Sinka

Sinka

Sinka adds snap points to the vanilla pieces that ship without any, mainly chests, fences and stake walls. Place one and the next snaps flush beside it or squarely on top, the same way walls and floors already do.

Named for the dovetail joint. It started as a chest mod and now covers fences too; the name stayed so existing config files keep working.

Features

• Eight snap points, one on each corner of a piece's own measured footprint.
• Fences and stake walls get a ladder of points up each end instead, so a fence line can

follow sloping ground.

• A standing torch placed on a pole snaps down into it, centred, with only its head showing

above the top. Which torches and which poles is a config list, and how much of the torch still shows is measured off its own fire when you do not say. While it stands there it also protects the pole from damage (ProtectFrom).

• Gap is per prefab where you want it to be, so chests can sit flush in the same world

where stakes stand a hand apart.

• A chest can be set down on top of another chest, which vanilla refuses outright. Read the

server warning under Stacking chests before using it on a server.

• Containers are matched by component, so modded chests are covered without naming them.
• Fences are matched by a config list you can extend.
• PointOverrides takes exact coordinates for a named prefab when the derived box is wrong.
• Optional: snap every buildable piece the game never gave points to.
• Pieces that already have snap points, vanilla or from another mod, are left alone.
• Nothing is added to prefabs you cannot build, so dungeon loot chests and pots stay

unsnappable.

How the snapping works

A snap point in Valheim is a child transform tagged snappoint, and that is all the game needs. While you hold a placement ghost, FindClosestSnapPoints picks the closest pair of points within 0.5m, one on the ghost and one on a placed piece nearby, then moves the ghost so the two points become the same point.

That rule is why Sinka uses corners and nothing else. A ghost's left corner landing on a placed chest's right corner is flush adjacency, and a bottom corner landing on a top corner is a clean stack. Mixing corners with face centres would let a chest snap half its own width out of line.

Gap pushes the corners outward by half its value, since both pieces contribute half the space between them. Gap = 0.1 leaves 10cm between two chained chests.

Footprints are measured at load from collider data, and only from the geometry that will actually be standing there. A built piece carries its damage states and destruction chunks in the same prefab, and measuring all of them at once inflates the box: wood_fence comes out 2.72 x 2.30 x 0.85 that way against a panel of roughly 2.0 x 1.5, which would leave chained fences standing 0.72m apart.

The fence ladder

Eight corners give a fence two heights to attach at, its base and a full panel up. Neither helps you run a fence up a hill, so a fence gets points up both ends instead, at mid-depth, every FenceLadderStep metres, starting FenceLadderBelow metres under its own base so the next panel can step down as well as up. The rungs run along whichever horizontal axis of the piece is longer.

The ladder is capped at 24 rungs per piece. A tall piece with a small step hits that cap and logs a warning saying where the ladder stopped.

Standing props, centred

Aim a floor brazier at the top of a floor tile and it lands dead centre on the tile. Nothing in vanilla centres these: braziers ship with no snap points, so every one is placed by eye.

Which props centre is CentreProps, and by default it is piece_brazierfloor01 and piece_brazierfloor02. What they centre on is not a list. The crosshair is on a piece, the face it hit points up, so the prop centres on the middle of that piece's measured footprint. A wood floor, a stone floor, a table top, the lid of a chest and a modded floor all work with nothing named. The bonfire and hearth are left out of the default because their prefab names are not confirmed against a running game; add a name to CentreProps and an unmatched one is reported in the log at startup.

It is gated on aim for the same reason the torch socket is. Snapping makes the closest pair of points coincide, so a face centre loose in the general point set would let a chest corner pair with it and land half a piece out of line. So the target's centre does not exist on any prefab: Sinka puts one point on the piece under the crosshair for the length of the placement search and takes it off again, and the prop's own base point is hidden from every list unless the prop is the ghost aimed at a top face. A chest placed near a centred brazier still only meets corners.

The centre is the middle of the target's footprint box. A round or triangular top has a box centre that is not the middle of its face, which is the limit of deriving it from a box. Hold the place-without-snapping key to place a brazier where you aim. Turn the whole thing off with CentreOnSurface = false.

Torches on poles

Aim a standing torch at the top of a pole and it snaps down into the pole, centred on it, with only its head standing above the top. Build the pole first; the torch goes on afterwards.

What pairs with what is the Sockets setting, one entry per line of pieces:

piece, piece : target, target : metres showing ; next entry

Semicolons separate entries, colons separate an entry's three fields, commas separate names within a field. Out of the box that is the four standing torches and the mist demister, into the seven poles that exist and can be built: wood, core wood, darkwood and ashwood. The dvergr pole is a prefab you cannot place, so it is not among them.