Modding Valheim

I resisted running mods for Valheim for so long… but I saw some folks talking about building their homes in New World, and I was all thinking “I already have Valheim” and then “but I could make it look better”. Also, I found out how to bring tar pits into biomes we have already explored.

Valheim has been an on-again, off-again game for me, once we killed all the bosses and most of Team Spode drifted away from the game back to other pursuits. But my Twitter feed yesterday exploded with people showing off their home builds in Amazon’s “New World”, and that got me back in the building mood again.

But first, I had some other housekeeping stuff to take care of.

Team Spode maven Calrain had been reading about a way to use a mod to go through biomes that have already been explored, and run the new location placement algorithm on them. Valheim itself only runs this algorithm on unexplored biomes at the time they are explored, so our two plains bases, being fully explored, would be out of luck.

The Upgrade World mod is just what we needed in order to not have to keep starting our game over from scratch every time Iron Gate updates the game. Since we have the world on a server, it can only be done by someone who could back up the game, run the mod locally, and then upload it again. AKA me.

I’d also have to learn how to mod the game — and that’s a door that is hard to close, once opened.

OverWolf’s Thunderstore Mod Manager made the entire process easy. I installed the mod manager, searched for the Upgrade World mod, installed that, stopped the server, downloaded the world backup, ran it locally, ran the upgrade, checked to make sure our plains bases had survived (they had), saved, uploaded the world files, restarted the server, checked on the server to make sure everything was still working (it was), and that was that. World upgraded.

I also downloaded the HD Valheim mod to upgrade a lot of the textures in the game. This is just client side (like the others), so only I get to see the new textures, and it hasn’t yet been updated for the new Hearth & Home textures, so new and old items together can look inconsistent.

Well, now that I could mod, what’s next? First thing: a mod that could hide my helment. That was InvisHelm. The new foods take a lot of veggies, so harvesting is a pain. FarmGrid makes it easy to position crops so that each plant has enough space. I don’t have any harvesting mods yet, but that’s going to happen pretty soon, I think.

I hadn’t yet built anything much with all the tar I’d been harvesting. I had my outpost up in a distant plains, and I’d put a new roof on part of my existing house. So it was building time.

I don’t have any pictures, but while I was building, a troll event started — trolls everywhere. And they were killing my wolves! One troll smashed my previous kennel and I could do nothing — killed the wolf inside it, too.

I ran around, trying to kill trolls before they wiped out all the wolves. The event finally ended; I had just three wolves left, and they were scattered all over the place (likely why any survived — they just weren’t at the epicenter). I dropped a bunch of meat for them, and as I built my new place, they started breeding.

I first built an all new, stronger kennel for one of the wolves with some of the new pieces. I should put another one in there. If deathsquitoes and fulings kill off all the others, I want to keep a breeding pair to rebuild the population, as it wasn’t that easy to lure the original wolves off the mountain and I don’t want to go through that again.

Valheim wolves have no gender; when they are well-fed, two of them will howl together with hearts swirling around them, and then after a couple of minutes, one will squirt out a cub with a disgusting slurp.

After that, it was time to relax in the hot tub back at the main house. A fruitful day. Built a new house, recovered from the troll attack, planted and harvested a nice crop, made some food, and enjoyed a lot of nice wolf jerky and wolf skewers. Well, what else was I supposed to do with a dozen dead wolves?