered them back up would be inventing a behaviour rather than continuing one.
• Not covered: fermenters and fireplaces. A fermenter is single-shot and measured in in-game days, and a fireplace going out is a lighting decision rather than a production one.

🔥 Production that does not stop dead on an empty server

• Valheim's dedicated server freezes the world clock when nobody is connected. ZNet.UpdateNetTime returns early at zero players, and every production machine measures its progress against that clock — so on an empty server nothing smelts, no matter who owns the site or how long it is held. This is the real reason "smelters keep smelting" does not work by itself, and it hid for a long time because taming kept climbing the whole time: taming counts down on real frame time, so animals advanced while production sat frozen, which looks exactly like a keeper bug and is not one.
• CreditOfflineProduction (synced, default on) hands each machine the real elapsed time it was owed and lets vanilla's own code spend it under vanilla's own rules, including its one-hour-per-gap ceiling. Nothing global is touched — the world clock, day/night and everything else stay exactly as Valheim intends. On a server with players on it the correction computes to zero by itself.
• Keep a full rotation under about 55 minutes. A vanilla smelter only ever catches up the last hour of production in a single gap; past that, time is genuinely forfeited. The log warns once if your standing stones and dwell time would push the cycle past it.

⭕ A leash you can shape, and see

• Circle, square or rectangle. Real pens are fenced boxes. Fitting a circle to a long rectangular run means either a leash that stops short of your own fence at the ends or one that spills well past it at the sides — either way the keeper enforces a boundary that is not the one you built. Pick the shape at the stone: a circle takes a radius, a square takes a side, a rectangle takes a width and a depth, and both boxes take a rotation, because a fence is rarely built square to the world.
• The outline is drawn on the ground, following the terrain — hills included — in whatever shape it is set to. No new art ships for it; the segment and its ground-raycast mask are borrowed from vanilla's own build-radius marker at runtime.
• Shift+E sets it, with sliders and the outline tracking them live while you drag, because setting a distance you cannot see was the whole problem. You can walk out past your own fence line to check the outline sits on it before you apply.
• Stand the stone in the MIDDLE of the pen. Straying is measured from the stone, so an off-centre stone means the far side of your pen falls outside the leash and its occupants get walked back from it forever.
• Strays are returned near the stone, not to the edge — that is where the food is, so a returned animal has a reason to stay rather than immediately resuming its walk outward. If the middle is crowded it takes the nearest clear spot inside the pen instead of stacking animals inside one another.
• The fence line is not an electric fence. An animal has to be half a metre clear of the boundary before it is corrected. Without that, a boar leaning on its own fence — which is what boars do — is a centimetre over a mathematical line, gets pulled to the middle, walks back, and gets pulled again, for the whole visit. That is churn that achieves nothing, and every one of those teleports is a physics re-seat, which is the exact event penned animals escape through.
• LivestockLeashMeters (default 12) is what a new stone starts with; each stone then carries its own. MaxLeashMeters (default 40) is the ceiling no player may exceed, checked on the server rather than trusted from the client that asked, and applied on read as well as on write — so lowering it reins in every site at once without touching a single stone.
• Note: MaxLeashMeters bounds distance from the stone, so it caps each half of a box. A cap of 40 allows a pen 80 m across, whose corner is about 57 m out. That is deliberate: clamping the corner instead would mean the size you set and the pen you got were different numbers.
• Why a leash at all: a site the keeper holds has no player in it. Creature AI still runs, but with nobody to orient on, animals wander continuously and lean on fence colliders for minutes at a time until they penetrate them. Drifts of 80–100 m in a single visit were measured before this existed.
• Penned animals are also held still while a site is loading. A boar and the fence around it are two entries in the same instantiation queue with nothing ordering one before the other, so an animal can be alive and walking across ground whose pen has not been built yet. Holding them makes that race unwinnable rather than merely usually-won.

📦 Pairs with AzuAutoStore (Azumatt)

• The Keeper Stone is a real container, not an imitation of one, so AzuAutoStore sees it with no compatibility code on either side and no configuration needed. Walk past your stone and your ore, coal and animal feed go straight into it; the stone then feeds the pen and reloads the furnaces while you are gone. With AzuAutoStore's own default of Must Have Existing Item To Pull, a stone only ever tops up what you have already chosen to keep in it — exactly the behaviour you want from six slots.

• Optional tuning: to give the stone its own pull radius or an item filter, add it to Azumatt.AzuAutoStore.yml under its prefab name:

  AFH_KeeperStone:
    range: 15
  

🐗 Conflicts with PetPantry (Azumatt)

• Both mods feed the same animals from different stores, and the result is unpredictable rather than additive: whichever gets there first satisfies the animal and the other's supply sits untouched, or both spend at once. Away From Home detects it and warns, and deliberately does nothing else — it does not disable itself, patch around it, or fight for the animal. Leaving the Keeper Stone's slots empty is a perfectly valid way to run both, and that choice is yours to make rather than the mod's to make for you.

🌐 Server-authoritative from the first line

• Every setting that changes what the keeper does is synced through ServerSync and locked to the server's value. A client quietly running a longer reach or a shorter settle timeout than everyone else is a real behavioural split, not a cosmetic one.
• Only the keybind and the menu accent colour are local, and they stay editable while locked.
• AllowRemoteSites lets the server refuse to stream distant sectors for clients entirely, if you would rather everyone stayed inside vanilla view range.

👑 The admin panel

• F7, admins only. Every Keeper Stone standing on the server, whoever raised it and wherever it is, including ones nobody can walk to — with the power to remove any of them.
• A stone with food still in it is refused rather than removed. Removing a stone from the panel reaches across the world and cannot drop its contents the way a hammer does, so rather than quietly deleting somebody's carrots it says how many items are inside and asks you to empty it or take it down in person. It is removable the moment it is empty.

🌱 Crops get nothing from this mod, and that is not a limitation

• Valheim's plants grow on a timestamp compared against the world clock. They do not need to be loaded, owned or simulated, and they finish on their own whether anyone visits or not. Nothing here would make them faster, so nothing here pretends to.

📋 Known, and not hidden

• The keeper holds one site at a time. A site can never receive more than its share of wall-clock time. DwellSeconds is the only dial that buys real throughput; a shorter cycle cannot move that ceiling at all.
• Feeding is paced by the rotation. The stone can only serve while its site is loaded, which — when you are away — means during the keeper's visit. It is not a continuous trough.
• Ownership is per-character, not per-account. Two characters on one Steam account are two owners for the purposes of the site limit, because that is the only identity Valheim durably records on a placed piece.
• VerboseLogging is this mod's test instrument. Its whole job is invisible by design; if you want to see the keeper working, this is how.

Before 1.0.0

Everything prior to this release was internal pre-release testing and is not documented here.