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

Changelog

1.13.0

• Village bounty boards: wild meadows villages now post work on a board by the plaza - either goods the village needs delivered, or a call to break the war totem of the nearest clanless camp. Completing a bounty pays coins on the spot and raises the village's standing (the same standing that discounts recruits), one posting per day. Camp bounties name the clan and give the distance.
• The Settlement Saga: your banner now chronicles the settlement's story - raids weathered (and by whom), warlords slain, weddings, abductions, rescues, losses and promotions. Open it with the new Saga button on the management panel. And settlers who stand through three raids earn a permanent saga epithet: Astrid the Unbroken, Leif Shieldheart - shown wherever their name appears.
• Rally Standard: a cheap plantable banner (hammer -> Misc, 6 wood + 2 leather scraps). Press E and your war party walks to the standard and holds there, alert and fighting - an aggressive hold point you can place ahead of a fight. Shift+E (or the stance key) releases them back to your side.
• Party focus-fire: a new hotkey (default Y) orders the whole party onto the enemy under your crosshair. Members falling back stay out of it - the rescue command outranks the kill order. New config: Party/FocusFireHotkey.

1.12.0

• Mead Hall + Innkeeper job: a new Village-tier blueprint (120 wood, 20 stone) raises a common hall with extra seating, a fermenter and the hall banners the new Innkeeper job (the fourteenth) gates on. Once per day the innkeeper pours a round from the brewer's stock - one mead or barley wine from your chests lifts every present settler's morale, and players in the settlement get their Rested buff refreshed on the spot.
• Fisher job + Fishing Dock: the fifteenth job needs open water at the settlement's edge and brings in 1-2 raw fish per tick. The Fishing Dock blueprint (40 wood, any tier) runs a torch-lit pier out over the water with a chest at its foot.
• Families: two housed, happy settlers can marry (rolled nightly). Couples gain morale while together, settlements with couples grow 50% faster, and sometimes the newcomer is a child of the settlement come of age. A partner's confirmed death - in battle, or lost to an abduction deadline - leaves real grief: a heavy morale blow and a mourning message. Absence never triggers grief, so travel and caravans can't fake a widowing. Talk to a settler to see who they married. Config: Economy/FamiliesEnabled.
• Seer ward-keeping: an assigned seer now tends the settlement - each work tick they close wounds on every hurt settler in the radius, and they see raids coming: with a seer present, a rival raid is foretold one night ahead ("they strike tomorrow night!") instead of landing unannounced.

1.11.0

• Named rival clans: every clanless camp now belongs to one of eight named clans (the Ashwolves, the Blood Ravens, the Rime Serpents...). Your settlement is raided by the clan of its nearest camp - raid messages name them, and each camp's war totem shows whose 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, on top of the existing temporary peace.
• Abductions & rescues: a rival raid can carry one assigned settler off to the clan's camp (20% of raids by default, one captive at a time). The banner shows who was taken and how many days remain - destroy that camp's war totem before the deadline (7 days by default) and they walk home with their name, stars and gear intact. Fail, and they are lost forever and the settlement mourns. Party members are never abducted - their fate stays under the party's permadeath contract.
• Defense works: two new Village-tier builder blueprints. The Palisade Ring (80 wood) raises a 10 m ring of sharp stakes with a gate and torches around wherever you stand; the Ballista Tower (60 wood, 20 stone) is the watchtower crowned with a Settlement Ballista - a turret that targets only enemies and can never hit players, tamed animals or your people (bolts from any ballista, including vanilla ones you built, no longer damage recruited settlers).
• Engineer job (the thirteenth): needs a workbench. Each work tick the engineer keeps the settlement's ballista towers loaded from bolts in your chests (topping up the emptiest first, never mixing ammo types), and fletches 4 wood turret bolts from 2 wood when everything is loaded - up to a stockpile of 40.
• New config: Raids/AbductionChance and Raids/AbductionDeadlineDays.

1.10.0

• Settler morale: assigned settlers track a mood (shown in the talk panel) adjusted daily by housing, food and company, and knocked down when their settlement is raided. Cheerful settlers produce an extra item per tick, miserable ones skip half their work ticks, and a settler left at rock bottom for days packs up and leaves the settlement - becoming a wild villager again, levels and all.
• Courier job + caravans: with a second settlement within range (default 300 m), a Courier loads up to 8 surplus goods (whatever the settlement has more than 10 of) and physically walks them to the partner settlement's chests, then walks home. On the open road they can draw a clanless ambush - and a courier that dies drops everything they carried. Journeys progress while the area is loaded.
• Herder job + Livestock Pen: a new Village-tier blueprint raises a fenced pen with two tame boars (VS_PenBoar spawns tamed). Herders keep feed on the ground for the animals (carrots/turnips from your chests, so vanilla breeding runs), cull the herd above four head for the larder, and carry loose drops in the settlement to storage.
• Twelve jobs total. New config: Economy/MoraleEnabled, and a Trade section with CourierRange and CourierAmbushChance.

1.9.0

• Settler equipment: open a recruited settler's talk panel and press Equipment to hand over a weapon, shield, helmet, chest or leg armor from your inventory (take-back buttons included). Gear persists in the save, survives party travel, changes their combat strength - weapons are used by their AI, armor reduces damage they take - and drops at their corpse if they die. A geared war party is a real investment, and losing one hurts accordingly.
• Settlement tiers: settlements now grow Hamlet -> Village -> Town. Population plus a workbench earns Village; a real population plus a forge earns Town. Each tier raises the settler cap (Hamlet 60%, Village 100%, Town 150% of the configured max) and unlocks builder blueprints: the longhouse needs a Village, and Towns unlock the new Stone Great-Hall. The tier shows on the banner and in the panel.
• The clanless warlord: once three or more camps are cleared, rival raids can bring a warlord - a mini-boss whose health and stars scale with boss progression, with a heavy coin purse. Fell him and the settlement he marched on gets 10 days (configurable) with no rival raids. Camp-clearing now has a climax instead of a quiet fade-out.
• New config section Progression: TiersEnabled, WarlordEnabled, WarlordChance, WarlordPeaceDays.

1.8.2

• New look, from the mod's design system: the package icon is now the hand-made VS shield, the settlement management panel was redesigned (population bar, level badges, rank stars, job stepper wells and a working/hungry status column), and the panels share one consistent palette. The README gained the pixel-art banner and a ten-jobs reference graphic.

1.8.1

• Fixed settlement terrain spawning terraced, with buildings buried in mounds or hovering over pits: each settlement now levels its ground with a single terrain op sized to the whole footprint (village 18 m, steading 17 m, outpost 11 m, camp 10 m). The previous overlapping ops re-sloped each other's leveled ground. Applies to newly generated or vs_spawn-ed settlements; already-spawned terrain is not reshaped.
• Fixed the settler talk panel rendering its text half outside the panel, and two lines being cut off. The "who lives here?" door panel had the same alignment bug.

1.8.0

• War party: up to 4 recruited villagers travel and fight at your side. G toggles follow/hold for the party, H orders a fall-back (members stop fighting, run to you and take 75% reduced damage); E on a member posts them in place or brings them along, and near a banner E still settles them in. vs_party lists the roster, vs_party recall retrieves separated members (host/singleplayer).
• Party members survive every traversal system: boats and portals stow them into your character save and they step out with you at the other end; logging out pockets them the same way, and members who fall behind teleport to you instead of being lost to zone unloading.
• The permadeath contract: players can no longer damage recruited villagers at all (a stray swing cannot kill or aggro your own people), party members take no environmental damage (falls, drowning, smoke, fire), and they are untouchable while you are dead or away. The only way to lose one is a monster killing them in a fight you are standing in — telegraphed by wounded/gravely-wounded warnings and an automatic retreat below 25% health that you can override. Death is permanent.
• Members recover health out of combat, so losses are a stake inside the fight rather than an attrition tax between fights. Settler names now persist in the save (previously they were derived from the network id).
• Fixed villages spawning half-collapsed: settlement buildings are now built from hardened piece variants (VS_loc_*) with structural-integrity and rain wear disabled, so the support calculation racing the terrain flatten at spawn can no longer tear down towers, roofs and walls. Existing already-collapsed villages are not retroactively rebuilt; newly generated (or vs_spawn-ed) ones spawn intact. Raids can still damage the buildings and builders still repair them.
• Talk to settlers: a new hotkey (T, configurable) opens a talk panel for the settler you are looking at - health, hunger and next mealtime, and a live checklist of everything their job still needs (workstation, ingredients, chest space) evaluated with the same checks the work loop uses. Recruiting now also hints that followers must be settled at your banner before they take a job.
• Builder projects: order construction through a builder's talk menu. Stand where the building should go, pick a blueprint (cabin 40 wood, watchtower 30 wood, longhouse 100 wood + 10 stone - the wild meadows buildings), and a construction site is marked out. Builders carry materials into it from the new buildable Builders' Supply Chest on their work ticks and raise the finished building on the spot. A recurring warning fires while a project's materials have run dry, and lumberjacks and miners automatically deposit their haul into the supply chest while a project still needs it. Shift+E cancels a site.
• Housing: press the talk key on a door inside your settlement to choose which settler lives there (one per door; blueprint cabins and longhouses come with doors and beds). With HomesMatter enabled, settlers without a home work at half speed and say so in their talk panel.

1.7.0

• Wild-village reputation: each village tracks a shared standing (-100..100) toward players, anchored in an invisible Village Heart at its center. Defending villagers while monsters attack (+1) and donating coins via Shift+E (+5 per 10 coins) raise it; hitting villagers (-5), killing them (-25) and recruiting (-2) lower it. Standing tiers scale recruit costs from 50% (Honored) to 150% (Distrusted); Hated villages refuse recruits. Villages generated before 1.7 behave neutrally (spawn VS_VillageHeart to retrofit one).

1.6.0

• Settlement naming: Shift+E on the banner (or the panel's Rename button) opens the sign-style text dialog. The name shows on the banner's hover, in the panel header, and syncs to all players.
• Management panel: E on the banner opens a woodpanel UI listing every assigned settler with name, rank, job and hunger status, plus prev/next buttons to reassign any settler's job without hunting them down. Closes on Escape or when you walk away.

1.5.0

• Settler veterancy: settlers earn 1 XP per in-game day of assigned service and 2 XP per battle survived. At 20 XP they become a 1-star Veteran, at 60 XP a 2-star Elite, with vanilla star stat scaling. Rank shows in hover text; levels and XP persist in the world save. Wild villagers also harden from combat, so old villages grow tougher over time.

1.4.0

• Four new jobs: Cook (cooks raw meat/fish from settlement chests, needs a cooking station), Miner (stone plus the occasional copper/tin ore), Hunter (raw meat, deer hide, feathers), and Brewer (2 honey → minor healing mead, 2 barley → barley wine, needs a fermenter).
• Hunters and cooks form a food chain with the settlement's meal upkeep.

1.3.0

• Clanless camps in world generation: bandit camps with shelters, loot and a destructible war totem. Each cleared totem permanently reduces the rival raid chance by 5%; clearing ten disables the native bandit raid event.
• Raid scaling: rival war parties grow with the target settlement's population (3–8 raiders) and gain star levels after The Elder and Bonemass.
• New vs_find [village|outpost|steading|camp] command marks the nearest settlement on your map with distance and direction — no cheats required.
• vs_spawn gained a camp variant.

1.2.0

• Settlement economy: settlers now eat one food item from settlement chests roughly once per in-game day (cheapest first); hungry settlers stop working until their next meal. Hover a settler or the banner to see hunger.
• Population growth: a settlement below its cap, with a spare unclaimed bed and enough food, can attract a newcomer each night — rarely a seer.
• Workstation-gated jobs: blacksmiths need a forge inside the settlement, builders a workbench, and farmers a beehive to produce honey.
• All of it is configurable (new Economy config section) and can be disabled to restore 1.1 behavior.

1.1.0

• Build your own settlement with the new Settlement Banner piece.
• Recruit settlers from wild settlements with coins; they follow you and can be assigned to your settlement.
• Jobs for assigned settlers: Lumberjack, Farmer, Builder, Blacksmith, Guard.
• Bandit raid event registered with Valheim's native random event system; rival clans can raid your settlement at night.

1.0.0

• Initial release: meadows villages, black forest outposts, plains steadings, named settlers, village trader, vs_spawn command, configuration.