1. Controls
2. Talking to a thrall
3. Sending one away and getting it back
4. The depot
5. The bindstone
6. The three of them
7. Levelling, and the wall
8. Farming
9. Carrying
10. Repairing
11. The bindstone's ledger
12. Notable config
13. Safety rails
14. Building
15. Multiplayer
16. Design notes
17. Author
18. Core is optional
19. Bugs and ideas

A Valheim mod that lets you put greydwarves to work. Bind one at a bindstone, lead it to a forest, a copper vein or a berry patch, and tell it to work from there. It clears the ground around that spot and hauls what it gathers to a depot you build.

There are three of them and each does its own work and nothing else: an ordinary greydwarf carries between your depots, a shaman tends what grows, and a brute cuts and mines. Which one you bind is the decision, because none of them can be retrained into another.

Built against the installed game (Unity 6000.0.75, BepInEx 5.4.23.5, Harmony 2.9).

Controls

Thralls binds no keys at all. Everything is a menu:

That is deliberate. Keys quietly owned most of the numpad and collided twice with another of my mods, most Macs have no numpad and Valheim ships a macOS build, and the four that were genuinely useful were build aids rather than thrall commands. They live in Devkit now.

There is also a console command, for when you would rather type than click:

thralls bind [tier]    bind one at the bindstone you are standing at
thralls job <job>      chop, mine, gather, farm, repair, follow or none
thralls base           move the nearest thrall's work base to your feet
thralls come           call the nearest one to you
thralls haul           send it to unload now rather than when its pack fills
thralls release        dismiss the nearest one
thralls list           the crew: level, job, pack, how far off

It does exactly what the panels do, because it is the same code behind both. It is not a cheat and does not need devcommands: binding still costs what binding costs and still waits for the right boss. It exists because a button in a panel cannot be pressed by anything but a person, which left the whole mod untestable by anything but an evening of clicking.

Talking to a thrall

Walk up to one and press E. Its orders panel opens: what it is doing down the left, what you can tell it down the right.

The left rail carries the two numbers you walked over to find out: how far the depot is, and how far its base is. A thrall standing next to you with its base three hundred metres away is a thrall that will walk off the moment you stop talking, and there was previously no way to see that.

Work from here moves the base to the ground under your feet, without changing the job, so a crew can be led twenty metres up the treeline without re-assigning any of them.

Sending one away and getting it back

Three different things, and all three keep the thrall's name, level and tool.

Raising a fallen one costs one of its own heads and half the bones it was bound with, which is the table under the three of them. Calling a resting one back is its own price in the config, and an empty one makes calling back free again.

Resting and dying are not the same list. A thrall you sent away is waiting; a thrall that was killed is on the roll of the dead and costs goods to raise. Either way it returns at the level it had, so experience is never lost. Only the goods are.

Without a bindstone there is no roll, so a thrall released in the field is released for good. The panel says which of the two it did.

The depot

Thralls unload into a depot, a piece you build, and nowhere else.

It is a chest underneath, a real container, six by four, that you can open and take from like any other. What it adds is a radius: any thrall whose work base is within DepotRange (60m) hauls its pack there and draws its seed there. Nothing needs nominating and nothing is stored on the thrall, so tearing the depot down and rebuilding it somewhere better re-points the whole crew at once.

Build as many as you like. A thrall walks to the nearest depot to the ground it works, and if that one is full it carries on to the next nearest instead of stopping. A second depot behind the first is overflow without being configured as overflow. Only when every one of them in range is full does a thrall say so and go back to standing by.

It was a chest you nominated with a keypress, once per thrall, which was a chore repeated as many times as you had workers. Softening that with an auto-adopt made it worse in a different way: a thrall would quietly claim whichever box happened to be nearest the bindstone, including one you were keeping something else in. Building the store where you want the store says everything, in one action, in the world rather than in a setting you cannot see.

The depot is a tally mast, a bound post with a crossarm, a basket and a sack hung off it and a plank bin at its foot. It stands 2.7m, which is deliberate: it governs a radius, so it has to be findable from inside that radius. Look at it to see how many of your crew are using it.

The bindstone

The stone you bind at is the trader's rune stone, the red-runed standing stone from Haldor's camp. Not a copy of it: the piece wears the game's own object, borrowed at runtime from the camp's location and never shipped in the package.

It is the one place this mod wears vanilla art rather than something modelled for it, and that is deliberate. A bindstone is a rock somebody carved a binding into, the game already has exactly that rock, and four hand-built stones were drawn and rejected before the honest answer turned out to be the one standing in the Black Forest.

AltarShapes is what decides. bindstone=Vendor_BlackForest/TraderRune is the default and means "wear that prop out of that location"; a bare name like bindstone wears the model file of the same name sitting beside the plugin instead, and the hand-modelled stone is still in the package for anyone who prefers it. The build-menu icon is photographed from whatever it ends up wearing, so it cannot disagree with what you build.

The three of them

Each thrall is one trade and stays that way. A shaman does not chop slowly, it does not chop: the orders panel does not draw the jobs its body will not take, so what a thrall can be told is the list in front of you.

All three answer once The Elder is down, so they arrive about when you start working the ground they came from. The head is the point of the price: three of a creature's own heads to bind one of it, which is a hunt rather than a shopping list. Raising a fallen one takes a single head and half the bones, because what you are buying back is the one that already knows its work: it returns at the level it died with, where a fresh one starts at nothing.

The carrier gets three extra pack slots over the other two. A porter whose pack is a woodcutter's walks the same distance for a third of the goods, which is the only thing its trade is about.

Five thralls can work at once, flat. MaxThralls (20) is a separate number: how many you may keep. Five of them work and the rest stand by, rest, or follow.

Levelling, and the wall

Levelling is earned, not bought. A thrall gains experience by working:

So the thrall you actually put to work is the one that gets good at it, and a thrall left standing at the bindstone stays a novice however long you keep it.

It stops at level 5. Experience stops there too rather than banking, and the hover text says so. Infusing it with a heartwood lifts the ceiling to 10 and gives it a star; a second heartwood lifts it to 20 and gives it the second star. A thrall wearing stars is therefore one somebody spent a heartwood on, not one that happened to reach a number, and it is genuinely tougher for it: stars are the game's own creature levels.

Heartwood comes from Vaettir, and Thralls does not depend on it. Without that mod the item does not exist, the infusion is refused in words that say so, and the cap stands at 5. InfuseItem points the gate at something else if you would rather play it without.

Levels make a thrall hit harder and swing faster, +8% damage and +3% speed each. They never change its tool tier, which is the hard gate: a Black Forest thrall cannot fell an oak or mine silver however long you leave it, exactly as a flint axe cannot.

Bind from the bindstone's ledger, which shows each trade, what it works at, its price, and lights up when you can afford it.

Farming

A farming thrall does the full loop, not just the picking:

1. Harvests anything ripe inside its work radius.
2. Sows seed from its pack onto free tilled soil, nearest spot first.
3. When it runs out of seed, walks to the depot, delivers the produce and draws a fresh batch of seed (SeedsPerTrip, default 20).

Before sowing it runs the same checks the crop would run on itself (cultivated ground, right biome, open sky, no crowding), so it will not waste seed on soil where nothing grows. If the depot has no seed it says so once and stops making the trip for two minutes rather than pacing back and forth.

What counts as a seed is read off the cultivator's own piece table, so any plant a mod adds to the cultivator is sown too, at that plant's own seed cost.

Carrying

A carrier works between depots rather than on the ground. Its home is the depot nearest its work base, which is the same rule every other thrall uses for "which depot is mine": walk to your hall, press E on it, work from here. It walks the outlying depots within PorterRange (100m) and brings their contents back.

What it carries is decided by the destination. It only takes things the home depot already holds some of. Put one wood in the hall's depot and wood starts coming home; take the last of it out and it stops. That keeps the rule in the world rather than in a filter list, and it is why a carrier can never strip the seed out of a farm's depot, which carry-everything would do on its first trip.

It only runs while you are about. A thrall ticks when a player is near enough to load it, so a carrier shuffles goods while you build at the base. It is not a courier that works overnight.

Repairing

Set a thrall to repair and it becomes the site foreman for that area: it finds the most damaged piece within its work radius, walks over, and repairs it, then moves on to the next worst. Repair costs nothing, exactly as it does when you swing the hammer yourself. Leave one posted at a base and it will quietly undo storm and raid wear.

The bindstone's ledger

Press E on a bindstone to open the ledger, which lists every thrall with:

• a rename field
• what it is doing, how full its pack is, how far away it is, and whether a depot is in reach of where it works
• job buttons that put it to work where it stands
• Come, to call it to the bindstone
• Release, to dismiss it

There is also Recall all here. The panel closes with its own button, with Escape, or by walking more than 8m away.

The ledger is the crew view: everyone at once, and hiring. For one thrall where it stands, talk to it instead.

Notable config

BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.thralls.cfg, written on first run.

• CarryJobs / TendJobs / LabourJobs: which jobs each trade will take. This is the wall, and moving a job from one list to another re-cuts the trades without a rebuild.
• Tier1CarryCost / Tier1TendCost / Tier1Cost: what binding each of the three costs, and Tier1CarryRevive / Tier1TendRevive / Tier1ReviveCost what raising it costs.
• LevelCaps: the levels a thrall cannot pass without being infused, default 5,10. Empty means no gate and no stars, and it levels to MaxLevel on work alone.
• InfuseItem: what an infusion consumes, default GroveHeartwood from Vaettir. Point it at something vanilla to play the gate without that mod.
• CarryPackBonus: extra pack slots a carrier gets over the other trades, default 3.
• PorterRange: how far a carrier walks to fetch from another depot, default 100.
• Breeds: how many biomes are offered, default 1. Raise to 5 for the draugr, golem, berserker and seeker, which are written and still have one body each rather than three.
• BaseWorkSlots / MaxWorkSlots: both 5, which is what makes the crew a flat five. Lower the first to make station extensions near the bindstone earn slots again.
• TierNCost: what a biome above the first costs to bind, whichever trade you pick.
• RecruitCost: an extra cost on every breed, e.g. Coins:50. Empty by default.
• MaxThralls: how many you may keep in total, default 20.
• ToolTier: tool tier of a rank 1 thrall, default 1. Each rank adds one on top.
• ChopDamage / PickaxeDamage / SwingInterval: how fast they work.
• SeedsPerTrip: seed drawn from the depot per visit, default 20. Set to 0 to stop them restocking, so they only sow what you hand them directly.
• WorkRadius: how far from the assigned spot they will roam for more of the same resource.
• DepotRange: how far a depot reaches, default 60. Measured from the thrall's work base, not from the thrall, so a crew spread along a treeline all agree on one store.
• DepotWidth / DepotHeight: how much it holds, default 6 by 4. A full depot stops the crew working, so this is a larger chest and a half rather than a chest.
• DepotCost: what it takes to build, default wood, log, scraps and 2 iron.
• AltarShapes: which bindstone shapes the hammer offers, and what each one wears. name=prefab wears one of the game's own objects, name=Location/Prop reaches inside a location for something that is only ever camp dressing, and a bare name wears the model file beside the plugin. Removing a name destroys every bindstone of that shape already standing, so change what a shape wears rather than what it is called.
• AltarIconAngle: pitch and yaw the build-menu icon is photographed from, for a shape wearing one of the game's objects. Only that; every other shape has an icon beside its model.
• TalkOnUse: whether pressing use on a thrall opens its orders panel. On by default.
• SmashTiers / SmashYield: which breeds fell trees bare-handed, and how much of the tree survives it. Set to the golem, so dormant until Breeds reaches 3.

Safety rails

• Thralls never target anything with a Piece or WearNTear component, so they will not chop up your buildings.
• Only a thrall that is actively working picks items off the ground. An idle or following thrall will not pocket something you dropped on purpose.
• Tamed creatures do not attack player structures, which is vanilla behaviour the mod relies on.

Building

dotnet build Thralls.csproj -c Release

The build copies Thralls.dll into the Thunderstore Default profile's plugin folder. Override ValheimDir or ProfileDir on the command line to target a different install or a different profile.

Multiplayer

Each thrall is driven by whoever owns its ZDO, which is normally the player who recruited it and is standing nearby. It works in co-op, but the mod has only been exercised in single-player so far. Treat dedicated-server use as untested.

What has been exercised, as of 2026-09-22 and by a scripted run rather than a memory of one: the bindstone and the depot standing, priced and refusing to be built for nothing; a thrall bound, refused for want of the price, ordered, listed and released; and one chopping until its pack was full, hauling it in, and putting wood in a depot. Resting, recall, raising, and the mine, gather, farm and repair jobs have not been run since the rework and should be treated as untested.

Design notes

Why there are no keybinds, why three trades rather than one thrall, why a trade is a wall rather than a preference, how a thrall is a tamed Dverger rather than a hand-rolled AI, and what the golem does when it arrives: DESIGN.md.

Author

Thralls is an original mod by Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software). Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Thijssen. MIT licensed. See LICENSE.

Core is optional

Thralls installs and runs on its own. Core is a soft dependency: present, it is used; absent, nothing here is degraded. Installing Thralls from Thunderstore no longer installs Core with it.

What Core adds is the version gate, a handshake that compares mod versions and build ids on connect and refuses a client that does not match. Little is at risk here: a thrall is a tamed vanilla creature with a waypoint, so there is no unresolvable prefab to lose a ZDO to. What is given up is the report when two ends run different builds.

Solo, none of that applies and Core is not needed at all.

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.

Coming next

Written, not released yet. This is what the next version of Thralls will carry, and it can still change.

It builds on Valheim 1.0 again

Four things had moved underneath it since the game's full release, and nothing had been compiled against them:

• Hoverable grew a third member, GetHoverOffset, so the bindstone and the depot no longer implemented it. Both answer zero, which is what the serialised offset defaults to on everything vanilla ships.
• Piece.SetCreator takes a platform id beside the player id and writes its index into the world's player history. A crop a thrall sows passes the local user, exactly as Player.PlacePiece does, and the player id stays the thrall's owner.
• VisEquipment moved off item names and on to stable hashes plus a quality, so the tool in a thrall's hand is set by hash now.
• The shared prefab registry in the Core repo grew a call into Core, so this needs Core at build time even though it still runs without it and still declares no dependency.

A bindstone that was free for everybody

Found while fixing the above, and standing in the code the whole time. A piece's cost is a list of resolved ItemDrops rather than names, and the first ObjectDB of a session is a stub with no items in it at all. The bindstone and the depot were priced once, against whatever database happened to be live, and then a Ready check that only asks whether the scene knows the prefab sent every later pass down an early return.

Priced against that stub, a cost resolves to an empty array, and an empty array is not a broken piece. It is a piece that is free, permanently, for everybody, with nothing in the UI to say so.

Costs are now written on every pass until every name in them resolves, and the hammer waits for that. Registration into the scene deliberately does not wait: a prefab missing when the game turns saved ZDOs back into objects costs every bindstone already standing in that world, where a piece missing from the build menu for a few frames is a piece you build a moment later.

The bindstone is Haldor's rune stone

It wears one of the game's own objects now, the red-runed standing stone from the trader's camp, rather than a model of ours. That was Robbin's call and it replaces the four hand-modelled designs that had been waiting on a pick since August.

The stone is camp dressing rather than a registered prefab, so nothing in ZNetScene knows it and asking for it by name answers nothing. It is reached through the location instead: ZoneSystem holds a ZoneLocation per location, its prefab is a soft reference, and the stone is a child of it. A shape in AltarShapes can now name Location/Prop to wear something that only exists inside a camp.

The icon is photographed from whatever the piece is wearing, on an orthographic camera five kilometres under the map, rather than shipped as a file. A picture of Iron Gate's art is not a thing an MIT package can carry, and a rendered file would go stale the moment a shape wears something else. AltarIconAngle turns the camera without a rebuild.

Console commands, and the mod became testable

Every order in this mod is a button in an IMGUI panel, and an IMGUI button cannot be pressed by a script. So the feature the mod exists for had never been exercised by anything but a person with a mouse, and every change since was an argument from the code.

thralls bind [tier]    thralls job <job>    thralls base
thralls come           thralls haul         thralls release     thralls list

They are the same calls the panel's buttons make rather than a second path that could drift from them, so bind pays the same price and obeys the same boss gate. They are not registered as cheats, since a command marked as one is refused for every client on a dedicated server.

Four scenario files in scenarios/ cover what they now reach: the bindstone standing, priced and wearing the stone; the depot as a real container of the size it promises; a thrall bound, refused, ordered and released; and the whole loop end to end, which is the first time a thrall has chopped, filled its pack, hauled it in and put wood in a depot without somebody driving it.

Three trades, and a trade is a wall

The Black Forest offers three kinds now instead of one, each doing its own work and nothing else: an ordinary greydwarf carries between depots, a shaman farms and gathers, a brute chops, mines and repairs. The panels do not grey out the jobs a body will not take, they do not draw them.

Each is bound with three of its own heads and a count of bones - ten, twenty and thirty - and raising a fallen one costs a single head and half the bones, because what you buy back is the one that already knows its work.

The trade is a second axis beside the tier rather than a replacement for it, which is what keeps a Black Forest thrall out of a silver vein: tier is still the biome and still decides tool tier, reach and pack size.

A carrier job, depot to depot

A carrier's home is the depot nearest its work base, set the way everything else is - walk there and tell it to work from here. It fetches from the other depots within PorterRange and brings back only what the home depot already holds some of, so a carrier can never strip the seed out of a farm's depot. It runs while you are about, not overnight.

Thralls stop at five and ten

A thrall works its way up on its own and stops dead at level five. A heartwood lifts it to ten and gives it a star; a second lifts the ceiling to MaxLevel and gives it the other. Experience stops at the wall rather than banking against the day somebody turns up with one.

Heartwood comes from Vaettir and this mod does not depend on it: without that mod the item does not exist, the infusion is refused in words that say so, and the cap stands. Point InfuseItem at something vanilla to play the gate without it.

Console commands

thralls bind [trade] [tier] job <job> base come haul infuse release list

The same calls the panel's buttons make. They exist because an IMGUI button cannot be pressed by a script, which had left the whole mod untestable by anything but a hand.

Known, and not fixed

A tree felled by a thrall can destroy a depot standing near it. This turned up as a scenario failing once and passing on the next run, and it is vanilla behaviour that the mod puts you in the way of: a chest a few metres from a creature felling trees is a chest under a falling trunk. No mitigation yet, and it is worth knowing before you site a depot in a treeline.

Changelog