🛡️ VikingOS

"THE HEARTH IS THAT WAY," he bellowed, because the gods had decreed that any man raising his voice must also lose the shape of his words. A Viking may shout. A Viking may also be understood. It was never obvious why he could not do both.

VikingOS lets you rebuild Valheim's interface. Press one key and every part of the screen is outlined — health, stamina, the hotbar, the minimap, the crafting list, the compass, and the hundred smaller pieces inside them. Drag them where you want them, with snap lines like a real editor. Resize a box and its contents re-flow to fit. Turn the health bar on its side and the numbers stay upright. It remembers exactly, and it remembers in a way that still makes sense when you change monitor.

And the chat becomes BarrkChat: ~1,900 emojis under the :shortcodes: you already know — a good chunk of them animated — with a picker, autocomplete, server-supplied custom emotes, item sharing by drag-and-drop, shouts that keep their capitals, and a chat window that finally moves, scales and resizes as one piece.

Every frame VikingOS draws is generated in code. No textures ship with this mod, and the metal is a colour picker.

🚧 THIS IS AN OPEN BETA. VikingOS is actively being built and it is not finished. Expect rough edges, and expect things to change between versions — features are still being added and fixes still being made, release by release. What you see today is not the final shape of it.

It is genuinely usable right now and it is tested before every release, but it has not had a long soak across many machines, mod lists and playstyles. If you want something that has been stable for years, this is not that yet. If you are happy to try something still growing and to tell me what breaks, you are exactly who this is for.

Your layout lives in one small file you can delete at any time to start over, so nothing here is hard to undo. Bug reports and suggestions are wanted — Discord is the fastest way to reach me, and reports genuinely do shape what gets built next.

⚠️ READ THIS FIRST

🛑 Running KG Marketplace & Server NPCs? KG Chat must be off.

VikingOS's chat does not work with KG Chat enabled — so if you run the server, set EnableKGChat = false on the server, before your first boot if you can, because it starts out enabled. Playing on someone else's server, there is nothing to do. The rest of KG Marketplace is completely unaffected. Full instructions in 🧩 Compatibility.

🪓 VikingOS can move other mods' interfaces

VikingOS does not work from a list of Valheim's own panels. It walks the interface and offers you everything it finds, and that includes UI belonging to every other mod you have installed. That is the whole point of it — but it also means you can move, resize, scale or rotate a panel that another mod is actively managing, and that mod was not written expecting you to.

Moving another mod's element can cause unwanted behaviour. Depending on the mod, you may see it snap back where it was, redraw in the wrong place, mis-position its own contents, stop responding to clicks where it looks like it should, or misbehave in ways neither mod can predict. There is no list of which mods are safe, because the answer depends on how each one was written.

This is not a bug in VikingOS and it is not a bug in the other mod. It is what happens when two things arrange the same object.

Nothing is permanent. Every change is reversible:

• Right-click an element in edit mode puts that one back.
• Your whole layout is one small file — delete it and everything returns to where your mods put it.
• VikingOS stores every change as a difference from where an element already was, so a reset returns it to what your other mods intended, not to vanilla.

So: rearrange freely, and if something starts behaving oddly, put that element back first. If it still misbehaves afterwards, then it is worth reporting.

🔗 Also mine: TortalPortal, a complete overhaul of Valheim's portal network, and Mists of Avalor, whose open beta is live on Hexium.

⚔️ Features

🪓 Rearrange Anything

Press F10. Everything adjustable on screen gets an outline.

VikingOS does not work from a list of the dozen panels somebody thought of. It walks the interface and offers everything it finds — which means the pieces inside panels are adjustable too, and panels added by other mods show up without VikingOS knowing they exist. When elements overlap, the smallest one under your cursor wins, so a thing nested inside another thing is still reachable.

It walks the HUD, the inventory, the chat box, the dialogue and message panels, the trader, the skills and text windows, the barber and the menus — and how deep it goes is yours to set. The default lists panels and their major parts, which is what most screens want; turn it up and it reaches individual labels, icons and bar fills. Far more rows, so the search box becomes how you find anything — and nothing is lost by turning it back down, because positions you have already set are remembered by name and return when you raise it again.

⚠️ Moving another mod's UI can make that mod behave oddly — it was not written expecting anything else to arrange it. Right-click puts an element back, and deleting your layout file undoes everything. See the full warning at the top of this page.

Search for an element by name and click the row: it is pinned — outlined, haloed for a few seconds so your eye can find it in a busy screen, holding the arrow keys and the corner grips, and draggable where it stands even when it is buried under three other panels. Deselect hands it back, and so does a click on empty screen.

Want a vertical health bar with upright numbers? Turn the panel 90° — the numbers stay readable by themselves.

🔑 F10 is rebindable, and vikingos_layout edit opens the same thing from the console. vikingos_layout on its own lists everything you have changed.

💬 F10 works while you are typing in chat, which is the one time the chat box is reliably on screen — vanilla hides it a few seconds after the last message. Edit mode holds it open for as long as you are arranging, so the thing you are dragging stops disappearing out from under you. (If you rebind edit mode to a letter, it stands down while you type, as it must.)

📐 Layouts That Survive A New Monitor

Valheim's interface is driven by a scaler that works out to min(width/1920, height/1080). Because of that min, the screen measured in interface units is exactly 1920×1080 at any 16:9 resolution — 1080p, 1440p and 4K are the same coordinate space. VikingOS stores your changes in those units, so a layout built at 4K comes back correct at 1080p, and corner-anchored things stay in their corners when the aspect ratio changes.

It also stores each change as a difference from where the element already was, never as a fixed position. So VikingOS cooperates with your other mods rather than overruling them: if something else has already moved your hotbar, that is simply the starting point — and reset puts the element back to what your mods intended, not to vanilla.

Your layout is one small file. It contains only what you actually changed. Delete it to start fresh, or send it to a friend. And it restores exactly — an element must hold still before its home position is trusted, so an intro animation can never smuggle a slightly-wrong "home" into your save.

🗂️ Saved Screens

One arrangement is rarely enough. A layout tuned for building is the wrong one for a boss fight, and the one you use on the big monitor is not the one you want on the laptop.

Type a name into the preset row at the top of the menu and press Save. That is a saved screen — panels, your clock and weight meter, the share box, the trade window, the metal colour, the text sizes. The ◀ ▶ arrows walk through what you have saved; Load puts one on.

A preset is a complete screen rather than a patch: loading one puts back anything it does not mention, so two presets always give you two results instead of the sum of everything you have ever tried. Your current layout is copied aside before a load, so a mis-click costs a file rename.

They are ordinary files in config/VikingOS/presets/, in the same format as your layout itself — so you can send one to a friend, or drop a layout you were given straight into the folder.

🧲 Snapping, Re-Flow, And The Details

The parts that make the engine feel like a desktop instead of a debug tool:

• Grids re-flow. Valheim positions hotbar and inventory slots by hand in code, once — resize the box and vanilla would leave the slots where they were. VikingOS re-flows any uniform grid to fit its new box: narrow the hotbar and it wraps onto a second row; reset it and the game's own arrangement returns. The shape is detected, not the name, so modded bars re-flow too — and a re-flowed grid holds its arrangement when a status effect expires or an item moves.
• Stat bars widen without breaking. A bar's width IS the game's readout of your maximum — write it directly and it stops growing when you eat. VikingOS adds your adjustment inside the game's own calculation instead, so a wider health bar still grows with max health.
• Scale and rotate happen in place. Unity transforms around an element's pivot, and Valheim's pivots are rarely the middle — left alone, enlarging the health panel slides it away and rotating it swings it off screen. VikingOS compensates so things grow and turn about their own centre.
• Rotated panels keep their text readable — the rotation is cancelled back out of the labels alone, at any depth.

😀 An Emoji Library Like A Phone's

~1,900 emojis are built into the mod itself, under the shortcodes you already know from Discord — :joy:, :fire:, :sob:, :skull:, :rocket:, :100: and the rest of the standard set. Nothing to download, nothing to set up. ~150 of the most-used are animated, powered by a GIF engine written for this mod, and an animated :joy: replaces the static one the way a phone keyboard would.

• The picker: a ☺ Emoji button on the chat panel opens a browsable grid of everything — click one to chat it.
• Autocomplete: type :fi in chat and matching suggestions pop above the input — click to complete. No second search box fighting the chat input for your keys.
• Emojis render in the floating text over people's heads too, not just in the log.
• Wide emotes render wide — up to 4:1 — instead of being squeezed into a square.

🏰 Server Emotes

Admins drop PNGs and GIFs into the server's emote folder; every player receives them automatically, cached so a rejoin costs nothing. The server's :skol: outranks the built-in one and your personal packs — the server's set is the world's identity.

• Oversized GIFs are shrunk by the server instead of refused. Drop in a full-size internet GIF; a dedicated server — headless, no GPU — decodes, resizes and re-encodes it to transfer size itself. The original file is never touched.
• vikingos_emotereload (admins only) picks up new files live, without a restart.
• Priority when names collide: server → your packs → built-ins.

💬 One Chat Window

The vanilla chat is a pile of hardcoded rectangles wearing a window costume — its input line does not even follow its own box. VikingOS restructures it once, at load, into an actual window:

• Drag the gold frame to move it. Log, input line and the VikingOS controls travel together, no edit mode needed.
• Corner grip to resize — available while typing, the one moment your cursor is already free. The input line stays glued inside the box.
• Mouse wheel over the control strip to scale the whole window.
• The log's text size is yours — vanilla's 18-point text was written for smaller monitors. Applies live.
• The VikingOS controls dock to the chat box — as a row across the top, a row underneath, or the original column beside it. The row is the default: it puts the buttons next to the emoji picker and hands the whole width back to the chat log instead of spending it on an empty grey column. Switch between them whenever you like; the chat box takes back or gives up the column's width to match.
• Wherever they dock, the controls sit inside one shared frame with the log, so chat and buttons read as a single window. In the row, the three gold dots on the left are the handle.

All of it saves with your layout and restores exactly.

🔠 Chat That Keeps Your Capitals

Vanilla rewrites every message before it reaches your eyes: shouts are forced to ALL CAPITALS, whispers to all lowercase. Not styled — genuinely rewritten, so a name, an acronym and a coordinate all arrive flattened. Head SE from Haldor becomes HEAD SE FROM HALDOR.

VikingOS removes that rewrite and nothing else. Shout still carries the same distance, the channel colours are untouched — you just read the sentence that was typed. The change happens where the message is displayed, on your machine, so it fixes every message you receive from everyone, vanilla players included.

📣 Always Shout

A toggle on the chat panel. While it is on, every message you send goes out at Shout range — no /s in front of it, no typing a paragraph into the void because you were still in Normal. It overrides the channel prefix rather than working around it, so the two can never disagree.

On a server running VikingOS this is a server-owned rule — the chat is the server's; the screen is yours.

🤫 Whispers, And A Reply Button

Valheim already has a thing called whisper, and it is not what anyone means by the word: it is a volume, short-range and overheard by whoever happens to be standing near you. There is no "to", and so there is nothing to reply to.

/w <player> <message> reaches exactly one person, anywhere on the map. /msg and /tell do the same. /r answers whoever whispered you last.

The chat panel has both as buttons. Whisper hands you a list of who is online and fills the name in spelled correctly, which matters more than it sounds when the name has spaces in it. Reply shows whose name it will answer, so you are not trying to remember.

Whispers stay out of the server's chat log.

⇄ Trading, Without Trusting Anyone

Ask somebody to trade with the Trade button or /trade. You both get a window with two columns, and you fill your side the same way you share an item: drag it out of your inventory and drop it on your half of the table.

Then you both confirm. If either of you changes the offer afterwards, both confirmations are torn up and you each confirm again — so the deal you agree to is always the one you were looking at.

What happens next is the part worth explaining. Valheim keeps your inventory on your computer, which means a straight swap has a moment in the middle where an item has left one pack and not yet arrived in the other. A disconnect in that moment is how people lose gear. So VikingOS does not do that: the server takes both sides, and only then hands each of you the other's. The item is in exactly one place at every instant, and that place is never a connection that just dropped.

Most disconnects never get that far. The two clients keep a heartbeat while the window is open, so a partner who drops is noticed within a few seconds and the trade simply ends — with everything still in both inventories, nothing to refund and nothing to explain. The escrow is there for the cases that slip past it: a swap that went through is waiting for you the next time you log in, and a trade the other player walked away from comes back to you.

Because the server keeps offering your goods until your client confirms it has them, the same delivery can legitimately arrive twice. Your client remembers what it has already been paid, so a redelivery is recognised rather than applied again — which matters on servers that keep your character server-side, where an accidental duplicate is not something an admin can quietly roll back.

Items arrive whole — quality, durability, the name of whoever crafted them, and any data other mods have attached to them.

⚔️ Trading needs VikingOS on the server, because holding both sides safely is the server's job and there is no honest way to do it without one. Whispers and layouts do not care.

🎒 Share What You Found

Pick an item up in your inventory and drop it on the Share Item box — it opens beside your character panel whenever the inventory is open, and you can drag it by its title row to wherever you would rather have it. The party gets a line with the item's icon and its name — and hovering that name opens a framed card with the item's icon and its real stats in your language: the same tooltip you would see in your own inventory, at the right quality, durability and world level.

The item stays in your inventory. Sharing it is not dropping it.

The stats are worked out on the reader's machine, not baked into the message. Other mods that change an item's numbers show through correctly for whoever is reading.

💬 This one needs VikingOS on both ends. Item cards travel on their own channel so the item's data and the chat line arrive together and can never get out of order.

📜 A Log Of Everything Said

Every message your machine sees is written to a dated text file, one per day. On a server that is every message it relays — the closest thing Valheim has to a shout log, and the thing to reach for when somebody asks who said what three evenings ago. It is plain text; nothing needs to be running to read it.

⬛ The Inventory In Black And Gold

The inventory, container, crafting and item-info panel backgrounds re-skin in VikingOS black and gold — whole panels, never a half-themed seam — following your chosen metal colour, and toggling live so you can compare. Bars, slots and icons are deliberately never touched: the game redraws bars from cached values every frame, and fighting that produces flicker, not theming.

🕰️ The Clock, The Compass And The Weight Meter

A small clock — your local time, server time, and the in-game day and time of day — and a live carry-weight meter with a fill bar that blinks red when you are overloaded, so you can read 45/300 without opening anything. Drag either one anywhere while the cursor is free, and drag the gold grip in its bottom-right corner to resize it. Both remember their place as a fraction of the screen, so a resolution change cannot strand them, and both hide with the HUD.

Beside them, a compass across the top of the screen: a sliding tape of the horizon centred on where you are looking, marked with the eight cardinal points and a bearing in degrees, with north lit because north is the one you are looking for. It follows the camera rather than your body, so it turns with the view instead of lagging a step behind it, and the bearings it gives match the ones on your map.

And your map pins ride it. Every pin the map knows about slides along the top of the tape as you turn — your own markers, your death, your bed, the boss stones — and so does every pin any other mod leaves behind: portals, shops, quest targets, resource nodes, whatever it is. There is no list of supported mods here and there never needs to be one, because the compass reads the same pin list the minimap reads. If it is on your map it is on your compass, including a mod released tomorrow.

Other players show up too, as the same small red figure the map uses — anyone sharing their position, moving along the tape as they move. Look towards something and it names itself underneath, with how far away it is.

The map's own filter buttons carry across: hide a pin type on the map and it is hidden here as well, so the two can never tell you different things. Set how far away a pin can be and still count, how many can crowd the strip at once, how big the icons are, or turn pins, players and the caption off one at a time.

✨ Four Frames, And The Metal Is Yours

The ornate frame wraps the chat window, and wraps every panel of the inventory screen too: your inventory, the character and crafting side, and the item info strip. It is built from the panel backgrounds themselves, so a frame is always exactly the size of the box it surrounds, and the weight and armour roundels sit inside it with nothing cut off. Move, resize or scale a panel and its frame comes with it, live.

There are four carvings to choose between, and you can flip through them from the layout menu while the window you are looking at wears each one:

All four are drawn to the same measurements, so switching between them never moves a single control — it is a change of carving, not of layout.

Two panels only share a frame if the result is actually a box — the panels inside a frame have to fill it. Push two panels together and they combine; leave a hole between them and they keep a frame each, rather than one frame drawn around open sky.

Every frame is generated at runtime, pixel by pixel — every rail, rune, rivet and crest, all lit by a single light over the top-left shoulder. Because it is generated rather than drawn, the metal is a setting: give it any colour and the shadow and highlight tones are derived from it, so silver, bronze, blackened iron or verdigris is one value, not a texture pack. A silver serpent or an iron rune band is two clicks apart. It rebakes while you watch.

🎨 And Everything Else Is A Setting Too

Nothing cascades from one dial any more. Window titles, sub-titles, the small gold labels, button text, list rows, footers and input fields each have their own size, on top of a single "everything a bit bigger" dial and a proportional zoom. If the body text is right but the titles are shouting, you change the titles.

The same goes for colour. Set the window background and how solid it is, the body and muted text colours, and — if you would rather not have them worked out from the metal — the metal's shadow and highlight by hand. The background colour reaches Valheim's own re-skinned panels as well, and the buttons, list rows and text fields are derived from it, so lightening the interface lightens the things you click rather than leaving them black on a pale panel.

🎛️ Want the features but not the look? One switch turns off everything VikingOS paints onto Valheim's own interface — the panel re-skin and the gilt frames — while leaving the chat window, emoji, item sharing and the entire layout editor exactly as they are. The two halves can also be turned off separately if you want one but not the other.

🎨 This is the same frame used by Fatty and TortalPortal. If you run more than one of them, give them all the same metal colour and text scaling — they share one set of generated artwork, so matching values make their windows read as one family.

🍗 Instructions

A start-to-finish guide to actually using the thing:

1. Install BepInEx for Valheim if you have not already, then install VikingOS through your mod manager (or drop the DLL into BepInEx/plugins/).
2. Launch once. Everything works out of the box; nothing needs setting up first. Running KG Marketplace & Server NPCs? KG Chat must be off — see 🧩 Compatibility.
3. Press F10. The whole interface outlines. Drag a panel where you want it, grab its corner to resize, scroll to scale it, [ and ] to turn it. Right-click puts one thing back.
4. Find the buried stuff by name. The menu's search box lists every element; click a row to pin it, and it stays outlined and reachable even under other panels. Deselect, or a click on empty screen, lets it go.
5. Press F10 again to leave. Your layout is saved as you go and comes back exactly, at any resolution.
6. Press Enter for chat. The window drags by its gold frame and resizes by the corner grip while you type. ☺ Emoji opens the picker; typing :fi autocompletes as you go.
7. Shout without the slash. Flip Always Shout on the chat panel and every message carries at shout range.
8. Share a find. Open your inventory, pick an item up and drop it on the Share Item box beside your character — drag the box by its title row first if you want it somewhere else. It goes to the party as a linked name they can hover for the full stat card, and it stays in your bag.
9. Make it yours. Every VikingOS window is drawn rather than shipped, so the metal colour and text scaling are live settings — set them in-game with Configuration Manager (F1) and watch the artwork rebake.

🛠️ How-To

😀 Add Your Own Emojis

The built-in set covers the standard Discord shortcodes, and you can add any number of your own.

1. Drop PNGs or GIFs into the emojipacks folder in VikingOS's own config directory.
2. The filename is the shortcode, so skol.png becomes :skol:.
3. Restart the game — your own folder is read at startup. (Emotes arriving from a server need no restart.)

Your packs outrank the built-ins, so naming a file after a standard emoji replaces it for you.

📡 Share Emotes From Your Server

Your players do not need your files. The server can hand them out.

1. Drop your PNGs and GIFs into the emotes folder in VikingOS's config directory on the server.
2. Run vikingos_emotereload from any admin's console, or restart the server.
3. That's it. Each client downloads what it is missing and caches it, so the download happens once per machine.

What that buys you: a guild's own emote set that everyone at the table has, with nothing to install and no modpack to rebuild. Oversized GIFs are transcoded by the server itself rather than rejected, so you can drop a full-size internet GIF straight in and let the server deal with it.

🧭 When Something Is Not Working

• vikingos_debug prints a feature-by-feature status report — what attached, what did not, and why. If something is not working, run this and paste the output.
• vikingos_debug on turns on verbose logging live: shares, emote sync, layout captures, and the reason anything was rejected.
• vikingos_layout lists every change you have made; vikingos_layout edit opens edit mode from the console.
• vikingos_emotes lists every emote currently loaded and where each came from.

🩺 Some warnings are never silenced. VikingOS's riskiest mechanisms — the chat case fix, which edits Valheim's own compiled code, and the item-share channel — fail quietly if a game update moves what they hook. Each one checks that it actually attached and says so in the log if it did not.

🤝 Multiplayer

Your screen is yours; the chat rules are the server's. Everything about layout, scale, theme and text size is purely local and never touched by a server. Chat behaviour is server-owned on servers running VikingOS.

⚠️ Versions must match. A server running VikingOS requires every client to run the same version, and refuses clients that do not have it at all. Half the chat overhaul is built while the game starts up, so a mismatched pair would disagree about what exists — better a clear refusal at the door than a session that breaks an hour in. In practice: update the server and its players together. A single-player game is unaffected, and a vanilla server does not care what you are running.

A server also gets one master switch for the whole chat side, because chat is the only part of VikingOS that reaches other people — everything else is a picture on one player's monitor. Turned off, everyone connected keeps Valheim's own chat.

🧩 Compatibility

🛑 Running KG Marketplace & Server NPCs? KG Chat must be off.

This one is not a preference and not a soft recommendation. Both mods provide a complete chat, only one of them can be in place, and VikingOS requires KG Chat to be switched off. With it on, the VikingOS chat will not work — no emoji, no picker, no item sharing, no shout strip.

On a server: set EnableKGChat = false in BepInEx/config/Marketplace/MarketPlace.cfg on the server, and restart it. That setting is server-side, so it must be done there rather than on a client — and do it before the server's first boot if you can, because it starts out enabled.

As a player on someone else's server: nothing to do. VikingOS switches it off on your machine by default.

The rest of KG Marketplace is completely unaffected — the marketplace, the NPCs, the quests and trading all carry on exactly as they do now. It is only the chat.

⛔ HUDCompass (Neobotics) — hard incompatibility. Do not run both.

Not a conflict to be configured around: two compasses is one compass too many. Both mods draw a heading strip across the top of the screen, both read your map pins onto it, and both expect to own that space — so running the pair gives you two tapes fighting for the same band of screen, two sets of pin icons for the same pins, and two answers to a question that has one.

Pick one and remove the other. There is nothing to be gained by running the pair. If you would rather keep HUDCompass, switch the VikingOS compass off in the configuration and everything else in VikingOS carries on untouched — but leaving both switched on is not a supported arrangement and bug reports from it cannot be acted on.

Checked against, and specifically built to coexist with:

• KG Marketplace & Server NPCs — see the callout above. Chat aside, the two run together with no conflicts.
• AzuExtendedPlayerInventory (Azumatt) — item dragging reads the inventory's drag state directly; extended hotbars re-flow like vanilla ones because the grid shape is detected, not the class name; and the wide panel it builds across the character and crafting area is themed and framed along with everything else.
• Hygge, MarsarahTweaks — no conflicts; anything they move becomes the baseline VikingOS adjusts from.
• Fatty, TortalPortal — share VikingOS's frame. See the colour-matching note above.

Chat patches are surgical: the forced-case rewrite is removed by editing exactly the two instructions that perform it. Vanilla's guard against players typing rich-text markup into chat is not weakened; item cards and emojis get past it by routes that never put markup on the wire in the first place.

📦 Dependencies

• BepInExPack Valheim — denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim-5.4.2333
• JsonDotNET — ValheimModding-JsonDotNET-13.0.4

Made by Wubarrk. Bug reports and abuse welcome on Discord.