1. Why
2. How it works
3. The unlock table
4. The Mistlands
5. The boss
6. How it knows what a deposit is
7. Console
8. Installing
9. Settings
10. Multiplayer
11. What has not been tested
12. Bugs and ideas
13. Licence

Tap Left Alt with a pickaxe out and vein mining is on. Every blow you land on an ore deposit or a boulder then fills a bar instead of breaking the chunk you hit. When the bar reaches 100%, the whole deposit breaks at once and all of its ore drops, including the chunks that were still under the ground. Stone and each metal open at their own Pickaxes level, late, and once you have beaten the boss of their biome.

Malmr is Old Norse for ore, and for metal. The mod is about both: you mine the ore, and it unlocks by the metal it smelts into.

Why

A copper deposit comes apart in a lot of chunks, and chasing them one at a time is the part of mining nobody enjoys. You walk around the rock, dig after the bits that sank into the ground, and pick up the ore from five places. Vein mining mods exist for that. The popular one breaks the whole rock on one hit while you hold a key. That turns a deposit into a click, and you have it from the moment you install it.

Malmr is slower than that on purpose. The bar only fills as fast as your swings would have broken the rock by hand, so a deposit still costs you about as many swings, as much stamina and as much pickaxe wear. You save the walking between chunks and the digging after the buried ones.

It also opens late. Stone opens at Pickaxes 20, copper at 30 and bloodgold at 80, so you have mined each one by hand for a while before this changes anything. Each also waits for the boss of the biome it comes from. With Vandi installed that means the boss beaten at one star, and without it the boss beaten once.

Stone is on the list because building takes a lot of it, and a boulder is the same chore as a copper deposit: many chunks, some of them buried. It opens first, at 20, because stone is the first thing anybody mines. It waits for Eikthyr, the Meadows boss.

How it works

• Tap Left Alt with a pickaxe in your hands. A small gold "Vein" appears just above the crosshair. Tap it again to switch it off. It stays on until you do, across swings, tool changes and deposits.
• Swing at any chunk of a deposit that is open to you. The chunk does not break. The damage your blow would have done to it goes into the bar instead, and the usual damage number still floats up.
• The bar sits just under the crosshair while you look at the deposit or have just hit it. It is a thin gold bar with the name and the percentage under it, like "Copper vein 45%".
• 100% is the health of every chunk still standing, buried ones included. When the bar gets there, the deposit breaks. The chunks go from the top down, each drops its ore where it was, and ore from under the ground pops up to the surface. An ore deposit comes down in a fraction of a second. A big rock takes longer, because Malmr breaks only as much of it each frame as the game can take without stuttering.
• The bar is saved on the deposit. Walk away, switch tools or log out, and it is still there when you come back. A friend with vein mining on can finish it for you.
• If somebody mines chunks off the same deposit by hand in the meantime, the total shrinks and the percentage goes up with it.
• If a deposit grows back, which is what Dvala does to the veins in a dungeon it restocks, its bar starts again from empty.
• If your pickaxe is too weak for the rock, you get the game's own "too hard" and the bar does not move.
• With vein mining on and a metal you have not opened yet, you mine the normal way. Once per deposit the top left of the screen tells you what is missing, for example "Iron veins need Pickaxes 40 and Bonemass beaten at one star through Vandi".
• A whole rock that has not cracked yet, like a copper deposit you have not hit before, breaks into its chunks the normal way first. The bar starts on the cracked deposit.
• When a metal opens, the game tells you in the middle of the screen, once, says what opened it and names the key. That happens on the level-up or on the boss kill, whichever came last.

Each swing costs stamina, wears the pickaxe and trains Pickaxes exactly as it does in vanilla, whether its damage goes into a chunk or into the bar. By hand, the last blow on a chunk wastes whatever it does past that chunk's health, and the bar wastes nothing. By hand, a chunk whose support you broke falls for free, and the bar charges for every chunk. So some deposits take a few swings more than by hand and some a few less.

The unlock table

Only these vein mine. Anything else is mined by hand.

Stone means the rocks and boulders that drop nothing but stone. Ore deposits drop stone as well, but a deposit with ore in it is always that ore's, never a stone vein. A copper deposit is copper at 30 however much stone comes out of it. A rock that drops anything else beside its stone is not a stone vein either, unless that other thing is on the list too. Then both have to be open to you, each with its own level and its own boss, because a full bar hands you everything the rock drops. It works the other way round as well: a rock only counts while every drop on it is on the list at a real level, so one drop that is left out or set to -1 keeps the whole rock mined by hand.

Some stone rocks are huge, and the bar covers the whole rock. With vein mining on you get no stone from one until the bar is full, so for a handful of stone, tap Alt to switch it off and take a few chunks by hand.

Tin and obsidian are not on the list, and adding them vein mines nothing. In Valheim 1.0 a tin rock and an obsidian rock are each a single rock, not a deposit of chunks, and Malmr does not touch them: they are mined by hand whatever Unlocks says. Tin:20 or Obsidian:50 there is still read as an entry, though, so it gets its own "veins open to you now" message and its own line in the malmr console, both for veins that never come. The world-load log then says no deposit resolves to it and suggests naming one in Deposits, which cannot help, because there is no tin or obsidian deposit to name. Leave them out. Tin was left out on purpose anyway, since it comes in small rocks and there is no deposit of it worth a bar.

The giant brains in the Mistlands are in the table as Eitr. A brain drops soft tissue and the eitr refinery turns that into refined eitr, which is how Malmr recognises a brain. On screen they are called giant brains.

The level that counts is the one you earned, the big number on the skills page. A bonus on top of it from gear, food or another mod makes each blow harder, as it always does, but it does not open a metal early.

Iron covers anything whose drop smelts into iron, so muddy scrap piles count.

The Mistlands

In the Mistlands only the giant brains and stone vein mine. Copper, iron or any other ore you find there is mined the normal way, even when that metal is open to you. With vein mining on, the top left of the screen says so once per deposit and no bar shows. The rule is there for the copper and iron scattered around the Mistlands, and a boulder there is stone like anywhere else, so stone is left alone.

It goes by the biome the deposit stands in, the one the map shows at that spot. The Mistlands line in the config says which entries still vein mine there. A rock that counts for two entries needs both on it.

The boss

With Vandi installed, the boss has to be beaten at one star. Vandi brings a boss back one star harder every time you kill it again, so the one-star fight is your second kill of it, and Malmr waits for that. Only kills Vandi counts are counted, which means a boss you summoned yourself at its altar. Helping a friend with their Bonemass does not count for you, the same as in Vandi. Vandi counts kills rather than stars, so if a server turns off Vandi's harder bosses the second kill still counts. Vandi keeps the count in the world, so a character that moves to a new world starts there without its boss kills.

Without Vandi there are no stars, so one kill is enough. That is the game's own record of your kills, the one it keeps on your character. Every player who landed a hit on the boss gets the kill, not only the one who struck last. Because it is kept on the character, a boss you killed in another world counts too.

The game only started keeping that record with its Call to Arms update. A boss your character beat before then is not in it, and has to be beaten again for Malmr to see it. The record also does not care where the boss came from, so a boss spawned with devcommands counts the same as one you summoned.

The unlock message, the top left message and the malmr command all say which of the two applies: "at one star through Vandi", or "beaten by you" without it.

Bloodgold waits for Fader, the same as flametal, because Vandi and Utangard both give the Deep North to Fader, and Vandi does not count the Frozen King. His defeat keys have been read off his prefabs, but which one the end of his fight actually sets has not been seen yet, so neither mod names him by default. The log lists every boss in the world with its key when a world loads, and once that is settled he can go into Vandi's BossBiomes and into Bosses here.

If Bosses names a boss nothing in the world sets, or one Vandi does not count, its metals can never open. The log says so on world load and so does the malmr command.

How it knows what a deposit is

It reads the drops. Every deposit has a drop table, and every smelter and furnace in the game lists what it takes in and what comes out. A deposit that drops copper ore is a copper deposit because copper ore smelts into copper. The same goes for an ore another mod adds, as long as you name its metal in Unlocks and some station makes it.

Ore always wins. If anything a deposit drops smelts into a metal on the list, the deposit is that metal's vein, whatever else it drops and however much of it. An ore whose metal is not on the list makes the deposit no vein at all. Only a deposit with no such ore can be a stone vein, and only when everything it drops is on the list. That works the same for anything else you add by the name of what drops.

When a world loads, the log gets one block listing every deposit in it, what it counted as and why, and any metal in the table that nothing matched. The deposits that are not veins are listed with what they drop, so a boulder that is not a stone vein shows what else is in it. If a deposit comes out wrong, name it in Deposits and that wins over the drops.

Console

No devcommands needed for any of these.

• malmr prints your Pickaxes level, whether vein mining is on, which boss count applies, the Mistlands line, each metal's level and boss, your kills of that boss, whether the metal is open and what is still missing, and the deposit list.
• malmr vein on and malmr vein off do what tapping the key does.
• malmr progress shows the bar of the nearest deposit within 10 metres, counted to its nearest chunk so a big rock is found from its face: the metal, whether it is open to you here, its biome, the percent, the damage stored against the total, and how many chunks are still standing. malmr progress rock4_copper_frac looks for the nearest one of that name instead, and a number on the end looks further, like malmr progress giant_brain_frac 20. stale=yes means the deposit grew back and its old bar was dropped.

Installing

Malmr needs BepInEx and nothing else. Put Malmr.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Malmr/, or install it with a mod manager.

I recommend Vandi alongside it. Vandi makes bosses you kill again come back with stars, and with Vandi installed Malmr asks for the one-star kill rather than a plain one. That second fight is what I think the vein should cost. Vandi is not pulled in by a mod manager, so install it yourself if you want it.

Then start the game once and quit. That first run writes the config file. It does not exist before the mod has loaded, which is the usual reason people think it is broken.

Settings

The file is BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.malmr.cfg. Every setting has a comment above it with the reasoning, so the file explains itself. The ones worth knowing about:

• VeinToggleKey is the key, Left Alt by default. It only listens while a pickaxe is out, so Jafna's Left Alt on the hoe is left alone. A tap is a short press and release of the key on its own, with the game in front the whole time, so Alt+Tab (out of the game or back into it) and Taum's Alt+E on a boar do not switch it. Nor does a tap with any other key pressed during it.
• Unlocks is the table above, as one line: Stone:20, Copper:30, .... Add a metal, change a level, or set one to -1 to switch it off.
• Bosses is the boss column of the table, as one line: Stone:defeated_eikthyr, .... A metal left out needs no boss.
• BossKills is how many kills of that boss Vandi has to have counted. 2 is the one-star kill. Without Vandi it is not used, and one kill is enough. 0 turns the boss half off either way.
• Mistlands says which entries still vein mine in the Mistlands. Eitr, Stone by default, the brains and stone.
• Names is what the screen calls a deposit of an entry. Eitr:Giant brain by default.
• Deposits overrides what a deposit counts as, by its prefab name.

Changing a default in a new version does nothing on a machine that has already run the mod. BepInEx writes every entry on first run and the saved value wins.

Multiplayer

Malmr has to be on the server and on every client. If you use Vandi, the same goes for Vandi.

Your skill and the game's record of your kills are saved with your character, so only your own machine knows whether a metal is open for you. That part is decided where you swing. The bar is saved on the deposit, and in Valheim only the player or server that owns an object may change it. So your blow is sent to whoever owns that deposit, the same way a normal pickaxe hit is, and their Malmr adds it to the bar and breaks the deposit when it is full. The owner can be any player near the rock, or the server. A machine without Malmr cannot do that, and a blow sent to it is simply lost.

Vandi needs to be everywhere for its own reasons. It counts a boss kill on whichever machine owned the boss when it died, and it keeps the count in the world. If some machines have it and some do not, kills go uncounted and players on the same server end up under different rules.

With Core installed, Malmr registers with its version gate, which keeps out anyone who does not have the same Malmr. The host's unlock table, bosses, Mistlands line and deposit list apply to everyone connected, in memory only. Your own config file comes back the moment you disconnect. Your key stays your own. Without Core the mod still runs, but nothing checks that everybody has it and each player plays by their own file.

What has not been tested

Eight Devkit scenarios in scenarios/ passed in singleplayer on 2026-09-29: the unlock levels, the bar filling and the whole deposit breaking, which deposits count as which metal, the Mistlands rule, a shut metal, stone, tin, and the pickaxe wearing the same into the bar as by hand. The Left Alt tap, and Alt+Tab not switching it, were checked by hand. All of that ran with Vandi installed.

Not run yet: two players on one deposit, a bar kept across a logout, and counting the boss without Vandi, from the game's own kill record.

Bugs and ideas

Both go to the site. longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/bugs is for anything broken, and longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/ideas is for what a mod should do next. You can vote on other people's ideas there as well.

Signing in takes a Steam or Discord account. I work from that list, so the votes decide what I pick up next.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

Changelog