EasyWork
Craft from nearby chests and drawers, and let your smelters, kilns and fires feed themselves. Brings its own item drawers in three looks. Multi-craft, timers and auto repair included. Server synced, all on F11.Easy Work
Your chests feed your crafting. Your stations feed themselves.
Two jobs, done properly: you craft from the storage around you instead of hauling ore back and forth, and your production stations keep themselves topped up while you get on with something else.
Everything is configurable in a window on F11, and everything that matters is synced from the server, so a group plays by the same rules.
What it does
Craft from nearby storage. When you build, craft or upgrade, the chests, item drawers and (optionally) loose items around you count as if they were in your backpack. The crafting menu shows the real total, and the cost is taken from wherever it actually sits.
Keep stations fed. Smelters, charcoal kilns, blast furnaces, cooking stations, ovens, fermenters, windmills, spinning wheels, eitr refineries, campfires, hearths, torches, braziers and bonfires get fuel and raw material added while you are nearby. Every station type can be switched off on its own.
Let storage tidy up after you. Off by default. Switch it on and a chest picks up loose items lying near it — but only of a kind it already holds. A chest with wood in it collects wood; an empty chest collects nothing; an ore chest never fills with berries. You sorted it once, and it keeps itself sorted. That rule is also the safeguard: if you put something down next to a chest that already holds it, it goes in.
Build drawers. Ten fine wood at a workbench, in three looks: dark wood, concrete and marble. Same drawer behind all of them, so pick whichever suits the room.
A drawer holds 10000 of one stackable kind — no weapons, armour or tools, because it stores a name and a count and those items carry more than that. It shows the item's icon and the count on its front, so a wall of them reads at a glance.
Use an item from your hotbar on an empty drawer to decide what it holds. After that the hotbar leaves it alone, and the rest is deliberate:
| Input | Effect |
|---|---|
| Use | Take a stack |
| Ctrl + use | Take one |
| Ctrl + use on an emptied drawer | Release it for something else |
| Shift + use | Store every matching item you carry |
Once a drawer has a kind it keeps it, even at zero: your coal drawer stays the coal drawer while you are out of coal. Tear one down and everything in it lands on the ground.
They snap to each other corner to corner, so a row or a stack lines up by itself. Hold the game's own alternative placement key (Shift by default) if you want one somewhere no snap point reaches. They can be built into anything — an alcove, under a stair, into a tree. And they count as storage everywhere else in the mod: crafting pulls from them, stations feed themselves from them.
Craft several at once. Pick a quantity, or hit Max, instead of clicking the same recipe twenty times.
See what is cooking. Look at a fermenter, cooking station, oven or smelter and the remaining time is right there in the hover text.
Repair everything in one go. Using a workbench repairs every worn item you carry. Repairing is free in Valheim anyway, so this only saves the clicking.
What it deliberately does not do
It never takes anything out of a station. Your coal, ingots and mead stay put until you collect them. Auto-collection sounds convenient right up to the moment it empties a smelter you were watching, or two players end up fighting over the same output. If you want that, this is not the mod.
It never sorts your backpack for you. Nothing is taken out of your inventory and filed away behind your back. Collect only ever moves things already lying on the ground into a chest that already holds that kind — and only if you switched it on.
Worth knowing before you install
Everyone needs it. Server and all clients. The mod refuses a mismatched connection rather than letting two players disagree about who owns what.
Turn off the mods it replaces: CraftFromContainers, AutomaticFuel, AutoRefillFires, AutoRepair, MultiCraft, ProductionTimers. Easy Work covers all of them, and running both means two mods writing into the same chests.
RossItemDrawers is no longer used. Easy Work has its own drawers now and does not read or write anyone else's. If you keep that mod installed its drawers keep working as that mod's drawers — they simply no longer count as storage for crafting or for feeding your stations. Its contents are safe either way; nothing is migrated and nothing is touched.
Two ranges, two meanings. This trips people up, so plainly: Crafting range under Crafting is measured from you and only matters while you craft or build. A station pulls its own supplies from Material range around stations under Refill, measured around itself. A chest next to your smelter feeds that smelter whether you are standing there or not. Each range sits in the same tab as the feature it governs, so you never have to remember which one you are looking at.
Stations still need you nearby, and there is no setting for it. Stations within 64 m of you are served. That number is fixed on purpose. Valheim instantiates objects zone by zone, zones are 64 m across, and even at the lowest simulation distance the game keeps a 3×3 block of them loaded — so a station within 64 m of you is loaded on every machine at every graphics setting. Further out, whether a smelter exists in memory at all starts depending on a video option, and a mod that quietly does more work because you raised your draw distance is not a mod anyone can reason about. A smelter on the far side of the map does not exist in memory and cannot be filled by anything, mod or not.
Fine wood and core wood are blocked by default. A charcoal kiln happily accepts both, and they are worth far more than the charcoal they turn into. One list under Refill, Blocked items, covers everything stations may not take by themselves — fuel and material alike. Clear it if you want them burned.
One reserve, not three. Keep per source under Sources is the only place that decides what stays put. Set it to 5 and every chest, every drawer and every stack on the ground keeps 5 of each item — while crafting and when a station helps itself. There is no separate fuel or material reserve, because the same item is both: wood is fuel in a campfire and material in a charcoal kiln.
Foreign chests are fair game by default. Use foreign private containers is on and does what it says: ward-protected chests belonging to other players get used too. On a public server you probably want that off.
Settings
Press F11. Pick a category on the left, change what you need on the right — every setting explains itself in one line. Changes are saved as you make them.
Each tab opens with one line saying what it is for, and every range lives in the tab of the feature it governs.
| Category | What lives there |
|---|---|
| General | The master switch, and how often a pass runs |
| Sources | Where items may come from at all: chests, drawers, ground, how much to leave in each one, blocked chests |
| Crafting | Craft and build from storage, the crafting range, multi-craft, auto repair |
| Refill | On/off, fuel and material, how far stations reach around themselves, blocked items |
| Collect | Storage picking up loose items, how far it reaches, whether empty drawers claim a kind |
| Stations | Every station type individually |
| Production timers | Which stations show remaining time — yours alone, never synced |
| Interface | Language, hotkey, messages, verbose log — yours alone, never synced |
Admins decide for everyone. Everything outside Interface, Production timers and Multi craft is admin-only and distributed by the server. Without admin rights those fields are greyed out and the window says why. Editing the config file by hand will not get around it; the server resets it when you connect.
Language: English or German, or Auto to follow the game.
If something is not being filled
Open the console with F5 and type easywork.
You get a line per station in range: whether the mod sees it, whether its category is enabled, how full it is, what material it accepts, how much of that is reachable and where the nearest of it actually is. The answer is usually plain — the material sits further from the station than the supply range allows, or the source type is switched off.
The same report tells you what the mod costs you:
Load: 0.08 ms of every second spent in Easy Work
The report prints both average cost and the worst measured pass. It covers the instrumented work, not every Unity render, UI or network cost. A low average alone does not exclude a noticeable frame spike.
easywork reset clears the figures. Worst case values accumulate from the moment the
game loads, so the very first pass sticks in them forever; resetting is how you tell a
one-off cost at startup apart from one that keeps happening.
Performance
Built to stay cheap on a base that has grown:
- Chests and stations register themselves as they load. There is no sweep over the world
and no
FindObjectsOfType, however much you have built. - One stock-take per pass, position aware, answered from a lookup afterwards. Asking every chest about every ore type separately is what makes mods like this stutter.
- A handover is booked against that stock-take rather than discarding it, and the chests around a station are looked up once per frame instead of once per item moved.
- The stock-take only reaches as far as the features you switched on actually need.
- A pass runs at most every Scan interval seconds and performs at most 64 handovers. Scanning cost still grows with loaded sources and stations. Where a pass starts rotates, so no station is ever permanently last in line behind the hungry ones.
If it ever does hurt: raise Scan interval, shrink the ranges. And switch off station types you never actually supply — a hundred torches with no resin anywhere still get checked on every pass.
Multiplayer
Station inputs use the vanilla RPCs and execute on the object's owner. Gameplay settings use Jötunn's server configuration sync; drawer contents use ZDO replication. Clients and the server need compatible Easy Work versions.
Container and drawer writes first claim ownership and check it locally. A refused claim skips the operation. Ownership claims and pending RPC counts do not provide a transaction across clients: simultaneous transfers, latency and reconnects still need a real multiplayer test. See the project audit for the remaining limitations.
Requirements
- BepInExPack Valheim
- Jötunn 2.30 or newer
No optional dependencies. Easy Work brings its own drawers and reads no other mod.
Credits
Author: DezzyCode
The ideas come from mods that did these jobs first and did them well: CraftFromContainers, AutomaticFuel, AutoRefillFires, AutoRepair (mtsukn, originally Tekla) and MultiCraft. Easy Work is written from scratch rather than copied — but it exists because those showed what was worth having.
