Runic Inventory 1.1.0

Equipped armor is on your body, yet it occupies the same general backpack space as wood, stone, trophies, and everything else you collect. Frequently used tools and consumables compete for the same limited organization.

Runic Inventory adds eight dedicated slots to Valheim's existing inventory. This extra, clearly labeled role row is always enabled with the mod. Your normal backpack rows remain available; no separate extra-row switch is needed.

Major features

• Dedicated helmet, chest, legs, cape, and utility roles.
• Three quick-access roles for frequently used items.
• One additional row, separate from native pocket upgrades, with permanently assigned slot types.
• Automatic placement and safe swapping for recognized equipment.
• Per-slot locks, protected-item behavior, and pickup controls.
• Sorting rules that respect equipment, locked cells, and item state.

How to use it

Equip armor normally: recognized equipped armor moves into the matching slot on the added bottom row. The five equipment slots accept only the matching helmet, chest, legs, cape, or utility type. Quick 1-3 accept only consumables, tools, or utility items. Wood, stone, ore, and other unrelated items cannot enter these slots, including through swapping or automatic transfers. The slot roles cannot be unlocked or turned into general storage. You can still replace gear and quick-use items. Place a consumable or tool in Quick 1-3 on the labeled bottom row. Press Left Alt + 1, 2, or 3 to use those quick slots. With the inventory open, press Left Alt + I to sort the configured safe rows. Hold Left Alt and right-click a player-inventory cell to lock or unlock it; focusing a cell and pressing Left Alt + L is the keyboard fallback. Controller chords can be changed in the BepInEx configuration manager or config file.

To keep food or supplies out of Quick Stack and Store All, install Runic Inventory alongside Runic Storage, open your player inventory, and Alt-right-click each cell you want protected. A yellow outline and a lock/unlock message confirm the change, including for empty cells. These are item protection locks, not just sorting preferences; unlock a cell before using its protected item in an action that consumes or moves it. Storage's Sort -> LockedSlots setting only fixes chest positions during chest sorting and does not create player-inventory locks.

How it feels in-game

Gear stays where gear belongs, quick items remain predictable, and sorting stops scattering the things you deliberately arranged. The inventory still looks and behaves like Valheim's inventory—only more intentional.

Safety and compatibility

The mod adds eight specialized slots, not additional carry weight. Every item remains in the native Inventory with its complete metadata, and death, tombstones, saving, and loading use the native item paths. Unknown modded categories stay ordinary items. Incompatible inventory modifications may prevent row initialization; failed migrations do not remove items.

Native ownership and persistence

Inventory does not maintain a second item store. Every item stays in the same vanilla Inventory with full item metadata: prefab, stack, durability, equipped state, quality, variant, crafter identity, custom data, world level, pickup state, weight, and effects.

• Valheim Inventory.Save and Inventory.Load remain the item persistence path.
• Death and tombstones remain Valheim's native grave-transfer path.
• Topology and locks use a small checksummed custom-data entry; a separate marker records the added row.
• Disable through General -> Enabled before uninstalling. In Configuration Manager, this control is grayed out while normal inventory lacks room for the extra-row items, with an explanation. Free normal cells, then disable; items move into those cells and the row disappears.
• An attempted config-file disable with insufficient space is refused and Enabled is restored to true. Freeing space does not automatically disable the mod; you choose when to disable again.
• Avoid an abrupt uninstall with items in the added row: vanilla no longer reserves or maintains those extra slots.
• Sort, lock changes, quick use, and relocation require the exact owning Player.m_localPlayer.

Mutations use one short-lived mutation scope owned by this mod and perform exact in-memory rollback when a position proof fails. There is no global lock, cross-mod transaction coordinator, durable journal, quarantine, or recovery protocol.

Optional integration

RunicInventory.Api.InventoryIntegrationApi.TryGetProtection(object, out int) is a tiny optional reflection seam for independently installed mods. It returns state 0 for governed-but-unknown, 1 for proven unlocked, and 2 for locked. A false return means the supplied object is outside Inventory's active protection domain. Consumers must treat unknown as fail-closed and must not retain the native item. Slot locks remain available when valid native slots and lock metadata exist but optional layout features are unavailable. The dedicated row's item-type restrictions remain in effect while enabled. A confirmed startup failure before protection activated yields NotApplicable rather than blocking ordinary cooking. Stable disabled, unsupported-layout, remote non-owner, and headless states also yield NotApplicable. Brief load, rebind, shutdown, malformed-evidence, and exception states remain Unknown and fail closed while the provider could still govern an owning local inventory. A proven non-owner or headless path remains NotApplicable because Inventory cannot enforce locks in that read-only context.

Storage, Safety, and Interaction may use this optional reflection API when Inventory is installed; none is a hard dependency in either direction. Inventory loads and functions on its own. The normal workstation repair call receives a narrowly scoped unlocked view, so equipped armor in the protected bottom row can still be repaired; protection resumes as soon as that repair call ends.

Authority modes

• AuthoritativeLocal: exact owning local player; gameplay features may mutate through native APIs.
• RemoteDedicatedCompatibility: a non-local or non-owning player reference is read-only.
• MigrationSafeCompatibility: topology or item evidence is incompatible, so special mutations stop.
• Disabled / BatchInert: ordinary vanilla behavior.

A connected dedicated-server client owns its character inventory and can use Inventory normally. The headless server process has no local player, so this mod remains inert there.

Install only BepInEx and Runic Inventory. Existing 1.0.0 configuration and topology metadata remain valid; no data migration or version bump is required.