AnimalFeedGuard
Keep animal feed on the ground: prevent automatic pickup near tamed animals that can eat it. Configurable radius, manual pickup preserved, and compatible with AutoPicker's normal pickup path.Animal Feed Guard
2.0.3 targets Valheim 1.0, built and checked against 1.0.16. Use the 1.x releases for Ashlands.
Animal Feed Guard keeps dropped food on the ground when a living, tamed animal that can eat it is nearby. Manual pickup remains available.
Features
- Configurable protection radius: 0-50 metres; default 25 metres.
- Uses each animal's live food list, including Asksvin Smokepuffs, Deep North feeds, seeds, barley, and modded feed.
- Measures distance to the animal's body, so a large animal's origin does not leave nearby feed unprotected.
- Reads synchronized tameness through ownership changes.
- Protects food even when the animal is already fed.
- Applies only to automatic pickup; manual pickup is unchanged.
- Client-side settings; install it on every player's client who wants protection.
- Compatible with AutoPicker's normal pickup path.
Creature and food coverage
The audit read all 150 MonsterAI components in the installed 1.0.16 asset bundle. Fourteen have nonempty diets, totaling 48 creature/food combinations (including juvenile and summoned variants). Protection uses live consume lists, with no species or biome whitelist. See the audit.
| Creature | Feed found in installed assets |
|---|---|
| Asksvin | Smokepuffs, vineberries, fiddleheads |
| Asksvin hatchling | Cloudberries, barley, flax; only qualifies if tamed |
| Hen | Dandelions, barley, beech/birch/carrot/onion/turnip seeds |
| Boar and summoned boar | Carrots, turnips, onions, mushrooms, raspberries, blueberries |
| Wolf and summoned wolf | Neck tails, boar/lox/deer/chicken meat, sausages, raw fish |
| Lox | Cloudberries, barley, flax |
| Deep North moose and summoned moose | Lingonberries |
| Deep North bear variants | Blueberries; only qualifies if tamed (including the summoned bear) |
These are audited game defaults, not hardcoded lists. Modded additions to an animal's consume list are also recognized. Creatures without any feeding behavior do not protect arbitrary items.
Testing and diagnostics
For regression tests, import the ZIP into a separate Gale profile, replacing the old AnimalFeedGuard DLL. Confirm an empty inventory slot is available when testing; otherwise failure to collect does not prove protection. Compare matching and nonmatching food inside/outside the radius, then repeat with the mod disabled and with AutoPicker enabled.
For the Asksvin test, drop Smokepuffs beside adult tamed Asksvin and run over them. Enable Diagnostics → Log Pickup Decisions in ConfigurationManager (or the config file) to log the protection decision, body/origin distances, and synchronized tame state in BepInEx/LogOutput.log. Turn logging off after the test. Logging is rate-limited per food and outcome and does not write to saves.
Automated coverage passed. The reported Smokepuff was 7.67 metres from the Asksvin's body, outside the former 5-metre radius. The maintainer has tested the current build and confirmed it works as intended. Manual pickup is deliberately allowed. Another player's unmodified client, or a mod that directly inserts items into an inventory, can still collect the feed.
Configuration
The config file is BepInEx/config/com.ziluck.valheim.animalfeedguard.cfg.
Enabled controls the feature. Protection Radius controls the distance from the dropped item to the nearest point on an eligible tamed animal's body collider. This handles large animals such as Asksvin, lox, and moose. A radius of 0 disables protection.
The default is 25 metres. Existing configs retain their saved radius when upgrading; set Protection Radius = 25 to adopt the new default.
Recommended optional mods
- ConfigurationManager - edit the settings in game instead of opening the config file. It is optional.
- AutoPicker - optional compatibility; Animal Feed Guard does not require it.
Links
Check out my other mods
- HenEggPickup - automatically collects chicken eggs once enough adult hens are nearby.
- RanchingAddon - adds skill-scaled chick and Asksvin hatchling growth, plus growth and egg incubation information to Ranching.
If you'd like to support ongoing modding work, Ko-fi is available.
Requires BepInExPack Valheim. Ranching and AutoPicker are optional.