Tollbound

Tollbound

Portals you earn one biome at a time. What you carry decides what you pay, and which bosses you have put down decides how much of it survives the trip.

Vanilla's portal rule is all or nothing: ore never goes through, and then one day the stone portal arrives and everything does. Tollbound fills that gap with a ladder — six new portal pieces, each built from its own biome's materials, each carrying a little more than the last.

Wood and stone portals behave exactly as vanilla. The stone portal already carries everything, so earning it in the base game is still the graduation. Tollbound's whole ladder sits before it.

The whole ladder, built out — Black Forest to Ashlands, left to right.

How it works

Each portal is a licence with a ceiling. A Swamp portal carries Swamp-tier cargo and everything below it, and refuses anything above.

Portals of different tiers connect freely, and a crossing carries the lower of its two ends. A Swamp portal linked to a Black Forest one is a Black Forest crossing in both directions. Link either to a plain wood portal and nothing restricted goes through at all.

The toll follows the cargo, not the ground you are standing on. Every restricted item belongs to a biome, and carrying it pays that biome's spirit wherever the trip starts. Hauling bronze and iron out of your base costs greydwarf eyes and entrails, exactly as it would leaving the Swamp.

Kill the boss and that biome's cargo travels intact. Leave it alive and the spirit takes a cut of the metal on the way through. Ores and bars can be lost; dragon eggs, extractors, cogwheels and Hildir's chests never are.

Nothing is spent unless the whole crossing is allowed. A refused trip costs you nothing.

The ladder

| Portal | Cargo it adds | Toll per crossing | Loss while the boss lives | |---|---|---|---| | Black Forest | Copper, tin, bronze, their ores and scrap | 5 × Greydwarf eye | 8% | | Swamp | Iron, iron ore, scrap iron | 6 × Entrails | 11% | | Mountain | Silver, silver ore, dragon eggs | 4 × Freeze gland | 14% | | Plains | Black metal, black metal scrap | 5 × Needle | 17% | | Mistlands | Dvergr extractors, Hildir's chests | 4 × Bilebag | — | | Ashlands | Flametal, cogwheels, springs, iron pits | 5 × Charred bone | 22% |

Tolls stack across every biome in your pack, not just the portal's own tier. Losses are rolled once per unit, so a big haul loses roughly the listed share and a small one is luck.

By default one toll covers a crossing however much you carry. Servers wanting more friction can switch Tolls/Scaling to PerLoad, which charges a toll for every stack.

Building the portals

Each portal costs its own biome's metal. That means the first haul out of every biome is still a boat trip — you cannot build the thing that carries iron until you have brought iron home the hard way. From the second run onward the biome is open.

| Portal | Cost | Station | |---|---|---| | Black Forest | Fine wood ×20, Greydwarf eye ×10, Surtling core ×2, Copper ×5 | Workbench | | Swamp | Fine wood ×20, Ancient bark ×10, Surtling core ×3, Iron ×5 | Workbench | | Mountain | Fine wood ×20, Obsidian ×10, Surtling core ×4, Silver ×5 | Workbench | | Plains | Fine wood ×20, Needle ×10, Surtling core ×6, Black metal ×5 | Forge | | Mistlands | Yggdrasil wood ×20, Black marble ×10, Surtling core ×8, Refined eitr ×2 | Forge | | Ashlands | Ashwood ×20, Grausten ×10, Surtling core ×10, Flametal ×5 | Forge |

Each portal glows in its biome's colour and carries its own icon in the build menu, so six of them in one base are still tellable apart.

A paid crossing. Cargo in a backpack is weighed like anything else.

Knowing where you stand

Look at a portal and it tells you what this particular crossing will carry, what the toll comes to, and what a living boss is putting at risk:

The no-teleport slash in your inventory tells the truth too. Stand at a Swamp portal and it clears from your iron while staying on your flametal.

The spirits

Each biome's spirit speaks when a crossing is refused or paid for, in its own register — and changes tone once you have killed it.

> The bog exhales. Nothing leaves the marsh unweighed.

> The mud parts where you walk. The mire outlived him. So did the toll.

A refusal: the itemised ledger top-left, the spirit's line centre-screen. Nothing is spent.

Lines live in BepInEx/config/Tollbound/voice.txt and can be edited or added to without reinstalling. The file is never rewritten, so your edits survive updates; sections added by an update are appended without touching anything you wrote. Set Appearance/SpiritDialogue to false for the itemised ledger alone.

Who needs to install this

Every player and the server. This changes game rules. The server registers the pieces and is what recognises them as portals at all; each client decides its own crossings. A client without the mod is refused at the version handshake rather than allowed in to desync quietly.

Gameplay settings are admin-synced from the server, so a client cannot lower its own loss rate or zero out a toll. Appearance settings are local.

Requirements