VikingSettlements

Vikings have finally learned to build homes of their own. This mod adds inhabited NPC settlements to Valheim's world generation:

• Meadows villages — a longhouse, cabins, a farm, a maypole, a watchtower, a market stall with a trader, and villagers around a central fire.
• Black Forest outposts — small fortified camps ringed by sharp stakes, manned by a few hardy settlers.
• Plains steadings — stone-walled halls with barley and flax fields, home to settlers and a village seer.

Settlers are peaceful villagers with their own names. They defend their home against raiding monsters and turn hostile if you attack them. Villages contain loot chests, crops to pick, working crafting spots, and (in meadows villages) a trader with a small store of early-game supplies.

Requirements

• Valheim 0.221.4 or compatible
• BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2333+
• Jötunn 2.29.2+

Installation

With a mod manager: install BepInExPack Valheim and Jötunn into your profile, then install this mod. Launch through the manager.

Manually:

1. Extract BepInExPack Valheim into your Valheim folder so winhttp.dll sits next to valheim.exe, launch the game once, then quit.
2. Copy Jotunn.dll into <Valheim>/BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Copy VikingSettlements.dll into <Valheim>/BepInEx/plugins/.
4. Launch Valheim. The config is written to BepInEx/config/com.abjumb.vikingsettlements.cfg on first run.

Multiplayer: the server and every client need the mod at the same minor version, or clients are rejected at connect. Install it on dedicated servers the same way; world and raid settings are admin-only and sync from the server.

Settlements only generate in new terrain. Installing on an existing save will not add villages to areas you have already explored — start a new world, sail somewhere new, or use vs_spawn (requires devcommands).

New player guide

Building Your First Settlement — step by step from finding your first village to defending your own.

Features

• Three settlement location types spawned by world generation (new worlds, or unexplored areas of existing worlds).
• Named settler NPCs that stay in their village, chat with visiting players, and fight off raiding monsters.
• A village trader with a small store.
• Build your own settlement: craft the Settlement Banner (hammer → Misc, needs a workbench) to found a settlement. Name it (Shift+E on the banner), and manage it from one screen: E opens a panel listing every settler — name, rank, job, hunger — with job reassignment buttons.
• Recruit settlers: press E on a settler in a wild settlement to recruit them for coins. They follow you; bring them home and press E near your banner to assign them.
• A war party you can lose: up to 4 recruited villagers fight at your side as a persistent party. Command them with hotkeys — G toggles follow/hold, H orders a protected fall-back — or E on a member to post them somewhere. They ride boats and take portals with you (stowed safely into your character save) and survive logout. You can never hurt your own people, and no fall, fire or forgotten corner of the map can kill them: a party member can only die to a monster in a fight you are standing in, after loud low-health warnings and an auto-retreat you can override. When one falls, they are gone.
• Ten jobs: press E on an assigned settler to cycle — Villager, Lumberjack, Farmer, Builder, Blacksmith, Guard, Cook, Miner, Hunter, Brewer. Producers fill your settlement's chests, cooks and brewers refine what they find in them, builders repair damage, guards keep watch. The jobs chain: hunters bring raw meat, cooks turn it into the food that keeps the whole settlement fed. Shift+E unassigns/dismisses.
• Talk to your settlers: press T while looking at any settler for a panel with their health, hunger and next mealtime, plus a live checklist of everything their job still needs — the workstation, the ingredients, the chest space — so an idle settler is never a mystery.
• Builder projects: order construction through a builder's talk menu — stand where the building should go, talk to a builder, pick a blueprint (cabin, watchtower or longhouse — the same wooden buildings wild meadows villages are made of). Builders raise it from materials in the new Builders' Supply Chest; you get warned when supplies run dry, and your lumberjacks and miners automatically redirect their haul to the supply chest while a project needs it.
• Housing: press T on any door inside your settlement to choose who lives there. Settlers with a home work at full speed; homeless settlers work at half speed and say so when you talk to them.
• Food & growth: settlers eat from your chests (cheapest food first) about once per game day; a hungry settler stops working. A well-fed settlement below its cap, with a spare bed, attracts newcomers on its own.
• Veterancy: settlers earn XP from days of service and battles survived, rising to Veteran and Elite star levels with vanilla stat scaling — your longest-serving villagers become your best defenders.
• Village standing: wild villages remember how you treat them. Defend and donate to recruit at a discount; rob and murder and they refuse to deal with you.
• Workstations matter: blacksmiths need a forge in the settlement, builders a workbench, and honey production a beehive.
• Raids: your settlement counts as a base for Valheim's native random event system — a new "The clanless are raiding!" event sends bandits against it. Rival clans may also assault your settlement at night, with war parties that scale with your population and the bosses you've killed.
• Clanless camps: the raiders have homes — bandit camps in world gen. Destroy a camp's war totem to permanently weaken rival raids; break ten and the native raid event goes silent.
• Console command vs_find [village|outpost|steading|camp] marks the nearest one on your map (no cheats needed); vs_spawn (requires devcommands) places one in already-explored terrain.
• Configurable: settlement counts per world, recruit cost, settlement size, work speed, raid chance — server-synced where it matters.

Configuration

Edit BepInEx/config/com.abjumb.vikingsettlements.cfg (created on first run):

Changelog

The full version history lives in the Changelog tab above (CHANGELOG.md in the package), or on GitHub.

Links & source

• Source code, issues and guides: https://github.com/abjumb/VikingSettlements
• New player guide: Building Your First Settlement
• Recruiting guide: standing, prices and follower care
• Console reference: commands and testing recipes