AutoChestSort

AutoChestSort

Name your chests. Teach them once. Let the server keep things tidy.

Dump everything into an Input chest and walk away. AutoChestSort moves it, stack by stack, into the chests you taught. Chests that hold the wrong thing sort themselves, a group spreads its stock sensibly over its chests, and Misc catches the overflow until there is room again.

No client magic, no item loss, no automation beyond your storage.

One modded player is enough. The mod lives on the server. One person with it installed names the chests, teaches the groups and holds the config. With allowVanillaClients = true everyone else can play completely vanilla and still gets their Input chest emptied.

Read this first

This is version 1.1. Back up your world before you use it. The mod writes into chest inventories, and it will have rough edges. Names, groups, the learn dialog, Input sorting, chest-to-chest tidying, clusters, the spreading stage, the beautify pass and the config sync are built and tested on a dedicated server, but that is not the same as being finished.

Why would you want this

Every Valheim player knows the moment: you come home with a full inventory and spend the next five minutes walking past twelve chests, shuffling stacks around.

• The sorting marathon. Wood to the wood chest, ore to the smelter room, food to the kitchen.

Every trip home turns into a logistics job.

• Where did I put it? Unlabelled chests are lucky dips. Signs help you find things, but they

do not put anything away, and they do not stop three chests from each holding a bit of everything.

• Multiplayer entropy. On a server everyone sorts differently. The system one player builds is

gone after the next visitor.

The idea: instead of telling the mod where every item goes, you tell the chest once. Put in what belongs there, press +, done. From then on the whole group knows its items, and the server does the walking.

What does the mod do

Names, groups, and a server that does the work. Nothing else changes about how you play.

• Chests get names. A name field right in the chest window. The name lives in the chest itself,

so the game saves and syncs it. It also shows in the hover text before you open the chest.

• Same name, same group. Every chest called Building is one group. Rename one chest and the

whole group follows. Case does not matter. Works for all six vanilla chests, from the barrel to the wardrobe.

• Groups learn their items. Fill a chest, press +: the item types inside now belong to that

group. A dialog lets you replace the old list or merge into it.

• Input chests. A chest named Input is your drop-off point. The server empties it one stack

per second into the group chests of the same cluster.

• Chests tidy themselves. No Input chest needed. Drop ore into the wood chest and the server

carries it to the ore chest. Teach an item to a new group and every chest in range hands it over.

• A group spreads its stock. Two wood-and-stone chests end up as one wood chest and one stone

chest. Big amounts push each other apart, small ones may share, partial stacks are poured together.

• Misc is the buffer. Items with no group in the cluster, overflow from full group chests and

unknown items land in Misc. As soon as a matching chest has space again, Misc sends it back.

• Clusters, not a radius. Chests standing within 12 m of each other chain into one cluster, and

a cluster is one store. Your outpost across the valley is its own store. Nothing ever travels between them.

• Optional: tidy-looking chests. Switch it on and every group chest is packed from the top left,

equals next to equals, full stacks first. Off by default.

• The server sorts. Only the server. In singleplayer, or when you host from your own game, you

are the server. No client ever moves an item, so two players cannot race each other. Every move adds to the target first and removes from the source second. Open chests are never touched (the host's own included), a chest gets a cooldown after it is closed, and the server reads every move back to prove it landed. A chest is loaded fresh when a player with the mod opens or breaks it. While a raid is running, nothing is moved anywhere until a minute after it is over. Stacks the game marks as cheated (Valheim 1.0.21) stay where they are. It keeps out of an unroofed chest in the moment rain damage is due to write to it, and it watches every move for three minutes afterwards and reports one that a foreign write undid.

• English and German, quiet log. Tooltips, messages and dialogs show in each client's language,

English as the fallback. Input and Misc stay the same in both, because they are data, not labels.

The sorting chain

Everything happens inside one cluster of chests. One move per second at most. Six steps per tick, and a step only gets its turn when every step before it found nothing to do.

| # | Step | What it does | Setting | Default | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Input chest | One stack out of Input to where it belongs. | always on | on | | 2 | Ungrouped out | Items no group knows leave a group chest for Misc. | relocateUnassignedToMisc | off | | 3 | Wrong group out | Ore in the wood chest goes to the ore chest. | relocateMisplacedItems | on | | 4 | Spread the group | Stock is spread over the group's chests by plan. | relocateItemStacks | on | | 5 | Misc back home | Anything with a group leaves Misc once there is room. | always on | on | | 6 | Beautify | Pack a group chest neatly. Purely cosmetic. | beautifyChestItemOrder | off |

Everything that does not belong in a group leaves it before the mod works out how to spread the rest, and Misc is emptied back into a group after that group has made room. Nothing is made to look tidy while anything else still has real work to do.

Out of an Input chest, in this order: