WinterSled

Winter Sled

A cargo sled for Valheim. Hitch it, load it, haul it — just like the cart, except this one actually likes winter. Reindeer not included: you are the reindeer. Unless you bring a deer from an animal mod: the sled is animal-friendly (see Draft animals).

It rides on runners instead of wheels, so how it moves depends on what is under it:

• Snow and ice: it glides as if it was born for this. Pulling it feels like cheating.
• Frozen ground (cleared ground in the Mountains and the Deep North): the runners scrape and complain, but keep going.
• Bare ground in the warm biomes: the sled becomes a very heavy plough. You walk slowly, tire quickly and start to question your choices, more so with a full load.
• Wood floors, roads and rock: neither here nor there.

That makes it the cart's winter rival: the cart wins on grass, the sled wins in snow. To keep things fair, wheels now sink in snow — the cart had it too easy (you can turn that off if you feel sorry for it).

The vanilla cart gets a seat too, for a passenger (no steering or brakes: someone pulls, or it rolls) — fair is fair (CartSeat turns it off).

You can also sit in it and ride down a snowy slope: steer with A/D, brake with your heels on S, push off with W (or back with S, once stopped: out of a dead end), and jump to bail out. A gamepad works too: the left stick steers (the further you tilt it, the sharper the turn), a flick forward or back pushes off, and the hint shows the stick. A sled left standing stays put on a slope: its runners settle into the snow. A sled you let go of at full speed does not: it has places to be. Odin does not cover runaway sleds.

While you pull it, an icon shows what the runners are on — snow, deep snow, ice, frozen ground, wood, stone or ground — in case your legs haven't told you already.

Sounds

The runners hiss on snow, crunch through deep powder, rasp on ice, grind on frozen ground and stone, rumble over wooden floors and drag through dirt, and at speed the wind joins in: real recordings, not synthesized noise (credits below). The volume is in the settings, for those who prefer to sled in dignified silence.

Seasons

Plays along with Seasons (shudnal) and Seasonality (RustyMods): when winter reaches the Meadows, the sled is the first to celebrate. It glides through snowy meadows, forests and plains, and frozen lakes and sea become the fastest roads in Midgard (with Seasonality, turn on its "Water Freezes" option). Neither mod is required.

Draft animals

An animal-friendly sled. New: tame animals can pull it too, with a mod that hitches carts to them. You can ride in the sled while they do. Tested with:

• Draft Animals 1.1.3 (4gestr): put a harness on a tame boar, deer or wolf, press Shift+E at the sled's shafts, then drive it from the bench at the front or let it follow you. The sled gets the same hitch and driver's bench as the cart. A deer is as close to a reindeer as Midgard gets.
• Beasts of Burden 1.0.8 (AWL Gaming's maintained fork): use the sled's handles with a tame lox, wolf or boar next to them, and the closest one gets hitched. To take the handles yourself with an animal nearby, hold Shift (the alternate placement key) while pressing E.
• OdinHorse 1.9.3: horses, and other tame animals, pull it.

When the animal slows down or stops, it holds the sled back (AnimalHoldBack), so the sled doesn't glide on into it on snow. On slopes the shafts stay at hip height above the ground (LevelAnimalHitch): the animal mods measure the hitch from the animal's feet, so behind a big animal the sled used to nose into the snow downhill and lift off uphill. The vanilla cart gets this too.

One difference from pulling it yourself: an animal keeps its own pace on any ground. The snow-versus-ground trade-off (the sled slow on bare ground, the cart slow in snow) applies to players only for now. If that makes the sled too good with animals, tell me (a comment or a GitHub issue) and I'll fix it.

Some quirks come from those mods or the game and happen with the vanilla cart too: with Beasts of Burden a hitch doesn't survive leaving the area. On Deep North ice the game takes an animal's footing away, as it does yours: pulling the sled, it keeps its footing like you do (SureFootedPulling); with the vanilla cart it slips and crawls, as in vanilla.

Use one cart-hitching mod at a time. Not compatible: LetsGo (Hardwire99) hitches carts to animals itself and its page asks to remove Beasts of Burden, so it fights the mods above over the same hitch; it isn't tested with the sled.

Languages

All the game's languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Finnish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Romanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Turkish, Greek, Georgian, Hindi, Thai, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean. The riding hint even shows your own key bindings.

Building