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, Y focus-fires the enemy under your crosshair — or E on a member to post them somewhere. Plant the cheap Rally Standard ahead of a fight and the party holds there instead of at your heels. 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.
• Fifteen jobs: press E on an assigned settler to cycle — Villager, Lumberjack, Farmer, Builder, Blacksmith, Guard, Cook, Miner, Hunter, Brewer, Courier, Herder, Engineer, Innkeeper, Fisher. 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: cabins, watchtowers, fishing docks and longhouses up to livestock pens, palisade rings, ballista towers, the mead hall and the Town-only stone great-hall. 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.
• Settler equipment: arm your people. The talk panel's Equipment button hands a settler a weapon, shield or armor from your inventory — their AI fights with the weapon, the armor genuinely reduces damage, and everything they wear drops at their corpse if they fall.
• Settlement tiers: Hamlet → Village → Town. Growing population and workstations promote the settlement, raising the settler cap and unlocking bigger builder blueprints, up to the Town-only Stone Great-Hall.
• The clanless warlord: clear enough camps and the clanless answer — rival raids can bring a scaled mini-boss. Kill him and your settlement earns days of guaranteed peace.
• Morale: settlers have moods — housing, food, company and raids all count. Cheerful settlers work extra, miserable ones drag their feet, and a settler neglected for days walks out on you.
• The mead hall: a Village-tier blueprint with seating, a fermenter and hall banners. An Innkeeper pours a daily round from the brewer's stock — morale for every settler present, and players in the settlement get their Rested buff refreshed.
• Families: two housed, happy settlers can marry. Couples gain morale together, settlements with couples grow faster — sometimes the newcomer is a child of the settlement come of age — and a partner's confirmed death leaves real grief. Absence never fakes a widowing.
• Seer ward-keeping: an assigned seer heals hurt settlers every work tick, and foresees rival raids one night before they land.
• Caravans: give a settler the Courier job and they haul surplus goods to your other settlement on foot — and can be ambushed by the clanless on the way.
• Livestock pens: a builder blueprint with two tame boars; a Herder keeps them fed (vanilla breeding included), culls the herd for meat, and tidies loose drops into chests.
• 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.
• Village bounty boards: wild meadows villages post work by the plaza — deliver goods, or break a named clan's camp. Bounties pay coins and standing, one posting per day.
• The Settlement Saga: your banner chronicles everything — raids and who sent them, warlords slain, weddings, losses, rescues — in a Saga panel. Settlers who stand through three raids earn a permanent epithet: Astrid the Unbroken.
• 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.
• Named rival clans: every bandit camp belongs to one of eight named clans — your settlement is raided by the clan of its nearest camp, raid messages name your enemy, and each war totem shows whose camp it is. A raiding warlord carries his clan's banner: fell him and that clan is broken for good — its raids on your lands end permanently.
• Abductions & rescues: a rival raid can carry one of your settlers off to the clan's camp. The banner shows who was taken and the days remaining — destroy that camp's war totem before the deadline and they walk home with their name, stars and gear intact. Fail, and they are lost forever. Party members are never abducted.
• Defense works: two Village-tier blueprints — the Palisade Ring (a stake ring with a gate, raised around wherever you stand) and the Ballista Tower, crowned with a Settlement Ballista that targets only enemies and can never hit players, tamed animals or your people. The new Engineer job keeps every ballista loaded and fletches turret bolts from wood.
• 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