OttoLens

For Valheim 1.0.7

Look at a chest and see what is in it. Look at a smelter and see how much ore is queued, how much fuel is left, and how long until the next bar drops. Look at a plant and see when it is ready. OttoLens puts a small ledger next to the vanilla hover text with the numbers the game already has but does not show you.

Maintainer: Paul Otto

What it shows

Every target gets the same panel: a title, one main meter, up to two smaller meters, and then item rows with the icon, the name and the count.

• Chests, carts and ship holds. Every item stack inside, sorted by count, with a slot meter and a Free N footer. Rows past the cap collapse to and N more.
• Fires, torches, braziers and hearths. Fuel left and how long it burns, in game days when it runs long.
• Smelters, kilns and blast furnaces. Fuel, the ore queue, time to the next bar, time to the last one, and finished bars waiting to be picked up. A windmill smelter with no wind says so instead of showing a countdown that would never move.
• Cooking stations and ovens. What is cooking, what is done, time until the next piece is done, and time until the first one burns.
• Fermenters, beehives and sap collectors. What is brewing and the time to ready, or the honey or sap level and the time to the next unit.
• Plants and pickables. Grow progress on a crop, or the reason it stopped growing, and the item and yield on a live bush. Respawn timers on picked bushes are opt in (ShowRespawn).
• Build pieces. Health and support, with the hammer out by default so the panel stays out of the way during normal play.
• Mineable rocks, trees, stumps and logs. Health as a percent, and the tool tier you need when yours is too low. Trees, stumps, logs and small rocks are off by default because a plain tree is a hover target and the panel would follow you through every forest.
• Item stands, armor stands, tombstones, tamed creatures, wisp spawners, shield generators, feasts, ground items and crafting stations.

What it does not do

OttoLens only reads. It never writes to the world, so burn rates, cook times, fuel limits and everything else about how the game plays are exactly what the game set. It does not patch the hover text itself, so it sits alongside other hover mods instead of fighting them. It is client only and needs nothing on the server.

If a reader throws on some modded object, the panel hides for that target and the error is logged once. The HUD keeps running.

A world-placed chest you have not opened yet shows its title and Contents unknown. Open it once and the panel fills in. That is on by default because the surprise is part of the game.

Lens dirt is off by default, because the Eye of Odin makes all things clear. Bloom still glows. Only the smudges on the camera lens are gone. Set RemoveLensDirt to false to bring them back.

The game writes BepInEx/config/potto007.OttoLens.cfg the first time it runs with the mod loaded.

Change it in a text editor or in game with Configuration Manager. Layout knobs apply the next time the panel builds for a new target. MaxRows, ShowNames and SortRows rebuild the panel at once, and any change under Targets takes effect on the target you are already looking at.

Installation (manual)

Extract the DLL from the zip into <GameDirectory>\BepInEx\plugins, then start the game.

Installation (automatic)

Use Gale, r2modman, or the Thunderstore Mod Manager. Search for OttoLens and install.

Servers

Client only. Nothing to install on the server, and players without it see the game exactly as before.

Version information

The release history lives in CHANGELOG.md, and it renders on the Changelog tab of the Thunderstore package page.

Credits

OttoLens is written and maintained by Paul Otto. I wrote every reader from scratch against the game's own behaviour in 1.0.7, and no code in it is taken from any other mod. The only dependency is the BepInEx pack, which brings Harmony with it. MIT licence.