Stavebound

Stavebound

Valheim will not let you carry ore or metal through a portal. You sail it home instead, and that sail is meant to be the price of the metal.

Letting every portal carry everything throws that away. Still hauling copper by boat long after the Elder is dead is just tedious. Stavebound sits between the two. Kill a biome's boss and you can build its stave; stand one beside a portal and that portal will carry that biome's ore — and only that biome's.

It also drops the pairing. Normally two portals connect by being given the same name; here you interact with a portal and pick where it leads off the map, from every portal in the world. Where it leads belongs to the portal rather than to you, so everyone who walks in arrives at the same place, until somebody points it somewhere else. Walking in still travels, exactly as it always did.

The staves are the part worth having. Build an Elder's Stave beside a portal and that portal will accept copper, tin and bronze. It will still refuse iron — until you go and build a Bonemass's Stave there too, and it says so in as many words:

> Iron cannot enter "Copper Mine" — no Bonemass's Stave there.

One end of a trip needs the right stave. By default either end counts, so a portal with a Bonemass's Stave beside it both receives iron from anywhere and sends iron anywhere. Only a trip between two portals that both lack one refuses iron. Which end has to have the stave is the setting most worth knowing about; see Which end counts.

A portal tells you before you step through it. Standing next to one, its runes go dark if you are carrying something it will not take. Open your inventory there and the stacks it will not take are marked. Walk in anyway and it tells you which resource stopped you, and which stave would have carried it.

Installing

Built for Valheim 1.0 and needs Jotunn 2.30.0 or newer — earlier Jotunn predates the game's 1.0 release. With a mod manager both it and BepInEx arrive as dependencies and there is nothing else to do; by hand, drop Stavebound.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Install it on the server and in every player's game. The server works out what each portal accepts; each player's game needs it for the map and the check when you travel. The rules come from the server, so no one player can loosen them for themselves.

Removing the mod removes its pieces, so any staves you built will vanish — normal for any mod that adds buildables. The extra data it writes is harmless to an unmodded game.

The staves

Each is built from that biome boss's trophy plus a little of what the biome gives you. Stand one within ten metres of a portal and it starts working on that portal. Nothing to connect or configure.

| Stave | Costs | Lets through | |---|---|---| | Elder's | The Elder trophy · 10 copper · 20 stone | Copper, tin, bronze | | Bonemass's | Bonemass trophy · 10 iron · 20 stone | Iron and scrap iron | | Moder's | Moder trophy · 10 silver · 20 stone | Silver, dragon eggs | | Yagluth's | Yagluth trophy · 10 black metal · 20 stone | Black metal | | Queen's | The Queen trophy · 3 dvergr extractors · 20 stone | Dvergr extractors, mechanical springs | | Ashen | Fader trophy · 10 flametal · 20 stone | Flametal and the Ashlands' spoils |

Each stave works on its own, so a portal with Moder's Stave beside it takes silver while still refusing iron. Nothing makes you build them in order.

While you are holding a stave, a beam shows which portal it would work on, and if none is close enough, a circle shows how far it would reach.

Which end counts

Every trip has two portals: the one you step into, and the one you come out of. MaterialFlow, under 2 - Clearance, decides which of them needs the stave. It is one rule for the whole world, set on the server, and it changes how the mod feels more than anything else here — so it is worth settling before you start a world.

| | Which portal needs the stave | What that gives you | |---|---|---| | Both (default) | Either one | A stave covers arriving and leaving, so ore moves freely between that portal and anywhere else. Only a trip between two portals that both lack the stave is refused. The most forgiving: a stave you forgot to build leaves nothing stranded | | Receive | The one you come out of | The strictest, and what the mod was designed around. A mining camp with no staves can send ore home forever and never receive any back. Ore only moves towards the places you have built staves, and a camp stays cheap and one-way | | Deliver | The one you step into | Receive reversed. A well-equipped base can supply a bare camp with anything, but that camp cannot send its own ore home until it has staves of its own |

Under all three, ore that neither portal has a stave for never moves. None of these lets you carry something you have not earned; they only decide which end has to have earned it.

One thing to know about Both, since it is the default: with a base that has every stave, ore can reach anywhere in two trips — camp to base, then base to another camp. A direct trip between two camps still needs a stave at one of them. If that feels too loose once you have played it, switching to Receive restores the stricter rule.

Controls

| | | |---|---| | E at a portal | Open the list of destinations | | Shift+E at a portal | Rename the portal, as the base game does | | ← → | Move through the list | | P | Confirm | | Escape | Cancel | | O | Sort by distance or name | | K | Show only destinations that accept what you are carrying |

Every one of these can be changed under 5 - Selector keys, and each has a gamepad button beside it. The whole list is playable on a controller.