ArcaneDecor: WaterGardens 1.1.3

Build a quiet corner of Valheim with flowering water lilies, flowing ponds, glowing lanterns, fountains, and fireflies.

WaterGardens adds 51 placeable garden pieces to the hammer's Water Garden category. Combine ponds into a larger garden, decorate their banks, and give each space its own atmosphere with adjustable lighting and sound.

A garden that moves with the world

• Four pond shapes: Round, Oval, Kidney, and Wild. Adjust width from 4 to 24 metres and depth from 0.4 to 3 metres.
• Connected water: Overlapping ponds join together. Elevated overlaps can form downward-flowing waterfalls with their own positional sound.
• Floating lilies: Four leafy lily-pad variations and six blue or white flowering varieties, from small buds to open flowers. Pads follow the water, with stems below the surface, and brush aside when you walk or swim through them.
• Living greenery: Ferns, a red fern, reeds, cattails, grasses, non-berry bushes, ivy, flowers, and glowing mushrooms. Plants use Valheim's wind shading for movement.
• Yggdrasil garden trees: Three decorative varieties, each with its own size menu.
• Stone and light: Garden rocks, stepping stones, a lantern, three fountains, and a dragon statue. Lantern lighting and luminous orbs have adjustable settings.
• Evening ambience: Seven selectable recordings, bright yellow fireflies, and controls for volume, playback speed, distance, and nighttime activity.

Each piece has a matching hammer-menu icon. All configuration menus share the same opaque panel styling.

Installation

With a mod manager

Install ArcaneDecor: WaterGardens through a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager and allow it to install the listed dependencies. Launch Valheim using the modded profile.

Manual installation

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim and Jotunn.
2. Copy the package's entire plugins/ArcaneDecorWaterGardens/ folder into BepInEx/plugins/ inside your Valheim installation.
3. Keep the included Translations folder beside ArcaneDecorWaterGardens.dll.
4. Start the game through BepInEx.

Models, icons, and audio are embedded in the DLL; no separate audio folder is needed. Configuration Manager is not required.

For multiplayer, install the same WaterGardens version and its dependencies on the server and every participating client.

Your first pond

1. Equip the hammer and open Water Garden.
2. Place a pond on suitable ground. Its configuration rock settles onto the terrain.
3. Look at the rock and press E when you see [E] Configure garden.
4. Adjust the pond and its atmosphere, then select Save garden. Cancel or Escape discards menu edits.
5. Add lilies to the water and plants around the edges.

Overlap another pond to connect it. A suitable height difference creates a flowing transition and automatically adds waterfall sound. Use Waterfall volume to adjust it; set it to 0 to mute it.

The pond's rock remains its control point. Remove that rock with the hammer to remove the pond. Normal hammer removal returns the piece's materials.

Shape the atmosphere

Ponds and the Night Garden Stone provide seven recordings named night_ambience_001 through night_ambience_007, plus an Off selection. Adjust loudness, playback speed, and audible distance. Changing playback speed also changes pitch.

Night only limits night ambience and fireflies to nighttime. Turn it off and save to use them during the day. Set Fireflies to 0 to turn them off.

Fountains have individual controls and their own positional running-water audio. Their sound fades with distance and is independent of the selected night recording. The dragon statue has an adjustable glowing orb, without fountain water or audio.

Connected pond controls

Some settings apply to the entire connected group of overlapping ponds:

• Flower and bud size, from 15% to 150%.
• Separate floating controls for lanterns, fountains, and statues.

Pond width, depth, waterfall volume and distance, night ambience, and fireflies remain individual pond settings. The upper pond controls each waterfall flowing out of it. Set Waterfall distance from 5 to 100 metres; the 100% volume setting provides a stronger sound with softened peaks. Rocks sit halfway into the water. Fixtures with floating disabled settle onto the terrain or pond bed.

Each Yggdrasil tree has its own menu with a 25% to 200% size slider. Its roots stay in place as it scales. These are decorative trees, with solid trunks and no harvesting drops. You can build right beside the trunk, including under the canopy, at every supported size.

Controls at a glance

Open a pond rock with [E] Configure garden, then choose Save garden after changing its settings. Cancel or Escape leaves saved settings unchanged.

Control	Range or behavior	Applies to
Width	4-24 m	This pond
Depth	0.4-3 m	This pond
Flowers and buds	15-150%; default 50%	Connected pond group
Floating lanterns, fountains, statues	Separate on/off controls	Connected pond group
Waterfall volume	0-100%; default 35%; 0 mutes	Waterfalls flowing out of this pond
Waterfall distance	5-100 m; default 16 m	Waterfalls flowing out of this pond
Night recording	night_ambience_001 through 007, or Off	This pond
Loudness	0-100%	This pond's night ambience
Playback speed	0.5-1.5x; changes pitch too	This pond's night ambience
Audible distance	5-40 m	This pond's night ambience
Fireflies	0-100; 0 turns them off	This pond
Night only	Restrict night ambience and fireflies to nighttime	This pond

For waterfall sound, edit the upper pond's rock. Fountain sound is configured on each fountain and plays independently of waterfall and night ambience. Set its volume to 0 to mute it; disabling its visual water flow does not mute the recording.

Each lantern, fountain, and dragon statue has its own lighting/glow menu. Each Yggdrasil tree has its own 25-200% size slider. The Night Garden Stone supplies ambience and fireflies without a pond, with 4-24 m coverage.

Placement and compatibility

Start on gentle terrain above the ocean waterline. WaterGardens does not remove Valheim's ocean, so ponds below sea level may be flooded by it. Very steep ground can expose the limits of the game's terrain grid. Existing buildings and large vegetation are not automatically cleared.

Ponds apply a reversible terrain overlay. Removing a pond reveals the saved terrain underneath, including any underlying terrain edits.

Water Garden pieces support InfinityHammer's invulnerability option. Placed pieces remain in the world, and normal hammer removal still returns their materials.

Piece catalog and progression

All 51 pieces are built with the Hammer, in Water Garden, within range of a Workbench. They use early-game Wood, Stone, and Dandelions; no biome visit, boss defeat, or upgraded station is added as a requirement. The decorative Yggdrasil trees do not require reaching the Mistlands. Normal material-discovery rules still apply.

Recipes include the following differences between flower variants. Normal hammer dismantling returns their recipe materials.

Piece	Materials
Shoreline Reeds	2 Stone
Garden Ferns	2 Stone
Marsh Ferns	2 Stone
Low Garden Shrub	2 Stone
Meadow Flower Patch	2 Stone
Garden Dandelions	2 Stone
Green Ivy Panel	2 Stone
Garden Boulder	2 Stone
Stepping Stone	2 Stone
Small Garden Rock	2 Stone
Red Garden Fern	2 Stone
Garden Fern I	2 Stone
Garden Fern II	2 Stone
Garden Flora Cluster	2 Stone
Garden Glow Mushrooms	2 Stone
Garden Reeds VI	2 Stone
Garden Cattails	2 Stone
Garden Rock I	2 Stone
Garden Rock II	2 Stone
Garden Rock III	2 Stone
Mossy Garden Rock I	2 Stone
Mossy Garden Rock II	2 Stone
Garden Lantern	10 Stone
Garden Fountain 1	20 Stone
Garden Fountain 2	20 Stone
Garden Dragon Statue	20 Stone
Garden Fountain 5	20 Stone
Tall Grass 1	2 Stone
Tall Grass 2	2 Stone
Tall Grass 3	2 Stone
Bush 1	2 Stone
Bush 2	2 Stone
Yggdrasil Garden Tree I	10 Stone
Yggdrasil Garden Tree II	10 Stone
Yggdrasil Garden Tree III	10 Stone
Night Garden Stone	4 Stone
River Garden Stone	4 Stone
Round Pond	20 Stone
Oval Pond	20 Stone
Kidney Pond	20 Stone
Wild Pond	20 Stone
Lily Pad - Small	2 Wood
Lily Pad - Broad	2 Wood
Lily Pads - Twin Patch	2 Wood + 1 Dandelion
Lily Pads - Natural Cluster	4 Wood + 1 Dandelion
Blue Lily Bud	2 Wood
Blue Lily Blossom	2 Wood
White Lily Blossom	2 Wood + 1 Dandelion
Blue Water Lily	4 Wood + 1 Dandelion
White Lily Bud	2 Wood + 1 Dandelion
White Water Lily	2 Wood + 1 Dandelion

Updating or removing the mod

Back up your world before changing its mod setup. Close the game before replacing the DLL, and keep only one installed copy of WaterGardens. Update servers and clients together.

Before uninstalling, remove placed WaterGardens pieces while the mod is still installed. Worlds containing custom pieces need the mod to load those pieces correctly.

Credits

Created by Chazman, who created all custom models except those referenced from Valheim itself. Native Valheim assets are loaded from the installed game. Fountain and waterfall recordings are from Pixabay; the seven night recordings are from Mixkit. The oval package medallion is AI-generated artwork. See the enclosed THIRD_PARTY.md for audio entries and license links.

Help and troubleshooting

For support and bug reports, visit Chazman Mods on Discord or Chazman Mods on GitHub. Include your game/mod versions, whether you use a dedicated server, steps to reproduce the issue, and the relevant BepInEx log.

• No night sound: Select a recording, increase Loudness, use Test sound, and disable Night only temporarily. Save, then stand within the audible distance.
• No waterfall sound: Edit the upper pond's volume and distance. Flat overlaps do not create waterfalls.
• No fireflies wanted: Set Fireflies to 0 on each relevant pond or Night Garden Stone and save.
• Missing configuration rock: Resizing moves the rock outward on the same side of its pond; overlaps can leave it on an underwater bed. Search the perimeter for the [E] prompt.
• Missing hammer category: Launch the modded profile, check that dependencies loaded, and remove duplicate mod DLLs.

Advanced settings are in BepInEx/config/chazman.RunicLilyPads.cfg.

Waterfall sound selection

Waterfall sounds are chosen by the vertical drop between the upper and lower pond water levels: below 1.5 m uses waterfall_001; 1.5 m or more uses waterfall_002. Each transition chooses independently. In BepInEx/config/chazman.RunicLilyPads.cfg, [Audio] TallWaterfallHeight changes this local threshold from 0.25 to 10 m. It is separate from the upper pond's Waterfall distance slider, which controls how far away the sound can be heard. Use the same threshold on clients if everyone should hear the same selection. Restart after editing the config file manually.

Language files

This version follows Valheim's selected language using files in Translations/ArcaneDecorWaterGardens beside the DLL. Missing translations fall back to English. Copy English.json to the selected language name and translate its values. No additional translation plugin is required.

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ArcaneWaters river gardens

With ArcaneWaters 0.3.1 or later installed, build River Garden Stone (4 Stone) beside a river. Its E menu controls manually placed pieces for 10 m along the channel in each direction, across bends and adjoining river sections. At junctions this is a 10 m path distance into each connected branch.

Adjust flower size, floating lanterns/fountains/statues, river sound volume/distance, seven ambience tracks, playback speed, audible distance, firefly count and night-only ambience. Place all lilies, reeds, cattails, statues and other decor manually with the hammer. The stone does not spawn decorations or water. More stones control additional sections; the latest saved stone wins overlapping settings.

WaterGardens remains usable by itself. For river garden features, install ArcaneWaters alongside WaterGardens on the server and clients, using matching mod versions across all players.