Cartur's Map Pins

Pins the world onto your map as you explore it, labelled, so you can find your way back to things without writing them down.

Walk near an ore deposit, a crypt entrance, a wild beehive, an abandoned chest — it lands on your map with a name on it. Pins are saved to your character like hand-placed ones, and they stay put after you clear the node so you can tick them off yourself.

What gets pinned

Ore deposits · dungeon and cave entrances · Fuling villages, Greydwarf camps and Charred fortresses · wild beehives · runestones · abandoned chests · named minibosses · leviathans · traders · maypoles · your bed, as home · spawners · wisp fountains · high-value pickables · boss altars · Deep North dungeons by name.

Every category is a switch. Berries, mushrooms, crops and surface flint are off by default — they would carpet the map and bloat your save.

Changing a pin's icon

Shift-click any pin to open an editor beside it: rename it, pick a different icon, choose a colour, set its size and opacity. Works on pins this mod placed and on pins you placed yourself.

There is also an icon grid on the large map, next to vanilla's own pin buttons, for choosing what a hand-placed pin will look like. Drag the small gold square in its top left corner to move the whole panel, and it stays where you put it. Only the square drags, so clicking an icon still picks the icon.

Keeping the map readable

A world you have played for a while fills up, and an ore field is a dozen separate deposits — so it was a dozen identical pins in one white blob. Pins with the same name standing on the same patch of ground now draw as one. Zoom in and they separate again. Nothing is deleted: every pin is still on the map, still saved and still searchable.

Pins are full size until the map is 15% zoomed out and shrink to 60% at the whole-world view, and names stop being drawn past 20% out. Both points are settings, and both can be turned off. Sizes glide and pins fade rather than popping in and out.

There is also a switch to draw pins with no names at all, if you want the map to read as icons — the names stay searchable, they are just not drawn. And one to stop drawing pins further than a set distance from your character, off by default.

Chests you have emptied fade to half, so a chest you have been through reads as dealt with without losing its place.

Death markers

The game drops a marker where you died and never takes it away, so a long save ends up with markers for graves that are long gone. Loot the grave and its marker goes with it.

Finding a pin

Type in the search box across the top of the map. Everything that doesn't match fades, so you can see where the copper is without losing the shape of the map.

Notable bits

• 153 icons to pick from. Every category and kind takes its own.
• Emptied chests change icon. Loot a chest and its pin switches to a looted marker. Refill it and it switches back.
• Mined-out ore pins remove themselves. Deposits never respawn, so a pin on a worked-out node is a walk to an empty hole.
• Dungeons tick off once every chest is empty and every mud pile mined.
• Crowded pins get out of each other's way. Stacked pins shrink, and where two names overlap the rarer one is kept — CHEST appears forty times and says less than CRYPT. Point at a pin and its name always shows.
• Names are properly translated. Stored as the game's own localisation tokens, so a crypt reads "Burial Chambers" in your language.
• Nothing is hardcoded to a prefab name. What counts as ore, a beehive or a pickable is worked out at runtime from components, so it survives game updates and picks up modded content for free.

Settings

BepInEx/config/com.jekkle.valheim.carturmappins.cfg.

Setting	Default	What it does
DiscoveryRadius	60	Metres. How close you must get before something pins.
ShowPinLabels	true	Draw the name under each pin.
HideCollidingLabels	true	Stop names being drawn on top of each other.
HideLabelsFromZoom	20	Percent zoomed out past which names stop being drawn. 100 never hides.
ShrinkPinsFromZoom	15	Percent zoomed out before pins start shrinking.
MergeRepeatedPins	true	Draw one icon where several same-named pins sit together.
ShrinkCrowdedPins	true	Shrink pins stacked on one spot.
ZoomedOutPinScale	0.6	How small pins get at full zoom-out. 1 turns it off.
HidePinsBeyond	0	Metres. Hide pins further than this from you. 0 draws all.
Ore / TintByType	true	Colour ore pins by what the ore is.
Ore / ForgetMined	true	Remove an ore pin once its deposit is mined out.
Chest / LootedIcon	Chest open	Icon an emptied chest switches to.
Dungeon / TickWhenLooted	true	Tick a dungeon off once it is cleared.
Home / ReplaceBedMarker	true	Mark your bed as home.
CustomIcons / MapPicker	true	Show the icon grid on the large map.
General / ApplyPreset	None	Sets every switch at once — see below.
General / ResetPins	No	Starts a world's pins over — see below.

Per category there is also Enabled, an icon, and a MinimumSpacing — how far apart two of the same thing must be to earn separate pins.

Most of the list is hidden until you ask for it. There is a switch and an icon for every kind of thing this mod knows about, about 290 settings on their own. They sit behind the Advanced tick box, leaving the seventeen categories in view.

ApplyPreset sets every switch at once. Minimal pins the few things worth walking back to, Everything turns it all on, Defaults restores a fresh install. It is a button, not a state — it returns to None once applied.

Boss altars are off by default. Vanilla already pins them, more weakly. Turn this on for a proper named pin, or leave it off to avoid two markers stacked.

Starting a world's pins over

General / ResetPins removes every pin this mod placed and forgets them, so each is pinned again as you rediscover it.

Pins you placed by hand are untouched, and so is any colour or size you set through the editor. Locations come back within seconds; ore, chests and beehives reappear when their part of the world next loads.

It is a spelled-out dropdown rather than a tick box on purpose — a stray click here would throw away a map somebody spent a long time filling in.

Commands

carturpins_clear	Removes every pin this mod placed.
carturpins_reicon	Resets this mod's pins to their category's current icon. Hand-placed pins are left alone.
carturpins_count	How many are on record.
carturpins_forget_missing	Forgets records whose pin is gone, so those places can be pinned again.
carturpins_dedupe	Removes leftover duplicate pins no record points at. Counts only, unless you pass yes.
carturpins_zoom	Prints the zoom and sizing numbers behind what is drawn. For working out why the map looks the way it does.

If you use badgers Valheim Skies

That mod opens its menu on a hotkey without checking whether you are typing, so a letter typed into the search box fires it. There is an optional download on this page that fixes it — install it only if you use that mod.

Install

Use a mod manager (r2modman / Thunderstore / Gale) and it pulls in BepInEx for you. Manually: drop CarturMapPins.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Client-side. The server doesn't need it and neither do the people you play with.

Pin names come out in the language you play in, and are re-worded if you change it. A pin you have renamed yourself is left alone.

Pairs with Cartur's Compass and Clock, which puts these same pins on a compass bar and drops the ones you've ticked off.

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Free, and always will be. If it improved your game you can tip me on Patreon.

More from Cartur: HD Blood · Compass and Clock · Safe Stamina · Follow Command · Flooring · UI HUD · Waste Management