Better Stability – build into the rock, build higher with late materials

Set a beam deep into a rock face or a foundation wall and it holds like the ground itself. Build a house out of a cliff on beams you set into the rock, hang a stone ledge out of a wall, and finally build higher with the materials the late game gives you: black marble, grausten and flametal now carry more than iron. It works inside Valheim's own stability system, adds no new piece and no magic support; it measures how deep a piece sits in rock or masonry and gives each material believable numbers.

Anchoring: set it in, and it holds

1. Build a foundation wall: stone, black marble or grausten that stands on the ground or is set into the slope.
2. Push a beam (or any piece) into it, so that at least a third of the beam sits inside. A 2 m beam needs about 0.7 m in the wall; a stone wall is 1 m thick.
3. With the hammer in hand, look at the beam. Below the crosshair you read:

Iron · full support Set 0.8 m into a foundation wall – as firm as the ground

The beam now stands as if it lay on the ground: blue in the hammer's colours, full support for everything you build on it. A house on two such beams stands on them as on solid earth.

• Rock and ground count the same. A beam set into a rock face or into the slope holds like the ground. Vanilla already does this when a piece only touches the rock; Better Stability also counts pieces buried completely, and shows you the depth.
• Higher walls carry with the wall. Set into masonry that does not reach the ground (an upper course), a piece takes that wall's own support, without the loss over distance: Set 0.8 m into Stone Wall 4x2 – carried by the wall.
• Less deep, less hold. A third in holds fully; less holds in proportion, and the hover text says how deep it would need to go: Holds 38 % – 0.7 m in would hold fully. A piece never holds worse than in vanilla.
• Thick walls hold best. Stone and black marble walls are 1 m thick, a grausten wall only 0.4 m: a beam straight through grausten holds about 60 %. Lay the beam along the wall, or through two walls, for a full hold.
• Stone ledges work. A stone floor set into a wall becomes a corbel and stands at full support; in vanilla stone cannot reach sideways at all.
• Nothing floats. Take the wall away and everything set into it comes down. Pieces set into each other never hold each other up: of two, only the one with more of itself inside the other counts as set in; a piece that only stands by its own anchor (a corbel) carries nothing set into it; and masonry passes on 97 % across a joint. Once the ground is gone, everything comes down.
• The world's towers already work. The stone towers, Dvergr towers and charred towers of the world are fixed rock to the game: what you build on them stands as on the ground, in vanilla too.

Materials: late means strong

Better Stability gives every material its own values, in the order you reach them. Early materials reach a little higher than in vanilla; from black marble on, each late material beats the one before. Masonry stays poor at reaching sideways (stone does not bend), metal stays good at it.

Measured in the game, built piece by piece as a player does: a straight column from the ground, and a row of beams or slabs out from a rock face, until the next piece breaks.

Flametal pieces (the Ashlands flametal pillar, beam and gate) are iron to the game; Better Stability recognises them by their recipe and gives them their own, strongest tier.

The real thing

Valheim's stability is a number per piece. A piece that touches the ground or rock has its material's maximum. Every other piece takes the best its neighbours can pass on: a neighbour's support times 1 − loss × distance, with the distance between the two centres plus 0.1 m, and a vertical loss when the neighbour is below, a horizontal loss when it is beside. Below the material's minimum the piece breaks.

(Vanilla values in brackets.) For a column of 2 m pieces built one on top of the other, this gives exactly the heights measured above: max × (1 − up × 2.1)ⁿ ≥ min. Floor slabs reach out a little farther than the formula says, because the game averages the support of two neighbours on opposite sides.

Anchoring adds one more source: a piece measures, with sample points through its colliders, how much of it lies inside rock, the ground or masonry, and how deep. From a third inside (FullHoldShare) and at least 0.25 m (MinDepth) it holds fully:

• in rock, the ground or a foundation wall: the material's maximum, as on the ground;
• in other masonry: the wall's support × 0.97;
• less deep: in proportion. The better of this and the game's own result counts.

A rule of thumb from real building stands behind the third: a beam that is to carry a load beyond a wall needs a fair part of its length inside it, or the wall's edge becomes a lever. Joist pockets and corbels in old masonry walls work the same way.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/zap.betterstability.cfg

Materials (server-synced, admin only):

• UseTiers (on): Better Stability's values below instead of the game's. Off: every material holds as in vanilla; anchoring still works.
• Wood, Stone, Iron, CoreWood, BlackMarble, Grausten, Ancient, Ice, Timberwood, Flametal: four numbers each, max, min, loss up, loss sideways, for example Iron = 1500, 20, 0.065, 0.065. The description of each entry shows the vanilla values.
• TierOverrides (empty): give single pieces another material, for example woodiron_beam:Flametal, piece_mymod_wall:BlackMarble.

Anchoring (server-synced, admin only):

• Anchoring (on): pieces set into rock, the ground or masonry hold by it.
• FullHoldShare (0.33): part of a piece that must sit inside for a full hold.
• MinDepth (0.25): a piece reaching less than this many metres in is not anchored at all.
• HostTiers (Stone, BlackMarble, Grausten, Ancient): materials that hold a piece set into them. Rock, the ground and the world's fixed structures always hold.

Client:

• ShowSupport (on): with the hammer in hand, the piece you look at shows material, support and anchor below the crosshair.

Multiplayer and compatibility

• The player whose game owns a piece works out its support, as in vanilla; the values from the server's config are the same for everyone. Every player and the server need the mod. Requires Jötunn.
• Better Stability changes no prefab and adds no piece. Remove it and your buildings follow vanilla rules again: what stands only thanks to Better Stability (very high late-material towers, stone ledges) will then break.
• Pieces from other mods take the material the game knows them by; TierOverrides changes that.
• The measuring runs once per piece and again only when something around it changes (a neighbour built or broken, the ground dug next to it): about 0.1 ms per piece, at most 12 pieces per frame.

Deutsch

Im Fels verankert, mit späten Werkstoffen höher bauen. Setzt du einen Balken tief genug in eine Felswand oder eine Grundmauer, hält er wie der Boden selbst. So baust du ein Haus aus der Klippe heraus, hängst einen Steinsims aus der Mauer und baust mit den Werkstoffen des späten Spiels endlich höher: Schwarzmarmor, Grausten und Flammenmetall tragen jetzt mehr als Eisen. Better Stability arbeitet im Stabilitätssystem des Spiels, ohne neue Bauteile und ohne Zauberhalt.

Verankern: Stell eine Grundmauer (Stein, Schwarzmarmor oder Grausten, die auf dem Boden steht oder im Hang sitzt). Schieb einen Balken so hinein, dass mindestens ein Drittel drinsteckt – bei 2 m also etwa 0,7 m; eine Steinmauer ist 1 m dick. Mit dem Hammer in der Hand liest du unter dem Fadenkreuz:

Eisen · voller Halt 0,8 m tief in eine Grundmauer gesetzt – fest wie der Boden

Regeln: Fels und Boden zählen wie eine Grundmauer. In einer höheren Mauerlage trägt der Balken mit dem Halt dieser Mauer, ohne Verlust über die Entfernung. Weniger tief hält anteilig, nie schlechter als im Grundspiel, und der Hovertext sagt, wie tief es sein müsste. Steinplatten in der Mauer werden zu Kragsteinen. Dicke Mauern halten am besten: Stein und Schwarzmarmor sind 1 m dick, Grausten nur 0,4 m – quer hindurch hält ein Balken dort etwa zu 60 %. Nimmst du die Mauer weg, fällt alles, was in ihr steckt; Teile halten sich nie gegenseitig in der Luft. Auf den festen Türmen der Welt baust du schon im Grundspiel wie auf dem Boden.

Werkstoffe: Jeder Werkstoff hat eigene Werte in der Reihenfolge, in der du ihn erreichst. Frühe Werkstoffe kommen etwas höher als im Grundspiel, ab Schwarzmarmor übertrifft jeder späte Werkstoff den vorigen. Gemessen im Spiel (Säule vom Boden): Schwarzmarmor 18 m → 70 m, Grausten 26 m → 98 m, Flammenmetall 50 m → 140 m. Mauerwerk kragt weiterhin kaum aus, Metall gut. Flammenmetall-Säule, -Balken und -Tor erkennt Better Stability am Rezept.

Einstellungen (zap.betterstability.cfg, vom Server-Admin): UseTiers, je Werkstoff vier Zahlen (max, min, Verlust nach oben, Verlust seitlich), TierOverrides, Anchoring, FullHoldShare (0,33), MinDepth (0,25 m), HostTiers. Für jeden selbst: ShowSupport (die Anzeige unter dem Fadenkreuz).

Mehrspieler: Alle Spieler und der Server brauchen die Mod. Ohne Better Stability gelten wieder die Regeln des Grundspiels; was nur dank Better Stability steht, bricht dann.