I have on my list of things to write about the effect of the mods we have chosen for our current run through Valheim, how they have worked out and how they have changed our play style.  There have been some obvious impacts.

I wrote about the six we initially chose a while back, but we added a seventh to the list, and I want to write about that one today because it had a rather poor impact on our game this past weekend.

The new addon was mtnewton-ItemStacks-1.2.0, which does two things.

First, it allows you to have bigger stacks of things… which I guess is kind of obvious by the name.  By default it allows you to have stacks 10x the size of the Valheim defaults.  So if you could only have a stack of 100 arrows before, you can now have a stack of 1,000.  If ore was limited to 30 in a stack, it is now 300.  If wood was 50 before, it is 500 now.

You get the idea.  It looks like this,

Bigger stacks of things

The reason we wanted this was because inventory management… and base storage management… is a royal pain the the ass in Valheim.  We burn through wood by the thousands of units at times, so we needed stacks and stacks of chests.  Food was always overflowing our storage as well.

And Potshot had built a big storage room for our main base, with a nice curve to it so that you could stand in the middle and access all the chests.  But once we got into smelting tin and copper and scrap iron, the chests began to overflow and it was either build a whole adjunct set of storage that we would need to manage or find a mod that allowed bigger stacks.  Since we were already on the mod train, that won out.

Our storage space

The other thing this mod does is allow the weight of items to be reduced and, by default, with the mod installed, things weigh just 10% of their default game weight.

Now this balances out in a way.  If you could carry a stack of 30 scrap iron before, you can now carry a stack of 300 scrap iron.  Your stack carrying ability remains the same, even if you are hauling 10x the count.

I was a bit dubious about this aspect of the mod.  It felt like we might be crossing the line from quality of life improvements… which bigger stack definately fell into… and into down right cheating, or at least going easy mode to the point of removing too much of the edge from the game.

You can configure the stacking and weight reduction.  It could be changed to 20x stacks or half weight rather than 10% weight, the latter being something I tried to set.  However, the client doesn’t pay attention to how the server side gets configured.  The client side config wins in any conflict.  So I left that alone.

And, we got used to the weigh reduction pretty quickly.  It mostly meant fewer trips back and forth, which is a pretty nice QoL improvement, while we still had to ship ore and metal manually because it cannot go through portals.  There is a mod for that, but we haven’t gone there.

This past weekend Bung got back online after being busy and away for the last few weeks, and I got on with him and explained where we stood in the game, encouraging him to go pick up some of our raw material so he would get the new recipes, starting with the chest where we kept our refined metal.

He then went over to the workbench and forge to check out the recipes while I peeked in the chest just to remind myself how much refined metal we had built up.  It should have been a lot, but when I opened up the chest there was very little metal.

Then I realized that every stack he picked up and been reduced to the default stack size of 30.  He did not have the new mod and, in the conflict between the server and the client, the client won.  Default Valheim says those metal stacks should include no more than 30 pieces so it simply deleted anything in excess of 30.  I was very quickly saying, “Oh shit!”

Stacks after I consolidated the remaining iron and silver

There had been almost 700 units of iron and 500 of silver in there along with a lot more bronze, tin, and copper.

I asked if he had seen the mod in the pinned list on our Discord.  He had not, which was reasonable.  You have to go look at it and we had added that mod while he had been away.  It wasn’t an obvious change and I had not considered the consequences of somebody showing up without it installed.  It is one of those mods that doesn’t prevent you from logging in, the way OdinShip does.

So we had our first mod-inflicted issue.

He went and got that downloaded and I started looking into what else he had touched.  Fortunately, he had stopped at that chest to investigate new recipes.

So we decided to put in some work getting new raw metals back to base, starting with a visit to the swamp.  This was a bit of an issue because he was still wearing black forest level gear… troll hide leather… and the swamp… the swamp can be a tough place.  A dragur one-shotted him literally two steps out of our swamp base.

That didn’t go well

He grabbed some fully upgrade bronze kit that we had in the backup gear chests and came out in that.

We did get into a couple of crypts after that and were able to load up on scrap iron.

Down in the crypt

Then we sailed that back to our main base.  But scap iron wasn’t in short supply.  I actually later found a couple stacks of 300 raw scrap iron in another chest that we just had not processed yet.  Silver though… that we were now very short on.  But getting us up into the mountains… he would need more than bronze.

Fortunately, I had made an extra wolf hide cape the day before… one of my more common mistakes is going to upgrade something and accidently making another one… so he was able to grab that.  Then I gave him my fully upgraded iron gear because we had just enough silver to make the first tier of the wolf armor, which has the same armor protect stats.

Then we ran back to the swamp and killed Bonemass to get another wishbone for him.  Also, we now have a Bonemass trophy to hang on the wall.

Finally, we headed up to the mountain outpost that Potshot put together and went to work excavating a silver node, doing the routine where you dig it out until it is floating in mid-air, then hitting it a few times until it fractures and all the silver lands on the ground in one big jackpot.  Lots of fun.

However, the game had some plans for us.  As we were almost done with that, we got the “you are being hunter” message, which is the mountains wolf event.  This is a tough one to deal with, as a swarm of wolves will mess you up pretty quick.

We thought for a bit we might be safe.  We were down in the mining pit with no ramp down, so the wolves couldn’t get to us.  But then they began pushing against each other at the end of the pit until the ones up front started spilling down into the pit where we fought for a while before succumbing to the wolf mass.

This is why we keep meads of frost protection back at the base.

We ate some food, got a mead each, then took the portal back to the base.  Running back it seemed that the event was over, so I jumped back into the pit… only to be reminded that the wolves don’t necessarily despawn.  There were five in there waiting for me, so I was soon back at base eating food and getting another frost resist mead.

The wolves couldn’t get out of the pit and all our gear was down in the pit.  So we grabbed a couple of finewood bows that Potshot had hung on the wall as decoration, grabbed some arrows out of the supply chest, then went back to the mountains and stood on the edge of the pit and shot the wolves.  Problem solved.

Dealing with the wolf menace

We were then able to pop the silver vein and haul it back to the mountain base for later transport down the mountainside to our small dock in order to sail it back to be smelted.

Silver is actually considerably heavier than iron, tin, or copper, so has ended up being the first point we hit where we couldn’t just load up and carry about all we wanted.  So even with weight being down to 10% of default, there are still limits.

Anyway, we have the three of us now up to date, have recovered a bit on the silver front, and are now live in the mountains

A mountain vista

We have a couple of items on our list still.  We need some drake trophies in order to upgrade to the mountains level wolf armor set head piece.  We need more silver.  And we have to find where Moder, the next boss, spawns.

I have on my list of things to write about the effect of the mods we have chosen for our current run through Valheim, how they have worked out and how they have changed our play style.  There have been some obvious impacts.

I wrote about the six we initially chose a while back, but we added a seventh to the list, and I want to write about that one today because it had a rather poor impact on our game this past weekend.

The new addon was mtnewton-ItemStacks-1.2.0, which does two things.

First, it allows you to have bigger stacks of things… which I guess is kind of obvious by the name.  By default it allows you to have stacks 10x the size of the Valheim defaults.  So if you could only have a stack of 100 arrows before, you can now have a stack of 1,000.  If ore was limited to 30 in a stack, it is now 300.  If wood was 50 before, it is 500 now.

You get the idea.  It looks like this,

Bigger stacks of things

The reason we wanted this was because inventory management… and base storage management… is a royal pain the the ass in Valheim.  We burn through wood by the thousands of units at times, so we needed stacks and stacks of chests.  Food was always overflowing our storage as well.

And Potshot had built a big storage room for our main base, with a nice curve to it so that you could stand in the middle and access all the chests.  But once we got into smelting tin and copper and scrap iron, the chests began to overflow and it was either build a whole adjunct set of storage that we would need to manage or find a mod that allowed bigger stacks.  Since we were already on the mod train, that won out.

Our storage space

The other thing this mod does is allow the weight of items to be reduced and, by default, with the mod installed, things weigh just 10% of their default game weight.

Now this balances out in a way.  If you could carry a stack of 30 scrap iron before, you can now carry a stack of 300 scrap iron.  Your stack carrying ability remains the same, even if you are hauling 10x the count.

I was a bit dubious about this aspect of the mod.  It felt like we might be crossing the line from quality of life improvements… which bigger stack definately fell into… and into down right cheating, or at least going easy mode to the point of removing too much of the edge from the game.

You can configure the stacking and weight reduction.  It could be changed to 20x stacks or half weight rather than 10% weight, the latter being something I tried to set.  However, the client doesn’t pay attention to how the server side gets configured.  The client side config wins in any conflict.  So I left that alone.

And, we got used to the weigh reduction pretty quickly.  It mostly meant fewer trips back and forth, which is a pretty nice QoL improvement, while we still had to ship ore and metal manually because it cannot go through portals.  There is a mod for that, but we haven’t gone there.

This past weekend Bung got back online after being busy and away for the last few weeks, and I got on with him and explained where we stood in the game, encouraging him to go pick up some of our raw material so he would get the new recipes, starting with the chest where we kept our refined metal.

He then went over to the workbench and forge to check out the recipes while I peeked in the chest just to remind myself how much refined metal we had built up.  It should have been a lot, but when I opened up the chest there was very little metal.

Then I realized that every stack he picked up and been reduced to the default stack size of 30.  He did not have the new mod and, in the conflict between the server and the client, the client won.  Default Valheim says those metal stacks should include no more than 30 pieces so it simply deleted anything in excess of 30.  I was very quickly saying, “Oh shit!”

Stacks after I consolidated the remaining iron and silver

There had been almost 700 units of iron and 500 of silver in there along with a lot more bronze, tin, and copper.

I asked if he had seen the mod in the pinned list on our Discord.  He had not, which was reasonable.  You have to go look at it and we had added that mod while he had been away.  It wasn’t an obvious change and I had not considered the consequences of somebody showing up without it installed.  It is one of those mods that doesn’t prevent you from logging in, the way OdinShip does.

So we had our first mod-inflicted issue.

He went and got that downloaded and I started looking into what else he had touched.  Fortunately, he had stopped at that chest to investigate new recipes.

So we decided to put in some work getting new raw metals back to base, starting with a visit to the swamp.  This was a bit of an issue because he was still wearing black forest level gear… troll hide leather… and the swamp… the swamp can be a tough place.  A dragur one-shotted him literally two steps out of our swamp base.

That didn’t go well

He grabbed some fully upgrade bronze kit that we had in the backup gear chests and came out in that.

We did get into a couple of crypts after that and were able to load up on scrap iron.

Down in the crypt

Then we sailed that back to our main base.  But scap iron wasn’t in short supply.  I actually later found a couple stacks of 300 raw scrap iron in another chest that we just had not processed yet.  Silver though… that we were now very short on.  But getting us up into the mountains… he would need more than bronze.

Fortunately, I had made an extra wolf hide cape the day before… one of my more common mistakes is going to upgrade something and accidently making another one… so he was able to grab that.  Then I gave him my fully upgraded iron gear because we had just enough silver to make the first tier of the wolf armor, which has the same armor protect stats.

Then we ran back to the swamp and killed Bonemass to get another wishbone for him.  Also, we now have a Bonemass trophy to hang on the wall.

Finally, we headed up to the mountain outpost that Potshot put together and went to work excavating a silver node, doing the routine where you dig it out until it is floating in mid-air, then hitting it a few times until it fractures and all the silver lands on the ground in one big jackpot.  Lots of fun.

However, the game had some plans for us.  As we were almost done with that, we got the “you are being hunter” message, which is the mountains wolf event.  This is a tough one to deal with, as a swarm of wolves will mess you up pretty quick.

We thought for a bit we might be safe.  We were down in the mining pit with no ramp down, so the wolves couldn’t get to us.  But then they began pushing against each other at the end of the pit until the ones up front started spilling down into the pit where we fought for a while before succumbing to the wolf mass.

This is why we keep meads of frost protection back at the base.

We ate some food, got a mead each, then took the portal back to the base.  Running back it seemed that the event was over, so I jumped back into the pit… only to be reminded that the wolves don’t necessarily despawn.  There were five in there waiting for me, so I was soon back at base eating food and getting another frost resist mead.

The wolves couldn’t get out of the pit and all our gear was down in the pit.  So we grabbed a couple of finewood bows that Potshot had hung on the wall as decoration, grabbed some arrows out of the supply chest, then went back to the mountains and stood on the edge of the pit and shot the wolves.  Problem solved.

Dealing with the wolf menace

We were then able to pop the silver vein and haul it back to the mountain base for later transport down the mountainside to our small dock in order to sail it back to be smelted.

Silver is actually considerably heavier than iron, tin, or copper, so has ended up being the first point we hit where we couldn’t just load up and carry about all we wanted.  So even with weight being down to 10% of default, there are still limits.

Anyway, we have the three of us now up to date, have recovered a bit on the silver front, and are now live in the mountains

A mountain vista

We have a couple of items on our list still.  We need some drake trophies in order to upgrade to the mountains level wolf armor set head piece.  We need more silver.  And we have to find where Moder, the next boss, spawns.