The Greatest Ships

⚠ Pre-release, still changing. This mod is new and hasn't reached 1.0. Cargo slots, default build materials, and other balance numbers will change as it's tuned against real sailing data. A future update can shrink a ship's hold or swap its recipe out from under you. Use it at your own risk, and expect to re-tune your own configs after an update.

New ships built on Valheim's own hulls. Install on the server and on every client.

Ship	Based on	Top speed	Health	Turning	Storage	Width	Length	Sail	Hull	Recipe (Workbench)
Karve (vanilla)		7.3	500	normal	4
Fast Karve	Karve	10.1	400	normal	2	0.85×		blue	red stripes	Fine Wood 30, Ancient Bark 20, Bronze Nails 60, Troll Hide 8, Resin 20
Longship (vanilla)		9.65	1000	normal	18
Fast Longship	Longship	13.0	800	normal	12	0.85×	1.1×	blue	red stripes	Fine Wood 40, Ancient Bark 40, Iron Nails 120, Deer Hide 10, Troll Hide 10
Knarr	Longship	8.6	1100	slower	32	1.25×		amber	green stripes	Fine Wood 40, Ancient Bark 50, Iron Nails 120, Deer Hide 10, Troll Hide 10
Busse	Longship	about 8.0	1500	slower still	48	1.4×	1.25×	amber	green stripes	Fine Wood 50, Ancient Bark 70, Iron Nails 150, Deer Hide 15, Troll Hide 15
Big Busse	Longship	about 7.5	1900	slowest	64	1.5×	1.5×	amber	green stripes	Fine Wood 60, Ancient Bark 90, Iron Nails 180, Deer Hide 20, Troll Hide 20
Small Byrding (experimental)	Longship	8.6	1000	normal	12			white	brown	Fine Wood 40, Ancient Bark 40, Iron Nails 100, Deer Hide 12, Wood 24
Byrding (experimental)	Longship, 1.25×	8.3	1400	a little slower	18			white	brown	Fine Wood 55, Ancient Bark 55, Iron Nails 150, Deer Hide 15, Wood 36
Greater Byrding (experimental)	Longship, 1.5×	about 7.7	1600	slower	24			white	brown	Fine Wood 65, Ancient Bark 65, Iron Nails 200, Wood 50, Lox Pelt 20

Top speeds are in m/s, in full wind about 64° off the stern. They were worked out from logged sailing with the Captain's Log mod.

Hulls are priced by their planking: a ship's wood and nails follow the area of its hull, taking the vanilla Longship's 80 wood and 100 nails as the unit -- the cargo ships pay a small premium (about 1.05×) and the Byrdings, mostly open deck, a little less. Health follows the wood in the recipe, 1000 per 80, except the two fast ships, which are built light and take 20% less. Every recipe's materials weigh 450 or less -- one load with the Megingjord -- except the Greater Byrding, the biggest ship here, at 480: two trips, or one on a Mead of Troll Endurance. (The vanilla Longship's materials weigh 220, the Drakkar's 260.)

Every ship names itself on its rudder ("Use rudder (Fast Longship)") and its hold ("Fast Longship Storage"), and so do the vanilla ships ("Use rudder (Karve)", "Karve Storage"), so you can always tell which ship you are looking at.

Each ship sits in the Hammer right after the vanilla ship it is based on. As with every build piece, it shows up once you have picked up each of its materials.

Fast Karve

A light racing karve with an oversized sail. It outruns a longship, but its hull is lighter and it has only two storage slots.

Fast Longship

A long, lean longship under an oversized sail, braced with troll hide and extra iron and sealed with swamp guck: the fastest ship here, with a lighter hull and two thirds of a longship's hold.

Knarr, Busse and Big Busse

Three tiers of deep, heavy longship built to haul, named for real Norse cargo vessels. Each is slower and clumsier than a longship, but sturdier, and holds progressively more: the Knarr 32 stacks, the Busse 48, the Big Busse 64. The Busse and Big Busse are also stretched bow-to-stern (1.25× and 1.5×), not just wider, so their bigger hold reads as a longer hull, not just a fatter one; each holds about 1.4× as much per square meter of deck as a longship, which is what a hull with no rowing benches should manage.

Small Byrding, Byrding and Greater Byrding (experimental)

A longship with a rail-fenced pen on deck -- corner posts and two rails a side, no gate yet -- that keeps a frightened tamed animal from jumping overboard the way it can on a bare longship. Named for the Norse trading vessel that carried exactly this kind of cargo. Otherwise a vanilla Longship with one row of the hold given over to fodder and tack (12 slots instead of 18). This is a first pass: the pen's position, size and deck height are estimates rather than measured in-game, and it only stops animals from escaping -- it does nothing to protect them from outside damage (monsters, the ship hitting rocks). Expect it to need retuning.

That is the Small Byrding: a boar or two. The Byrding is the whole ship scaled 1.25×, with a pen the length of its deck, mast and all: room for a few boars, and a longship's hold. The Greater Byrding is scaled 1.5×, with a fence high enough that a wolf can't clear it: room for a lox, or a pack of wolves. Each is slower than the last: 10%, 15% and 20% under a longship, and each turns a little more slowly too. The Wood in each recipe is exactly what its pen's poles and beams would cost to build by hand: 24, 36 and 50. Each pen holds about one boar per two square meters -- three, ten and fifteen -- and past that the animals stand on one another and can be lost over the side. Under way, an invisible lip along the top of the rails keeps a jostled animal in; at rest it is gone, so animals can be dropped in over the rails from a dock. Each pen also has a gate on each side: look at it and Use, and it folds outboard into a ramp from the pen floor up over the gunwale, so with the ship alongside a dock at rail height animals can walk off, or on.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/DeathMonger.TheGreatestShips.cfg has one section per ship, named after it. When an update changes a default, any value you never touched moves to the new default by itself; a value you set yourself is kept. To get the new defaults for everything, delete the file (or just the entries you want reset) and start the game.

Setting
Lock Configuration (General)	While on, only the server's admins can change the synced settings, from their game; others see them read-only	Synced with the server
Name Vanilla Ships (General)	Label the vanilla ships' rudders and holds too	Needs a restart
Recipe	Comma-separated ItemName:Amount prefab names, at most five: the build HUD has room for five plus the crafting station (a sixth is shown, but the station's icon hangs off the panel)	Synced with the server
Top Speed Multiplier	Relative to the vanilla ship it is based on	Synced with the server
Health	Maximum hull health	Synced with the server
Rudder Speed	How quickly the rudder swings; the vanilla ships use 1	Synced with the server
Sail Color	Multiplied into the sail. White leaves it as it is	Needs a restart
Hull Color	Paint multiplied into the hull planks, not the mast or rudder	Needs a restart
Hull Stripes	Number of painted bands; 0 paints the hull solid	Needs a restart
Hull Width	Width relative to the vanilla ship	Synced with the server
Hull Length	Bow-to-stern length relative to the vanilla ship	Synced with the server
Hull Scale	Size of the whole ship in all three dimensions; Width and Length multiply on top	Synced with the server

Updating from 0.9.0 moves a Fast Karve speed of 1.14 and the old Cargo Longship recipe to the new defaults. The Cargo Longship's own section also moves across under its new name, Knarr. Values you changed yourself are kept either way.