Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim

I have a long, complicated, and mixed relationship with mods for games.

On the whole I like the idea of mods and how they can expand on and improve a game.  But I had all the usual problems with incompatible mods, mods where the author walks away and the next big game update breaks the mod forever, to having them simply mess up games and corrupting saves so badly that you simply have to wipe everything and reinstall from scratch.

Getting older and more conservative about games… this month will be a wild exception to my usual patter of the last seventeen years here were I mostly play the same damn games I was playing when I started the blog… has made me even more leery about mods.

If you read any of the Minecraft posts back in the day, you will recall that I pretty much did all of that mod-free.

That said, when it felt like we were going to go back to Valheim I was thinking of mods as a possible way to change things up, to keep things from being the same basic progression as last time around.  And then Potshot suggested mods as a possibility and a couple people in Discord messaged me about mods and then there was a comment about mods here on the blog… so we’re going to do some mods.

But which mods?

After some reading and some picking and choosing we ended up, currently, with the following mods:

• BepInExPack_Valheim v5.4.2202 by denikson
• TargetPortal v1.1.16 by Smoothbrain
• EquipmentAndQuickSlots v2.1.13 by RandyKnapp
• Azumatt-AzuCraftyBoxes-1.2.7
• OdinShip v0.4.1 by Marlthon

I ended up using Thunderstore for mods as they also have a mod manager and that is another aspect of this whole thing.  They have a manager that works in the Overwolf framework, which I already use for WoW addons because they absorbed Curse Forge from Amazon, and a standalone manager if you’re not into that.

Their manager handles the client side of things.  As long as you remember to press the right button, everything is fine.

Press the Modded button

If you have setup a profile correctly… easy enough to do, though the UI feedback is minimal… you should see that your mods have loaded on the opening screen.

Mods have launched

If you are playing solo at home, you’re done.  All your mods are fine.  This setup is all you need,, so long as you press the right button.

In the mod manager, default profile, just press the button

If you’re playing on a hosted server though, that also needs to have the mods installed.

Fortunately, G-Portal (and some other hosts) have some key mods available for automatic install.  So I was able to go to the admin panel for our server and turn on BepInEx.

G-Portal mod choices

BepInEx is a framework that other mods use and which allows for easy mod management once it is installed and you’re restarted your server.  It creates its own directory set which includes a plugins folder where you drop the .dll files for your mods and a config folder where their configuration files get generated.

I use WinSCP for FTP and like file transfer tasks, basically out of habit because it reminds me of an old Mac FTP client I used to use and because you can configure it to correctly set files when you’re moving between Windows and Linux a lot, something I was doing daily at my last job.  Also it has a free version and has a bunch of other little features I use.

WinSCP and the plugins directory

Basically, it took about 90 minutes from me deciding I was going to add a few mods to having them actually working, much of which was simply trying to figure out what a particular instruction meant because it was ambiguous (always a problem in technical documentation where the writer often has a lot of context in their head that you do not) or because it was left completely unsaid… like “click the modded button” to launch with mods.

Then I took what I had learned and pasted some instructions into our Discord at 23:30 and went to bed… because you should always start trying to figure out technical things right when you want to go to bed.  Sleepiness compels me to do things like update my motherboard bios.

Of course, I missed a couple of gotchas and both Potshot and Bung had to go on their own voyage of discovery to get the mods running, but eventually all three of us were good.

So what did we get with these first mods?

Equipment And Quick Slots was an easy one to choose as it frees up some inventory space by giving your equipment its own slots to live in, getting them out of your bag.  It also gives you three additional quick slots mapped to Z, V, and B.

The additional slots

That is eight things out of my bag, which is eight more stacks of things I can hold.  The only catch is that V is mapped by default to auto-pickup items, something I rarely use so I remapped that to another key.

Azu Crafty Boxes is one that allows you to build/craft by pulling from storage box inventory if it is within a set range.  Since our storage room backs up to our forge and workbench and such, there is no need to go rooting through boxes to find the items you need.  And you can feed the kiln and the furnace in bulk.

Crafty containers in action

That is very handy, though you have to be careful about what it is pulling, and sometimes it is finicky about what it will pull, and when you have items in your inventory it will pull those first… mostly.  Mistakes have been made with this.  Minor ones.  And I am waiting for the day when somebody realizes they fed all of our fine wood into the kiln, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. (I built some piles of fine wood because it won’t deconstruct those.)

Target Portal we are just getting to the point of using, but what it does is break the whole “paired portal” paradigm of the game.  Instead, when you use a portal it puts up a map and you pick which portal you want to jump to.  Like the US airline industry, we have gone from a hub-and-spoke layout that requires multiple jumps to direct flights.  This will make things like using portals when scouting much easier.

Finally there is Odin Ship, which was one of the first ones we wanted to get.  It was also the most problematic for me.  First of all, there are TWO versions of it, Odin Ship and Odin Ship+, the latter which requires you to pay in order to use it on a hosted server.  The former also requires payment in order to use all the ships, but some ships are available for free.  I wasn’t going to pay for anything up front before I knew it worked and I had grabbed Odin Ship+ on my first pass before I got deep into the change log and found it was pay to play.

Odin Ship was also the one mod we had picked that, if you didn’t launch your client with it, you couldn’t log into the server.  The other ones you could stumble in with no mods and still play.  If you didn’t have Odin Ship you got the incompatible version error.

Boats or go home!

That and the fact that you seem to need to launch with that mod a couple of times before it picks up and works caused a bit of heartburn.  Each of us had to fiddle with things before it would let us in.

But this was also the mod with the biggest immediate benefit.  Odin Ship adds additional boats to your build options, including a very nice and inexpensive small boat with four cargo slots and a sail that scratches the itch that the Karve, the best default exploration boat in the game, generally takes care of.

The small boat coming back to dock

Having that available instead of the raft as a quick, low resource boat is a game changer.  There are other boats available as well, including a pair of rowboats that also include some storage, but I am at a loss as to why you would use either when this boat is available.  The small boat is as fast against the wind… and every trip is against the wind and least some of the time… and so much faster when you do get some wind.

There are also some cosmetic items available with Odin Ship, including this marlin I put at the end of our dock.

I’ll pretend I caught it

So that is our mod journey so far on our third run at Valheim.  It is successful so far.  We’re still looking into other mods, but these are the ones that seemed best to start.