Getting started

1. Raise a Frithstone

The Frithstone is the settlement. Everything - who lives here, what they may do, where they may work - is stored on it, and it is the thing residents come home to.

It costs 40 coins, 1 surtling core, 3 amber and 5 fine wood by default, and it is built with the ordinary hammer.

It is in the hammer's Misc tab from the start, greyed out until you have the materials. Valheim normally hides a piece entirely until you have handled everything it costs, which meant the Frithstone was invisible until well into the Black Forest and looked like a mod that had not installed. This one shows itself and what it wants.

Put it where you want the middle of your village to be. It can be moved later, and a rebuilt stone within 24m adopts the old one's residents, but everything measures distance from it - so somewhere central saves you work.

2. Take someone in

Use the Frithstone to open the panel, then Take in a resident. The first two cost 20 coins each, then 30, 50, 100, and 200 for everyone after that.

They arrive with nothing and no craft.

3. Give them a bed and a chest

Two things a settlement needs before anything else works:

• A bed each, roofed, within 45m of the Frithstone. Residents refuse to work until they have claimed one. (RequireBed turns this off if you would rather they did not.)
• At least one chest. This is where they put what they gather, and where they fetch their tools, weapons and food from. Any chest inside the settlement counts.

4. Give them a craft

Open the panel's Settlers tab, pick the resident, pick a craft. They will go and find the tool they need from your chests - an axe for a Lumberjack, a rod for a Fisherman - so put a spare in a chest and you never have to hand anything over.

The Farmer, Lumberjack, Forager, Hunter, Fisherman, Cook, Caretaker, Builder, Guard, Follower and Smith are available. The Miner is normally greyed out; server admins can enable Work/OfferUnfinishedCrafts to try it, with rough edges expected.

5. Draw them some ground

By default a resident works within 30m of the Frithstone. That is enough for the first day and not enough after it - the trees near the stone run out.

Open the panel's Settings tab and use Draw work areas on the map. Draw a circle where you want a craft to work; a circle can belong to one craft only, or be a keep-out circle nobody enters.

This is the setting people forget. A Forager saying "Nothing worth gathering in the work area" almost always means the berries are outside the circles, not that there are none.

What happens next

They feed themselves from the chests, sleep at night, sit down when there is nothing to do, and complain when they are unhappy. A resident that stays miserable long enough will leave, and puts its things back at the Frithstone on the way out.

The Trade tab also lets you survey routes between settlements and manage caravans. See Fields and farming and Roads and caravans for those systems.

Three shortcuts worth knowing straight away:

• Use on a resident opens its pack.
• Shift + Use on a chest opens the sorting and intake menu.
• Shift + Use on a follower tells it to come along or to stay.