Altar of the Pack

Altar of the Pack

Build a wolf shrine and offer ingredients to summon a born-tamed wolf cub, with your choice of 0, 1 or 2 stars. Shrine wolves have 3x the health of an ordinary wolf of the same star tier by default, including after growth into adulthood. Damage follows normal star scaling.

Early test release — 0.1.2. Dedicated-server loading and shrine placement/use have been tested by the author. Full multiplayer ritual, adulthood and save/reload coverage is still in progress. Back up your world and characters before using this release.

Installation

Install with Gale, Thunderstore Mod Manager or r2modman. BepInExPack Valheim and Jotunn are required and declared as dependencies.

For manual installation, install those dependencies first, then copy plugins/WolfShrine/WolfShrine.dll into BepInEx/plugins/WolfShrine/.

Multiplayer: install the same version on the dedicated server and every client. Hybrid Chests is not required. Restart the game/server after installation or updating. Avoid leaving a second copy of the DLL in another plugins folder.

Unlock and build

Your character must witness an ordinary wolf finish taming nearby, or successfully pet an existing ordinary tame wolf. Petting an existing tame wolf works on older saves. Shrine-born wolves do not grant this unlock. The unlock is saved per character.

Use the hammer's Crafting menu to build Altar of the Pack for 20 Stone, 5 Silver and 1 Wolf Trophy. No workbench or stonecutter is required. Normal material discovery requirements still apply.

Summon a cub

1. Point at the shrine and use Alternate Use (normally Shift+E; follow the displayed key bindings) to select 0, 1 or 2 stars.
2. Press Use to review the offering. Confirm Yes to pay, or choose No / Escape to cancel.
3. After the default six-second ritual, a tame cub appears on clear, dry ground beside the shrine.

Offerings come from your carried inventory, not nearby chests.

| Cub tier | Default offering | | --- | --- | | 0 stars | 5 Wolf Meat, 2 Wolf Pelts, 5 Bone Fragments | | 1 star | 10 Wolf Meat, 4 Wolf Pelts, 2 Wolf Fangs, 1 Wolf Trophy, 2 Silver | | 2 stars | 20 Wolf Meat, 8 Wolf Pelts, 5 Wolf Fangs, 2 Wolf Trophies, 5 Silver |

Leave room beside the altar. If the exit is blocked, the paid ritual waits and retries without charging again. The default cooldown is 60 seconds after birth. Cubs grow on the normal game timer, keeping their tame status, star tier and stored health bonus. Wild wolves and ordinary bred offspring do not receive the bonus.

Configuration

After first launch, edit BepInEx/config/com.jason.wolfshrine.cfg. Offering recipes, ritual delay, cooldown and health multiplier are synchronized from the server and restricted to administrators in multiplayer. Default health is 3x; the permitted range is 1x to 10x.

The health multiplier is recorded for each new shrine wolf when its offering is paid. Changing the setting affects future offerings. Building costs are fixed in this release.

Updating and removal

Existing altars use the updated model after a matching game/server restart; rebuilding is unnecessary. Keep backups and the matching mod version if removing it: custom shrines require this mod to load correctly.

Known limitations

Paid rituals resume when the shrine is loaded and an owner can process them; they do not simulate continuously in an unloaded area. Active rituals block hammer removal. Destruction attempts to refund ordinary ingredient quantities, without preserving ingredient custom metadata.

Ritual payment and world/character saving are not a single crash-proof transaction. A crash or lost ownership at the wrong moment can require recovery from backups. This early release is intended for cooperative play on trusted servers.

When reporting an issue, include mod/game versions, whether it occurred on a dedicated server, reproduction steps and relevant BepInEx/LogOutput.log lines. Remove personal connection details before sharing logs.

Credits

Created by Jason. Built with BepInEx, Harmony and Jotunn. Shrine visuals reuse assets from the installed game at runtime; no Valheim assets or dependency DLLs are bundled.