ArcaneDecor WaterGardens

ArcaneDecor:WaterGardens 1.4.0

Build a quiet corner of Valheim with flowering water lilies, flowing ponds, glowing lanterns, fountains, and fireflies.

WaterGardens adds 56 placeable garden pieces to the hammer's Water Garden category. Combine ponds into a larger garden, decorate their banks, and give each space its own atmosphere with adjustable lighting and sound.

Arcane lilies

Three additional pieces duplicate the white lily's bud, bloom, and full bloom. The original lilies remain available. Look at an Arcane Lily and press E to open its own opaque menu:

• Lily size: 25-200%, independent of the pond-wide flower slider. At the same setting, buds stay smaller than blooms, and full blooms are largest.
• RGB / hex color: choose the petals' color and matching light color.
• Petal glow: 0-8; zero removes emission.
• Light brightness: 0-3; zero turns off the nearby light.
• Light distance: 1-6 metres.

Changes preview immediately. Save lily saves this piece; Cancel or Escape restores its saved appearance. Each costs 2 Wood and 1 Dandelion. They retain floating, wind movement, and walk-through plant motion.

Menus exist only while open. Lily meshes and materials are shared; each lily uses at most one shadow-free point light, disabled beyond 40 metres. Many nearby enabled lights still add rendering work; lower brightness to zero when only glowing petals are wanted.

Shoreline update in 1.3.4

Pond edges now rise gently from the water into a low bank, then blend into the surrounding terrain. This replaces the broad flat shelf. Pond depth, water color, local reflections, waterfalls and saved settings retain their previous behavior. Existing ponds receive the new terrain overlay when loaded; removal still allows the underlying terrain to return.

A garden that moves with the world

• Four pond shapes: Round, Oval, Kidney, and Wild. Adjust width from 4 to 24 metres and depth from 0.4 to 3 metres.
• Connected water: Overlapping ponds join together. Elevated overlaps can form downward-flowing waterfalls with their own positional sound.
• Floating lilies: Four leafy lily-pad variations and six blue or white flowering varieties, from small buds to open flowers. Pads follow the water, with stems below the surface, and brush aside when you walk or swim through them.
• Living greenery: Ferns, a red fern, reeds, cattails, grasses, non-berry bushes, ivy, flowers, and glowing mushrooms. Plants use Valheim's wind shading for movement.
• Yggdrasil garden trees: Three decorative varieties, each with its own size menu.
• Stone and light: Garden rocks, stepping stones, a lantern, three fountains, and a dragon statue. Lantern lighting and luminous orbs have adjustable settings.
• Evening ambience: Seven selectable recordings, bright yellow fireflies, and controls for volume, playback speed, distance, and nighttime activity.

Each piece has a matching hammer-menu icon. All configuration menus share the same opaque panel styling.

Golden ivy

Two new pieces use Chazman's ivy model: Golden Ivy - Clinging for walls and trunks, and Golden Ivy - Hanging for branches, arches, and other overhangs. Aim at the attachment surface with the Hammer. The ivy extends downward from its top attachment.

Look at a placed ivy piece and press E for its own opaque menu:

• Ivy size: the existing 25-200% slider (approximately 0.5-4 metres tall). The top attachment stays fixed.
• Red, Green, Blue / Hex color: choose any RGB color for the bulbs, including an exact six-digit hex value such as #66CCFF.
• Glow: adjust the bulbs' emissive brightness separately from their color.
• Next bulb group: choose one of three interleaved groups, each containing five bulbs.
• Bulb size: enlarge the selected group from 100% to 300%. Each group remembers its own size; leaves and vines remain unchanged.
• Save ivy stores all settings for that piece. Cancel or Escape restores its saved settings.

Hanging ivy can attach to the solid surfaces of all three WaterGardens Yggdrasil garden trees, as well as ceilings and overhangs. Aim at a solid trunk or branch within normal hammer reach; foliage alone is not an attachment surface. To extend it, select Golden Ivy - Hanging in the hammer and aim anywhere across the bottom half of an existing hanging ivy. The preview automatically overlaps the vines, matches the existing piece's size and orientation, and hides the new piece's top loop. Click to place it. You can repeat this on each extension. Press E on an individual piece to adjust its ivy size, light color, glow, and bulb groups. Each placed piece remains independent: resizing an upper piece later does not automatically reposition pieces already hanging below it.

Existing ivy placements and their saved overall sizes carry forward from 1.3.0. The water retains its established colors and reflections.

Optional fish add-on

ArcaneDecor:WaterGardens:KoiFish adds decorative koi, fish controls and feeding to these ponds. WaterGardens works independently; install KoiFish only if you want fish.

Installation

With a mod manager

Install ArcaneDecor: WaterGardens through a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager and allow it to install the listed dependencies. Launch Valheim using the modded profile.

Manual installation

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim and Jotunn.
2. Copy the package's entire plugins/ArcaneDecorWaterGardens/ folder into BepInEx/plugins/ inside your Valheim installation.
3. Keep the included Translations folder beside ArcaneDecorWaterGardens.dll.
4. Start the game through BepInEx.

Models, icons, and audio are embedded in the DLL; no separate audio folder is needed. Configuration Manager is not required.

For multiplayer, install the same WaterGardens version and its dependencies on the server and every participating client.