BeastheimBanners

First-party banner pieces for the Beastheim 1.0 modpack, built by cloning vanilla's own banner piece (mesh, collider, cloth/wind shader, LODs) and swapping in original artwork — no custom mesh or shader, no third-party assets.

Formerly named RiverheimBanners. Renamed because "Riverheim" is a third-party world-generation mod (Gurebu-Riverheim) in this modpack, not this project's own identity — it should never have been used as this package's namespace. The pre-rename 1.2.0 build is preserved as historical evidence in the old custom-mods/RiverheimBanners/FROZEN-1.2.0-EVIDENCE/ folder, untouched.

Why this exists

The NewBeginings archaeological recovery project extracted 11 historical player-built structures via PlanBuild. Two of the recovered prefab names — banner1 and banner5 — originally came from Reidrheimr-ReidrheimrFactionPack, a mod excluded from the Beastheim 1.0 mod stack (it's a faction/guild skill system unrelated to building reconstruction; only those two banner pieces were ever actually needed). Rather than pull in that whole mod for two pieces, this package registers first-party replacements under the exact same legacy prefab IDs, so every recovered blueprint referencing them resolves and places correctly with no blueprint modification needed.

Pieces

Prefab ID	Name	Notes
banner1	Beasts of Midgard War Banner	Legacy ID — pinned, do not rename (recovered blueprint compatibility)
banner5	Beasts of Midgard Battle Standard	Legacy ID — pinned, do not rename (recovered blueprint compatibility)
BeastheimBanner_GildedLady	The Gilded Lady	First-party original
BeastheimBanner_TheUnbound	The Unbound	First-party original
BeastheimBanner_WrathOfTheDeep	Wrath of the Deep	First-party original

Additional original banners may be added over time; anything beyond the two legacy IDs above uses a BeastheimBanner_-prefixed prefab ID so it can never collide with a vanilla prefab name or another mod's naming scheme.

Rendering behavior: mirrored/heraldic appearance (intentional, not a defect)

All 11 vanilla banner variants share one identical mesh, and that mesh's UV layout maps both the left and right halves of the cloth back onto the same narrow texture strip, mirrored. Every banner in this package therefore renders as two mirrored copies of its artwork side by side — a heraldic "twinned crest" look — rather than one single portrait.

This was investigated and confirmed deliberately: the historical ReidrheimrFactionPack banner mesh has byte-for-byte identical UV data to vanilla's shared mesh, meaning the original 2023-era banner1/banner5 always rendered this same mirrored way in-game. This package reproduces that geometry/UV behavior faithfully rather than introducing a new compatibility defect. Confirmed and accepted as the intended appearance since 1.2.0 — do not treat this as a bug, and do not attempt to "fix" it without building a genuinely custom mesh (a real scope increase, out of scope for this package). Artists designing future banners for this mod should compose with this mirroring in mind (e.g. a centered symmetric emblem) rather than an off-center single-character portrait.

Design notes for maintainers

• Mesh, collider, and cloth/wind shader are all cloned live from vanilla's piece_banner01 at runtime (PrefabManager.CreateClonedPrefab) — nothing is shipped as a custom Unity asset bundle. Only the PNG textures under Assets/ are original to this package.
• Vanilla's own banner cloth mesh (piece_banner01's default child) already matches the historical banner mesh's real-world dimensions (~2.97m tall × 1.18m wide) almost exactly, so no scale compensation is normally needed — the code still computes and applies a compensating scale defensively in case a future different base piece is used.
• Size compensation is applied to the cloth child's transform, never the prefab root. PlanBuild's blueprint placement code sets the placed instance's root transform.localScale directly to the blueprint's saved value, which would silently discard any compensation baked into the root.
• No dependency on Reidrheimr-ReidrheimrFactionPack or makail-Skyheim. piece_rune_altar (also originally from Skyheim) is intentionally not recreated here — that gap is handled by manual reconstruction, not a mod dependency.
• Plugin GUID is beastheim.banners (was riverheim.banners prior to the rename — treat as a distinct mod identity for update/dependency purposes, not an in-place upgrade).

Dependencies

• BepInExPack for Valheim
• Jötunn, the Valheim Library

Credits

Artwork commissioned specifically for this package — not derived from or copied out of any third-party mod. Mesh/shader/collider are Valheim's own vanilla banner piece, cloned at runtime via Jötunn's PrefabManager, not redistributed as a separate asset.