FehuMounts 1.1.0 — release candidate 1

Deer companions and bareback mounts for Valheim. This candidate extends the original FehuMounts 1.0.4 source. It is a local test candidate, pending in-game and dedicated-server validation.

Deer life

• Feed wild deer with raspberries, blueberries, carrots, turnips, mushrooms, cloudberries or onions. Exact food prefab IDs are configurable.
• Taming progresses while the deer is fed, calm and away from nearby players. Default duration: 30 minutes.
• Tamed deer continue eating. Feeding consumes a food item before granting its effects.
• An unclaimed tame deer belongs to the first player who pets it or gives it a command. When dropped food contains a known creator, feeding can record that owner earlier. No nearby-player guess is used.
• Two fed adult deer with the same owner can mate. Pregnancy lasts 120 loaded seconds by default; both parents receive a mating cooldown.
• The fawn inherits its owner and stars. Star selection is 70% lower parent, 25% higher parent, 5% one above the higher parent, capped at five stars.
• Fawns grow over 2,000 loaded seconds, gradually increase in size and cannot be ridden or breed. The butcher knife is blocked for fawns by default; enemies can still hurt them.
• Taming progress, ownership, names, loyalty, pregnancy, fawn age and stamina are stored with the world objects. Growth and pregnancy pause when the creature is not being simulated. Birth waits if the pen is full; pregnancy reservations count toward mating limits.

Controls

Look at a tamed deer:

Control	Action
E	Follow / Stay
Q	Pet; owner gains loyalty, with a five-second pet cooldown
R	Rename, up to 20 characters
Shift + E	Ride an adult deer with at least two stars
Movement keys	Steer while mounted; uses the game's mapped movement buttons
Run	Gallop while stamina remains
E or Jump	Dismount

The mount panel shows stamina. Names, stars, feeding status, growth, pregnancy and loyalty appear on hover. UI focus stops riding movement and suppresses pet/rename shortcuts. Q and R are currently keyboard shortcuts.

Follow and Stay use pathfinding; there is no teleport-to-owner fallback. The legacy FollowTeleportDistance config key now means maximum follow distance.

Riding tiers

Stars	Rideable	Speed multiplier	Stamina	Sprint drain / second
0–1	No	1.00	100	15
2	Yes	1.00	100	15
3	Yes	1.15	125	15
4	Yes	1.25	140	12.75
5	Yes	1.35	160	10.5

Base mounted speed is 5 m/s walking and 10 m/s galloping, configurable on the server. Loyalty at 30/60/90 adds a 5/10/15% mounted speed bonus. Stamina regenerates at 10 per second and does not reset when remounting. No saddle item is required.

Installation and compatibility

Install the same candidate DLL on the server and every client at BepInEx/plugins/FehuMounts/FehuMounts.dll. Requires BepInExPack for Valheim. Jotunn is not required by this candidate.

Remove older copies of FehuMounts from the test profile before adding the candidate. Keep a separate backup of the profile and test world.

The five supplied reference mods are not dependencies. This candidate declares conflicts with TameableDeer, RideableTames, TameableAnimals, ServerTaming and LetMeTameYou to prevent simultaneous modification of deer. Other deer AI/riding mods also need a compatibility review.

Gameplay decisions and interaction requests run on the server. Server settings are sent to clients every three seconds; remote requests are ignored until compatible settings arrive. The sender is mapped to its connected player character. Names, distance, ownership, rider occupancy and movement values are checked server-side. This does not claim protection against every exploit in Valheim's native networking.

The old experimental FehuMount_Deer clone is not registered by this candidate. Worlds containing that prefab must be reviewed before migration; use a fresh test world first. Do not open a production world with the candidate as an experiment.

Legacy whisper/whistle and manual-taming configuration entries are retained for compatibility but do not register a whistle item or select another feeding implementation. The old General/MinStarsToRide value is considered once when migrating settings; subsequent edits belong in Riding/MinStarsToRide. Existing vanilla tamed deer retain their tame state and existing Fehu owner IDs.

Build and validation

Build with dotnet build src/FehuMounts.csproj -c Release. Override ValheimDir and BepInExCoreDir MSBuild properties for another installation. The project references local game assemblies and does not redistribute them.

Run deterministic checks with dotnet run --project tests/DeerRules.Checks.csproj -c Release.

Runtime acceptance steps are in qa/ACCEPTANCE.md. A successful build and rule checks do not establish in-game, multiplayer or save/reload compatibility.