OneHandedEarlyAxe

One-Handed Early Axe

A single axe. Room for a shield.

Turn the Early Axes fighting style into a one-handed option: craft a separate One-handed Early Axe, equip your favourite shield, and use familiar one-handed axe attacks. The original paired Early Axes remain unchanged.

Features

• One native Early Axe model, held in one hand, with shield support.
• Three-hit primary combo and a vertical secondary chop using native one-handed axe animations.
• Configurable attack animation speed: 1.25x by default, adjustable from 1x to 2x.
• Native damage, chopping power, stamina cost fields, durability, tool tier, weight and effects retained. Different timing and combos mean damage per second can differ from the original pair.
• Native crafting recipe, full material costs, ordinary quality upgrades and special upgrader support.
• Works independently of Single Berserkir; no dependency on that mod or Jotunn.

Crafting and upgrades

Find One-handed Early Axe at the normal workbench after discovering the required materials. The recipe follows the game's Early Axes recipe and station requirements; receiving one axe does not halve the cost.

At this release, the initial recipe uses 4 Wood and the two Early Axe heads (AxeHead1 and AxeHead2). Ordinary upgrades use Wood and Leather Scraps: 2 of each for quality 2, 4 of each for quality 3, and 8 of each for quality 4, at the native station levels.

The native special weapon upgrader is supported. Its upgrade resource is not an initial crafting ingredient. The game's success, failure, break and refund rules still apply; this mod does not guarantee a successful special upgrade.

Installation

Requires Valheim with the native Early Axes content and BepInExPack Valheim. Harmony is supplied by BepInEx. No game or framework DLLs are bundled.

With Valheim closed, place OneHandedEarlyAxe.dll in BepInEx/plugins/OneHandedEarlyAxe/, or install through your Thunderstore mod manager. For the Nexus ZIP, extract into your Valheim folder while preserving the BepInEx folder structure.

Launch once to create BepInEx/config/au.tyvalheim.onehandedearlyaxe.cfg. In the Combat section, AttackSpeed defaults to 1.25. Use matching settings across participating peers.

Multiplayer and compatibility

Install the mod on participating clients and on the dedicated server for worlds that must handle this custom item. Keep versions and settings matched.

Modded observers see the Early Axe. An unmodded observer sees a bronze axe in the held/back equipment slot. That fallback covers equipment appearance only: it does not make custom dropped items, pickups, storage, item stands or trading compatible with unmodded clients. Do not pass the custom item to an unmodded player.

Bronze or Iron appearance

Version 0.1.1 adds a matching single-axe inventory icon and a choice of either original Early Axes model.

In BepInEx/config/au.tyvalheim.onehandedearlyaxe.cfg, set:

[Visuals]
AxeModel = Bronze

Use Bronze (the default) or Iron, then restart Valheim. This cosmetic choice applies to all existing and newly crafted single Early Axes and their inventory/crafting icons. No recrafting is needed. Stats, full recipe costs and upgrade behavior stay the same; Iron does not give the vanilla Iron Axe's stats.

Each modded client uses its own appearance setting, so use matching settings to see the same model. Unmodded observers still see the bronze equipment fallback for either choice. Icons are generated at runtime from the selected native mesh and texture atlas; no extracted game assets are shipped.

Icons and gameplay

The icons show the selected native axe. Gameplay screenshots by Gomisan show both appearances in use.

Bronze single-axe inventory icon

Iron single-axe inventory icon

Iron Early Axe with shield - gameplay by Gomisan

Bronze Early Axe close-up - gameplay by Gomisan

Bronze Early Axe in use - gameplay by Gomisan

Removal and support

Back up your character and world before removing a custom-item mod. Remove the custom axes from inventories, chests, stands and the world while the mod is still installed, then close the game and remove its DLL. Simply storing an axe in a chest does not make it safe for an unmodded installation.

For a bug report, include your game/mod versions, other relevant mods, AttackSpeed setting, whether you play locally or on a server, and the relevant BepInEx log excerpt.

Changelog

0.1.1 - Single-axe icons and appearance choice

• Choose Bronze or Iron in the Visuals config section (restart required).
• Inventory/crafting icons now show the selected single axe instead of the original pair.
• Preserves existing items, native stats/costs/upgrades, nested glow and the multiplayer equipment fallback.
• Both appearances and icons gameplay-tested and approved by Gomisan.

0.1.0 - Initial release

Adds the separate one-handed Early Axe, shield support, configurable attack speed, native recipe and upgrade paths, retained native visual effects and equipment appearance fallback. Gameplay tested and approved for publication by Gomisan on 28 October 2026. No DLL changes were made for site packaging.