Valheim incredible success in the last month has been incredible. After smashing 5 million copies sold and holding overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam the game as been going up and up. Despite the overwhelming success of the game there are some things mechanics and parts of the game players are having gripes with. For this, as gamers, we turn to mods! For the list we are not focusing on the best mods for Valheim, merely showing off the most popular mods available and what you can expect.
Over on the Valheim Mod Nexus there are already 383 mods that have been created for the game. Considering the game has only been out for a little over a month and has no native modding tools this is incredible. From content, to mechanics, to UI changes there seems to be no stopping modders at the moment. Today, we are going to look at the 8 most popular mods that are currently available for Valheim on the mod nexus. We will talk about what you can expect from the mod, and provide a link to the mod’s official page.
You can click on any of the header images for each mod in order to go to the nexus mods page for each mod.
For the sake of clarity, none of the mods featured in this post are installed and used by the author. The risks involved in modding the content and possible loss of game data is kind of detrimental to my work!
With that out of the way, let’s get to the list of the 8 most popular mods for Valheim! The list is in order from least to most popular, meaning mod number 8 is currently the most downloaded mod for Valheim.
Valheim Mod 1: Quick Stack
The first mod we will talk about is a quality of life addition to Valheim. The mod is titled quick stack and was created by nexusmods user damnsneaker. The mod allows you to press a key in order to automatically send a group of items out of your inventory and into a chosen container. By default, the mod uses the ` key to do this. Inventory slots and specific items can be excluded from automatically stacking if there are objects in your inventory you don’t want to always send into a chest.
Quality of life mods are always appreciated in games as they don’t necessarily change too much content-wise about the game but make the game flow a little bit better.
Valheim Mod 2: BetterUI
BetterUI is a mod that, believe it or not, tweaks the UI. The mod makes some subtle, (and some not so subtle) changes to the way many aspect of the UI work in Valheim. As seen in the image above, the tools and weapons’ quality rating are replaced with star values which look quite nice. There are other features to the mod as seen on the mod’s nexusmods page. Modder Masa, has created a great little UI mod here.
Some other great changes in the mod include changes to the item tooltips which categorize the values into different section. Another great feature is that the skills page is changed to show clearer what skill level the player is on and what percentage they are to the next level. Perhaps my favorite addition is the health bar. Each enemy has a health bar that will have a specific value showing how much health they have currently. Wonder if you can take an enemy one-on-one no more! Plus you can swap out the kind of ugly awareness indicator for a color-coded name which lets you know whether an enemy is aggressive towards you or you are hidden. Very cool.
Valheim Mod 3: Unrestricted Portals
Tired of not being able to bring certain items through portals in Valheim? Not enjoying the grind of sailing metals across seas? Boy do we have a mod for you. Unrestricted Portals is fairly self-explanatory. One of the most divisive features in the game is whether or not metals and ores should be able to be brought through portals. This mod makes it possible. The mod also has different setting if your want to configure which exact items should be allowed through and it is also possible to set limits on the amount of items to allow through.
The description on the mod’s official nexusmods page states;
“Because Valheim has so many resources that are separated by tons of land and water, it makes grinding certain resources a pain. Having to go from one point to another takes lots of time. It is a useless grind. The developers fixed this by adding portals. This would be a solution, but they then blacklisted certain items. The blacklist of certain items forced players to go back to doing the useless grind.“
Want to teleport metals through portals? Check this one out.
Valheim Mod 4: Custom Textures
This mod is the first texture mod featured on the list. The mod allows allows you to change the textures on some items and models in the game. You can change the color and look of various weapons, tooldsand armors. From the mod’s nexus page;
“This mod should allow you to replace the following:
- player model textures
- item inventory icons
- equipment textures like armor, weapons, and tools
- terrain and water textures
- world object textures, almost everything else in the game world“
Have a scroll through the official page’s images to see what kind of changes a bit of color can make in the world of Valheim! Personally, I’m a big fan of customization mods in particular.
Valheim Mod 5: Clock
One of the main issues I have with the UI in Valheim is the fact I can never tell what time it is. Some users have been very creative making sundials with the use of the games construction system. This is great if you’re waiting around in your base and can see the time but what about when you’re exploring and want to know when to travel home?
Queue: Clocks
Clocks creates an actual digital clock at the top of the game’s UI showing you exactly what time it is in the game. I love the look of the clock and I think it fits very well into the games aesthetic. It wouldn’t surprise me if this mod was on the developer’s radar to be officially added into the game. The mod even has popups for the different day cycles. For example, early evening, night, midnight.
The mod is customizable and the font, UI position and other settings can be tweaked to the users preference. If you are looking for a great 1uality of life time mod for time display, this is certainly the greatest time mod I’ve seen for Valheim so far.
Valheim Mod 6: Equipment and Quick Slots
This Valheim mod adds a more classic RPG equipment slot. The Equipment UI appears outside of your main inventory and essentially expands your inventory meaning that your armor will not take up an inventory space. Think Minecraft equipment inventory.
The mod also adds 3 new slots assigned to different hotkeys on your keyboard. You can place food, potions or anything you’d like here to quickly access these items without having to open your inventory and select them individually. As aforementioned, great for different potions on the go, or equipping different arrow types depending on your enemy.
Valheim Mod 7: Craft Build Smelt Cook Fuel Pull From Containers
Easily the mod with the worst name on the list, Craft Build Smelt Cook Fuel Pull From Containers basically gives it away from the name. With this mod, anytime you try to construct or craft an item, the game will take into account items that are in nearby containers as well. The mod adds this ability so you don’t have to run around filling up your inventory with all of the materials.
The mod also makes some subtle UI changes which tell the player how much of each items they have available in the crafting UI as seen in the image above. The mod also has a great feature where you can easily put the max amount of coal/ore/materials into a processer which will save your finger and E key from getting worn down. The following description is pulled from the mod’s nexusmods page;
“Crafting stations and build menu will show an item’s create-ability based on resources available in all nearby containers rather than just player inventory.
Resource requirement numbers will now also show the total amount available in nearby chests. You can customize this in the config file.
Resources that the player’s inventory doesn’t have enough of will flash yellow (customizable) instead of red.“
Definitely one to look at if you’re sick of looking around and pulling items into your inventory for crafting or building.
Valheim Mod 8: Valheim Plus
Here it is! The most popular mod for Valheim, Valheim Plus. Valheim Plus adds an incredible amount of quality of life features, tweaks and other gameplay changes for the game. It is one of the largest mods available to download for Valheim and the most popular by far. The description on the nexusmods page description is as follows:
“A HarmonyX Mod aimed at improving the gameplay quality of Valheim. The mod includes several different main features including modifiers to ingame stats of players, buildings and entities and a sophisticated system to build and place objects with high precision and a system to modify already placed objects with high precision. The general goal is to provide V+ as a base modification for your gameplay to increase quality of life, change difficulty or have a better experience in general. The mod also comes with a version and configuration control system for servers and users, allowing servers to make sure that only people with the same configuration are able to join their servers.“
It is hard to say exactly what Valheim Plus does because it adds and changes so much of the original game. You can view the features of the mod o the nexusmods page which is available here. There are so many features that this page would be doubled if I listed them all here as well. The mod modifies the player’s HUD, day and night cycle, farming rates and much much more. There is configuration if you want to allow or disallow certain tweaks and features in the mod and you can decide what to add.
Keep in mind there are a lot of tweaks or fixes that have been added to the official Valheim game which are no longer needed to be added by Valheim Plus such as persistent map location toggle. The mod features a great system of sharing map exploration. This is one of the most highly requested features for Valheim but you can have it right away with Valheim Plus.
That was our list of the 8 most popular Valheim mods. Which ones are you currently using? Are you more of a fan of customization mods or do you download most of your mods just to fix existing issues or provide QOL improvements? Let me know in the comments below.
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