Living Factions — a Valheim mod

NPC factions that live their own lives. They found camps, gather wood, stone and food, raise buildings piece by piece, grow from camp to hamlet, village, town and city, send out settlers, trade, feud, go to war, raid and capture each other's settlements — whether or not you are watching. And you can deal with them: earn their trust, trade, bring gifts, declare war, buy peace, swear an alliance.

Built for Valheim 1.0.17 with BepInEx 5 and Jötunn. Status: early, playable in single-player and as host. Dedicated servers and remote clients are not supported yet.

What is in the world

Each starts with one camp. Factions that find no room at first arrive later. Settlements you have visited are pinned on your map.

• Growth. A settlement keeps stores of wood, stone, food, metal and coins. Its people are split between gathering, building and guarding. It builds what it needs: huts and houses when crowded, a storehouse when full, farms and workshops for whatever is short, a watchtower, smithy and market on the way to a town, a palisade and great hall on the way to a city. Only a faction's capital becomes a city; a few settlements become market towns.
• Buildings are real. Everything is made of ordinary build pieces, placed in construction order, so a half-finished house is a floor, some walls and no roof. Away from players the settlement develops in the simulation; when you return, it catches up.
• Politics. Relations drift with shared borders, trade, incidents and common enemies. Wars bring raids that loot, burn buildings and can capture a settlement. If you are standing in a settlement when it is raided, the raiders really arrive.
• You. Each faction keeps a reputation for you. Talk to anyone (E) to see where you stand, what the settlement has and what it lacks.
  • Gifts raise reputation — double for whatever they are short of, with diminishing returns.
  • Trade: buy from their stores, sell them your goods; prices follow scarcity and standing.
  • Killing their people or smashing their buildings costs reputation; enough blood and they declare war on you. Killing monsters near their homes, or raiders attacking them, earns it.
  • War can be declared outright. Peace costs silver. An alliance needs real trust (70+).
  • Factions notice whose side you are on: allies of your enemies cool toward you.

New in 0.3.0

• Roads between neighbouring settlements, laid over dry land, with lamp posts every 30 m.
• Caravans: a trader with two guards leaves or arrives by the road.
• Hired fighters: a friendly settlement hires out two fighters who follow you for 15 minutes.
• Tower guard, villagers running errands between shifts, a paved square in every hamlet and up.
• Chronicle widget tells what the nearest settlement and the other factions are busy with.
• Settings menu: the "LF" tile on the inventory screen (Tab) - features, language, limits.
• Russian and English; the mod follows the game's language.
• Two relic axes (Wolf Fang, Stag's Horn).

Install

With a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager): install the package; BepInEx and Jötunn come with it.

By hand:

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim and Jötunn.
2. Copy LivingFactions.dll into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/LivingFactions/.
3. Start a world. The factions arrive on the first day you play with the mod; an existing world works too. Back up your world first — settlements level terrain and place pieces.

Faction state is saved next to the BepInEx config, in BepInEx/config/LivingFactions/<world>_<uid>.json, whenever the world saves.

Console

Start the game with -console, press F5:

Config

BepInEx/config/alexandr.livingfactions.cfg: simulation pace, race factions on/off, wars on/off, settlement limits, how many inhabitants appear as characters, language (auto, en, ru), on-screen chronicle messages.

Building from source

Requires the .NET SDK and a Valheim install with BepInEx and Jötunn (set VALHEIM_INSTALL if it is not in the default Steam folder).

dotnet build src/LivingFactions -c Release      # builds and copies the plugin into the game
dotnet run --project tools/SimHarness           # runs the simulation headless with 31 checks

src/LivingFactions.Core is the simulation and has no dependency on the game; the harness runs it against a stand-in world and verifies determinism, save/load, invariants across 25 seeds and a diplomacy scenario.

Known limits

• Single-player / host only for now.
• Villagers walk to trees, rock piles, fields and building sites and swing their tools there, and gather at the fire at night; what is produced is still decided by the simulation (their swings do not fell trees).
• Race factions use the same building style as the clans.
• Removing the mod leaves the buildings in the world as ordinary pieces.

Credits

• BepInEx, HarmonyX, Jötunn.
• Built with AI assistance (Claude Code with the universal-modder toolkit). No game files, decompiled code or extracted assets are included; every building is assembled at runtime from the pieces in your own copy of the game.

Changelog

0.6.5 - 2026-10-14

• Seven faction swords. Six are sold by the traders of their faction as relics, the Greydwarf one is taken from the guards of a brood (one guard in four leaves it):
  • Grey Blade (Wolf Clan, +25% damage), standing 50, 480 coins;
  • Antlered Blade (Stag Clan, double durability), standing 30, 300 coins;
  • Black Beak (Raven Clan, half the weight), standing 40, 460 coins;
  • Obsidian Saber (Fuling Horde, +25% damage), standing 20, 380 coins;
  • Rune Sword (Dvergr Hold, +25% damage), standing 40, 520 coins, in place of the iron sword;
  • Root Club (Greydwarf Brood, double durability), a bronze mace in the hand;
  • Rusted Blade (Draugr Court, double durability), standing 10, 450 coins, in place of the iron sword. A trade.cfg written by an older version gets the new offers added at its end; the rest of it is left as the player made it.
• New console command lf rewind. Without a number it lists the days it can go back to; lf rewind <day> takes the factions back to the latest kept copy on or before that day, lf rewind -30 goes thirty days back. The world stays as it is: buildings the factions had not got to by then come down, settlements founded since are cleared away. lf advance keeps a copy before it jumps, so a jump too far is one command to undo (reported by a player who typed lf advance 755 hoping to go to day 755).
• Settlements check themselves once a session: a building the record calls built that has no piece in the world (a world backup restored without the faction state, as before 0.6.1) is put up again; pieces of buildings the record has not got to come down; ground under a building that is more than 0.4 m off level is levelled again, and the pads next to it with it.
• Fixed: a guest on a server with other HUD mods saw no chronicle under the minimap (reported by a player). The panel is now drawn in front of the game's interface, and if the minimap has been moved off where it can hang from, it goes to the top right corner. The log says where it was put.
• Fixed: the mod's own items were named in English in a game in another language until the next start; they are named again once the mod knows its language.
• Fixed: a trader with more than seven offers did not show the last ones (the Stag Clan's sword).
• Fixed: a woodcutter whose tree was cleared away for a building while he was at it threw an error.
• Checked in the game: every relic property in a real fight against a still Draugr (+25% damage, fury below a third of health, 5% of damage healing, mending in the hand, double durability, stamina 5.36 against 6.70 a swing with the Stag's Horn); five swords bought from five traders, the club taken from a Greydwarf guard; a fresh village advanced 30 days and rewound 25: three buildings came down, rewound to before it was founded: 525 objects cleared; an old world backup loaded with a newer faction state: three missing buildings put up again and the ground under them levelled; the chronicle seen by a guest on a dedicated server.
• Not checked: the chronicle with the HUD mods of the player who reported it (EpicMMO, Captain Skill Tree and others); two players in one village at once.

0.6.1 - 2026-10-14

• Fixed: restoring a backup of the world left the factions in the future, with the deaths, days and standing of the later game (reported by a player). The faction state lives beside the world, not in it, so the mod now keeps a dated copy at every save (the last 60) and, when a world loads with its clock behind the state, takes back the latest copy that is not ahead of it. The newer state is kept beside the save as a file of its own, and the player sees a message that the factions went back with the world. Copies are kept from this version on: a backup made before updating cannot be matched.
• Checked in the game: saved the world, kept a copy of it, played on and turned the Raven Clan hostile, put the copy back: the Raven Clan was friendly again and the day went back with it.

0.6.0 - 2026-10-14

• Woodcutters fell real trees. Only trees at least 10 m from every building, falling away from the village, and only by the player who builds the settlement (one felling per tree when playing together). The trunk is carried off and a sapling of the same kind is planted in the stump's place, so the wood round a village turns into a clearing of young trees instead of vanishing. Woodcutters prefer trees that may come down. Switch in the menu, page Villagers.
• Boss hunts. A chief names the next great beast they want dead and the bounty: 150 coins for Eikthyr, more for each one after. Kill it, come back to any chief of that faction, collect. Killing a boss is news everywhere: the clans think better of you (+10), the Dvergr too (+5), and the Greydwarfs, the Draugr and the Fulings take the death of their Elder, Bonemass and Yagluth badly (-25). Those three never put a bounty on their own.
• Fixed: villagers on a visit and guards at the end of a night round kept stepping about on the spot, which read as jerking. They now stand still once they get there. Measured: no jerky movement among 26 inhabitants (was up to 10 in the evening).
• Fixed: a sapling inside a doorway could keep people out of a house; the whole way in is cleared.
• Checked in the game: a tree felled and a sapling planted in 26 s; a hunt taken, Eikthyr killed, the bounty paid; features, life, track, hired fighters, caravan, road, ground across two restarts, names, map, town, smoke, checks, languages all passed.
• Not checked: how long a sapling takes to grow into a tree in a normal game, and the bounty with two players at once.

0.5.0 - 2026-10-14

• Five more relic axes, none of them sold, each come by its own way and given once to a character:
  • Raven's Wing (Raven Clan, +25% damage): strike down two raiders attacking a Raven Clan place and the jarl gives it to you;
  • Blackgnaw (Fuling Horde, +25% damage below a third of your health): taken from a Fuling chieftain;
  • Rune Cleaver (Dvergr Hold, double durability): a thane's gift to an ally at standing 80, asked for in talk;
  • Rootbiter (Greydwarf Brood, mends itself in the hand): carried by a Greydwarf chief;
  • Barrow Moon (Draugr Court, 5% of the damage you deal heals you): carried by a Draugr chief.
• The way to an alliance is shown: the dialog says how far your standing is from the 70 an alliance needs, the button shows it too, and every gift says what it would earn right now.
• Names follow the mod's language in all seven: the Greydwarf places and the Draugr's by-names, which are made of English words, are translated; Norse, Fuling and Dvergr names stay names.
• Checked in the game: each of the five axes comes the way it should (a Fuling and a Greydwarf chief struck down, the thane's gift asked for, two raiders struck down at a Raven Clan city) and sits in the hand (6 to 13 mm from the palm); smoke 15/15, checks 8/8, languages 15/15.
• Not checked in a real fight: the three new properties (fury, thirst, a self-mending blade).

0.4.2 - 2026-10-14

• Faction lands on the map. Every settlement you know of has a circle around it in its faction's colour, wider the bigger the place, and its mark is in that colour too. The large map has a legend of the factions you have met. Far zoomed out the lands stay visible as patches of colour. The small map shows only the marks, so the corner of the screen stays clear.
• Two new switches in the mod menu, page World: faction lands on the map (on), and every settlement on the map from the start (off, so you still find them yourself).
• Checked in the game: the large map close and far, with known settlements and with all of them, and the small map (docs/screenshots/map_zones_0.4.2.jpg).

0.4.1 - 2026-10-14

• Fixed: on a large or full screen the chronicle panel slid behind the minimap. It now hangs from the bottom edge of the minimap, right edges in line, at any screen size. Checked at 1280x720 and 1920x1080.
• New icon and cover picture.

0.4.0 - 2026-10-14

• Playing together. The simulation runs on whoever hosts the world, a player or a dedicated server, and everyone else reads a copy the host sends out. What a guest does (gifts, trade, hiring, kills, war, peace, alliance, theft, finding a settlement) reaches the host and stays. The player nearest a settlement puts it up in the world, levels its ground and brings its people out; a dedicated server builds nothing itself. Roads, lamps and raids have one keeper in each neighbourhood, so nothing is done twice. Everyone on the server needs the mod, the server too.
• Five more languages: Polish, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese, about 290 lines each. The language follows the game by default; the menu now lets you pick any of the seven whatever the game is set to. Names of people and places are translated for Russian only.
• Fixed: a sapling or a tree on a doorstep kept people out of their house. Doorsteps and paths are cleared again every 20 seconds, because growth turns up later than the ground it stands on.
• Checked on a dedicated server with one guest on the same machine: the guest received the state and saw the village with level ground and its people; a purchase by the guest stayed in the settlement's stores after the host's next copy; the guest put up a settlement nobody had visited (623 pieces, twice, the same number both times), the server recorded every building, and after the server was restarted nothing was placed again.
• Not checked: a player hosting from the game with a friend joining, and two players in the same settlement at once. Both need a second Steam account.
• Dev tools: tools/lfmp.sh starts a dedicated server with a copy of the lab world and joins the game to it as a guest; scenarios mp, mp-build, mp-again, langs; commands net, server <cmd>, lang mod <code>; translations live in tools/lang/*.tsv and tools/lang/build.py checks them.

0.3.4 - 2026-10-13

• Paths inside a settlement are kept clear of trees, rocks and bushes. A village that grew in a wood used to keep the whole wood between its houses, so its paths lay under the canopy and could not be seen. Done once a session for each settlement near the player, and again when it builds something new. Worn trails to a tree or a neighbour are left as they are.
• Checked in the game: the village of Fjallfell from above before and after (docs/screenshots/village_paths_0.3.4.jpg), smoke 15/15.

0.3.3 - 2026-10-13

• Fixed: the doorway of the great hall was blocked by a table and a bench, so nobody could walk in. Both tables now stand along the back wall. Halls that are already built are taken down and put up again once, on the next visit.
• Fixed a typo in the Russian description of the Wolf's Fang.
• README says what the two axes really do in the game. The Wolf's Fang card is marked as concept art, its numbers are plans.
• Checked in the game: a settlement grown into a city has its square and paths cobbled, the ground under 29 buildings is level and has no torn edges; the Wolf's Fang deals 1.25 times the damage of the same axe without its mark; checks 8/8; smoke 14/15, the one miss being raiders left in the test world by the scenario before it.
• Dev tools: commands damage and emptybag.

0.3.2 - 2026-10-13

• Discord server for feedback, bug reports and chat: https://discord.gg/qVfAq3fqj6. The link is in the README and in the package description. Nothing changed in the game itself.

0.3.1 - 2026-10-13

• People and settlements read in Russian when the mod speaks Russian: Steinvik is Стейнвик, the chieftain Astrid is «Астрид, вождь». Chronicle, map pins, dialog title and messages follow. Saved names are untouched, so switching back to English restores them.
• Fixed: switching the language in the mod menu left the names over villagers' heads in the old language until the next load; they now change at once.
• Fixed: the shipped DLL no longer carries the path of the folder it was built in.
• Package: new icon, cover picture and a card of the Wolf Fang axe in the README.
• Checked in the game, in Russian: smoke 15/15, names 3/3. Harness: every name the seven cultures can make reads in Russian letters.

0.3.0 - 2026-10-13

• Roads find their way over dry land: the cheapest walk on a 16 m grid of the world's heights, never through water, round steep ground where a gentler way exists, rounded into curves. A neighbour that cannot be reached by land is passed over; a settlement on an island has no road.

• Fixed ground work being lost on the next load. The mod asked for a tile's terrain compiler before the saved one had loaded and so made a second; the game then kept the one with more operations and threw the mod's away, with levelled pads, road paint and mended seams. Checked across two restarts: 0.00 m under all 15 buildings, no duplicates in the log, no torn edges.

• Nobody crowds at work: a yard has two places and a field three, a good step apart; whoever finds them taken fells a tree. The first shift starts at a time of each one's own, carriers spread along the storehouse front. Measured: at most 3 people within 3 m (was 5 and more).

• People talk: 55 new lines in English and Russian - several greetings for each standing, and remarks about what the speaker is doing (felling, quarrying, farming, building, carrying, visiting, on the road, guarding, on the tower, trading, escorting, hired).

• Workers turn to their work over a moment instead of in one frame and stay on their spot between swings. Guards left on the tower deck by an earlier watch climb down. Hired fighters notice trouble 45 m around the player.

• Checked in the game, in Russian: smoke 15/15, checks 6/6 (trading post, stamina, cargo, archer), features 4/4 (menu, hire button, caravan), hired fighters in a fight, a caravan arriving, the road with lamps before and after a restart, both custom axes in the hand.

• Not checked: cobbles of a town (needs a town in the lab world), relic effects in combat, multiplayer. Known: 3 points of the Vindfell - Barkthicket road lie at the water's edge.

• Dev tools: tools/lfsuite.sh runs several scenarios and prints one summary; commands track, crowd, lang, mats, archer, roadtp <s> dry; scenarios life, track, road, hired, caravan-in, town, terrain-persist.

• Chronicle widget tells what is going on: for the nearest known settlement its size, people and guards, what it is busy with, its two worst troubles (hunger, a recent raid, war, no room, no guards, no wood) and what comes next; the other factions take turns below, one every 7 seconds. Wordings change from day to day and place to place (Forecast in the core, checked in the harness).

• Roads: every settlement lays a road to the nearest neighbour it is not at war with (kin first, up to World/RoadReach, 1500 m). Roads sway a little, skirt buildings, are cobbled for the last 40 m into a town, and are painted only around the player as they travel.

• Paved square at the heart of every settlement from hamlet up, wider with each tier.

• Paths are no longer a spoke to every building: places everyone uses and about half of the rest join the square, the others join the nearest older building. Up to five trails per settlement are worn by the people who actually walk them (to a tree, a neighbour, the road).

• Errands (Features/Errands): between shifts villagers call on another building or walk 50-85 m out along the road and back.

• Tower guard (Features/TowerGuards): one guard keeps the deck of the watchtower while another walks the rounds; an archer shoots from it, anyone else climbs down to fight.

• Caravans (Features/Caravans): a trader carrying goods with two caravan guards leaves by the road or arrives by it every few minutes while the player is near.

• Hired fighters (Features/Mercenaries): a friendly settlement hires out two fighters for 120 + 40 per tier coins; they follow the player for 15 minutes and fight whoever is hostile to them.

• In-game checks (dev tools): tools/scenarios/checks.txt confirmed the chest trading post, archers shooting, carried cargo, footpaths and the Stag's Horn stamina saving. New commands stamina, shots, tradechest, chestinfo, watch, roads, caravan, hire; scenario verb until.

• Roads are made, not just painted: wider, their bed evened out, trees, bushes and rocks cleared off them, and a lamp post (a log pole with a torch that never burns out) every 30 m, on alternating sides (Features/RoadLamps).

• Settings menu: an "LF" tile on the inventory screen (TAB) opens the mod's own settings - language, on-screen chronicle, every feature switch, pace - on pages that are easy to extend (ModMenu.BuildPages). The language changes at once.

• The hire button is offered to anyone the settlement will trade with (it used to need friendship and was pushed off the list by the eight-button limit; the dialog now holds nine).

• Fixed torn ground: terrain tiles that disagree along their shared border are found and levelled to the mean on both sides about a minute after ground work ends; road beds no longer smooth across tile borders or inside settlements; all building pads are re-levelled once.

• Dev tools: seams, perf, roadtp, roadview, lampview, inv, modmenu; tools/lfbuild-combined.sh builds master plus the modelling worktree without merging; docs/TESTING.md is the guide for the testing session.

• Wolf's Fang («Клык Волка»): the Wolf Clan's relic axe, a new item built from the lowpoly-kit model (src/LivingFactions/Assets). Clan Wolf sells it at 420 coins from reputation 40 (keen). Checked in the game: sits in the hand (surface 0.015 m from the palm), on the back, bought with the affix. Existing trade.cfg files keep AxeIron until deleted.

• Stag's Horn («Рог Оленя»): the Stag Clan's merchant axe. Sold by the Stag Clan at 1500 coins from reputation 60. While carried, buying from the traders costs 10% less; wielding it costs 20% less stamina. Checked in the game: in the hand and on the back, and the stamina saving (1.60 spent instead of 2.00). The 10% discount is covered by the harness only.

• Equipment camera (dev tools): look <slot> [angle] [elevation] [zoom] frames the item itself and follows the player. Slots: hand (axe, sword, mace, tool), shield, bow, helmet, chest, legs, cape, belt, back (sheathed), full; look auto picks the slot of the last item. Angles are named (side, front, rear, face, top) or a bearing in degrees.

• New commands gear <item>, unequip, sheathe / draw, face lit, gearinfo, hidehud, and the scenario verb gearshots <item>. tools/lfgear.sh [items] runs a whole photo session (about 5 s per item) and puts pictures and contact sheets into docs/gear/.

• The chronicle widget now disappears together with the game's HUD at once, not up to 3 s later.

• Attach points (dev tools): points lists the character's nine equipment joints and skeleton, points <item> measures where an item's model sits relative to the joint it hangs on (box, long axis, distance from the palm to the nearest surface, the cut of the handle at the palm and how far to move the model), points all writes the same for every wearable item in the game, marks on puts coloured balls on the joints. gearshots now fails a hand-held item that is not in the hand.

0.2.2 - 2026-10-13

• Test runner (dev tools): tools/lftest.sh <scenario> launches the game, runs a whole scenario inside it and prints a PASS/FAIL report. Scenario verbs: goto, waitready, wait, shot, expect, reject; new commands speed, equip, count. A full smoke test takes about 80 s.
• While dev tools are on the game does not pause when its window loses focus.

0.2.1 - 2026-10-13

• Fixed buildings hanging over a gap and the ground tearing along zone borders. The game's level and smooth operations are relative to the heightmap as currently built, which is rebuilt a few frames after a change; several operations on one zone in a row stacked on top of each other. Ground work now runs strictly in order, waits for a zone to settle (1.5 s) after each change, and flattens every pad only after all shaping is done. Existing settlements repair themselves on load. lf padcheck <settlement> measures the ground under each building.

0.2.0 - 2026-10-13

• Houses and sheds have 3 m walls: a roof eave hangs 0.65 m below the wall top, which left 1.35 m of headroom at a door in a 2 m wall and stopped the player. lf doorcheck <settlement> sweeps the player's own capsule through every house door.
• Special wares per faction from BepInEx/config/LivingFactions/trade.cfg (assortment, prices, required standing): ordinary goods, relics with one property (keen, stout, light, lasting) and unidentified relics the faction identifies at reputation 30.
• A chest the player builds inside a settlement that trades with them becomes a trading post: the settlement buys useful goods out of it and leaves coins.
• Villagers haul what they gathered to the storehouse with the load on their back.
• One fighter in three is an archer (AI-tuned bow and a knife).
• Footpaths from the central green to every building, paved from town size up.
• Chronicle widget under the minimap: day, wars, the nearest known settlement's project, news.
• Every mechanic has a switch in the config section Features.
• Storehouse chests hold real goods, every home has a chest; theft and gifts through chests.
• Culture building styles: Fuling stake walls, Dvergr dark roofs, Draugr stone, open doorways.
• Night: villagers sleep indoors, guards patrol and may attack strangers (57%).
• Fixed: pickaxe work dug craters; inhabitants duplicated on every load; leftovers of destroyed settlements (now removed through the object database, not physics).

0.1.0 - 2026-10-12

• Simulation core, settlements from vanilla pieces, inhabitants, diplomacy window, raids.