NorntasticSkillGrowth

Norntastic Skill Growth

Skyrim-style perk trees for every Valheim skill, four overlapping sector trees, and three experimental skills. Built against Valheim 1.0.12, BepInEx 5.4.2350, Jötunn 2.30.0.

This drop is Stages 0 through 7 — everything but the balance pass.

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What works right now

• Loads against 1.0.12 and logs every registered skill, including ones other mods added
• High-water point tracking with a retroactive grant on first load — an existing

character walks in with every point their levels have already earned

• Perk purchase with level gates, prerequisites and a point budget
• Refunds with downstream cascade, priced in respec points (or free, per config)
• Prestige at level 100
• Auto-generated stub trees for foreign skills
• Persistence in the character's own save, travelling with the .fch across worlds
• All 31 trees, 360 nodes and 715 ranks loaded from an editable perks.json
• Perk effects via one aggregate status effect, with live conditions
• A full-screen perk panel — press P — with the node graph, the skill rail, per-rank

detail, buy/refund and prestige

• Armor, Unarmored and Tavern Brawler registered as real skills, so their trees earn

points like any other

• Armor and Unarmored level from taking hits — Armor off what your gear absorbed,

Unarmored only when every armour slot is empty, on a deliberately front-loaded curve

• An on-hit dispatcher and the first handler family: bleed across Axes and Swords
• Tavern Brawler: swing or throw any inventory item as an improvised weapon, with

damage derived from what the item actually is

Effect coverage — read this before judging the mod

69 of 384 nodes currently do something. 315 are authored but not implemented.

That is not a shortfall against a plan, it is what the trees turned out to be. When every node was mapped against the status-effect API, only the unconditional numeric perks fit — damage percentages, stamina costs, regeneration, armour, carry weight. Everything else is a mechanic: a bleed, a stack counter, an active ability, a yield change, a co-op aura. Each of those needs its own code.

The breakdown of what the 313 are waiting on:

| Needs | Share | |---|---| | Bespoke combat code (bleeds, counters, on-hit, AoE) | ~45% | | Yield / gathering patches (ore, wood, crops, fish) | ~11% | | Active abilities and event triggers | ~11% | | Crafting, building and durability patches | ~5% | | Chance-based procs | ~5% | | Mount patches | ~3% | | Conditions not yet modelled | ~7% | | Co-op auras | ~2% |

So the honest roadmap is not "one more stage". It is a long tail, and the mod is built for that: PerkHandler is a one-perk-at-a-time extension point, registered by node id, and Effects/Handlers/ is where they land. Nothing in Core or Effects changes as perks go live. A perk that is not implemented says so — in the panel, in nsg.tree, and in the message when you buy it. It never silently does nothing.

The Character.Damage dispatcher is the cheapest hook in the whole plan: HitData carries m_skill, so one patch makes every "when you land a hit, do X" perk implementable without another. Eighteen authored perks are that shape. Twelve are done, and Character.IsStaggering() being public means the "against staggered targets" family rides the same hook.

Tavern Brawler

Ready an inventory item with J, swing it with G, throw it with H. Damage comes from the item — weight is the base, anything with its own edge keeps half of it, tool tier stands in for an edge on things that have no damage profile at all. Skill is worth up to +60% by level 100, roughly a weapon skill's worth.

Only items with no durability can break. A tool, a weapon, a piece of armour — anything whose SharedData sets m_useDurability — wears down instead and is never destroyed. The one edge case handled explicitly: Valheim destroys a broken item when m_destroyBroken is set, so those are floored at 1 durability and can reach broken-but-present, never gone.

Materials, food and trophies have no durability to wear, so those are what shatter, one out of the stack at a time. Heavier things survive better and skill reduces the chance further, before Careful Grip touches it. A thrown breakable always leaves your hand; the roll decides whether it is lying where it landed or gone.

Six of its twelve perks are live: Anything Goes, Careful Grip, Bottle Service, Bar Fight, Ore Toss and Closing Time.

What still doesn't work

• No Unwoven Thread item. nsg.rp stands in for it.
• The brawler's readied item is cycled with a key rather than picked in the inventory

screen. Patching InventoryGui for a right-click-to-ready gesture is nicer and a much bigger surface to get wrong.

• Throws are hitscan, not arcing projectiles.
• The panel has no pan or zoom; trees are laid out to fit.
• No custom icons for the three new skills; Jötunn's default is used.

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Building

Full walkthrough, written for r2modman: BUILDING.md.

The short version:

$env:VALHEIM_INSTALL = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Valheim"
$env:BEPINEX_ROOT    = "$env:APPDATA\r2modmanPlus-local\Valheim\profiles\<YourProfile>"
.\pack.ps1

Then r2modman → Settings → Import local mod and pick the zip in dist\.

The two paths are different on purpose: under r2modman, BepInEx and Jötunn live inside the profile, not the game folder, and each mod gets its own Author-ModName directory — Jötunn ends up at plugins\ValheimModding-Jotunn\Jotunn.dll. The build probes that layout and the flat one, and tells you where it looked if both miss.

ServerSync is optional. Without lib/ServerSync.dll the mod builds and runs, it just doesn't push config from the server — fine for a first build and for single player. See BUILDING.md section 6 for adding it.

Tests

./tests/run.sh