Herd Bell

Your tamed animals give you resources while they live. It works like a Palworld ranch, built for Valheim.

Build a Herd bell in your pen. Every tamed, grown animal that is kept fed within the bell's reach slowly builds up a yield of its own natural materials: leather scraps from boars, pelts from lox, feathers from hens, pelts and fangs from wolves. With mods that let you tame more creatures, every one of them has a yield ready: hides from trolls, carapace from seekers, resin from greylings. Ring the bell and the herd's yield drops at your feet.

No slaughter needed, and your crops become animal feed.

How it works

• Build a Herd bell (Hammer, Misc tab, needs a Workbench). It's a post with a crossbeam and a bronze bell that swings and rings. Default cost: 6 Wood, 2 Bronze, 2 Leather scraps.
• Keep your animals fed within 20 m of the bell. Each animal builds up one yield per 15 minutes of being fed. Bigger creatures take longer: about 2× for a lox or a stone golem.
• Stars pay off: each star adds 25% to the amount, so a 4-star animal gives twice as much.
• Ring the bell (E) to bring everything in. An animal holds up to 4 yields, then waits for you.
• Look at the bell to see your herd ledger: every kind of animal in reach, how many yields are ready, and who is hungry.
• Look at an animal to see what it yields and when the next yield is ready, or why it isn't producing (hungry, too far from a bell, still young).

What animals yield

Every creature you can tame (with the game itself, LetMeTameYou or the other mods in the pack) has a ready-made yield, each as its own setting under 4 - Creature yields, so you can change one in Gale's config editor. The yields are things the creature could shed, grow back or gather: hides, scales, feathers, bones, resin. There are no trophies, and no meat apart from a neck's tail (it grows back), so meat stays the reward for hunting. A few examples:

Creature	Yield
Boar	Leather scraps 1–2
Hen	Feathers 1–2
Wolf	Wolf pelt 1, plus a wolf fang 25% of the time
Lox	Lox pelt 1
Greydwarf	Wood 1–2, resin 1, sometimes a greydwarf eye
Troll	Troll hide 1–2
Neck	Neck tail 1 (it grows back)
Seeker	Carapace 1–2
Asksvin	Asksvin hide 1–2, sometimes a bladder

Each entry reads Item min-max chance%, separated by commas, for example TrollHide 1-3, Coal 1 50%. Item names are the game's prefab names. Leave an entry empty to use the creature's own drops (minus the excluded items), or write none for nothing.

Variants use their base creature's entry: a sleeping troll yields like a troll, and a Draugr archer like a Draugr. Creatures from other mods that aren't listed yield their own drops; you can give them a yield in Product overrides, for example MyCreature = Wood 2; OtherModBeast = LeatherScraps 1-2.

Tamed bosses (Eikthyr, The Elder, Bonemass, Moder, Yagluth, The Queen, Fader) have entries too (Eikthyr sheds an antler now and then, Moder lays an egg), but yield nothing unless you turn on Bosses yield.

Gentler drops from starred creatures

The game doubles what a creature drops for every star: 1 star 2x, 2 stars 4x, 3 stars 8x. Breeding mods can raise animals to 10 stars, which is 1024x. With Herd Bell, kill drops grow with stars the same way as the bell's yields: 25% more per star (the Bonus per star setting), so 1 star drops 1.25x, 2 stars 1.5x, 4 stars 2x and 10 stars 3.5x what a starless creature drops. Part amounts are rounded up or down by chance, so on average it comes out exactly that. A drop that only comes some of the time (a 50% feather, say) keeps its own chance; the game would otherwise make it certain at 1 star.

This applies to every creature, wild or tame, and only to drops that grow with stars in the game (trophies and one-per-player drops are left alone). Turn off Wild creatures too to change only tamed creatures' drops and leave wild ones as in the game. Turn off Like the bell for the 1.0.7 curve instead (doubling up to 2 stars, then one starless drop's worth per star: 3 stars 5x, 10 stars 12x), or turn off Gentler star drops for the game's own doubling.

Looks above 2 stars

The game has a look for 1-star and 2-star creatures (bigger, other colours, sometimes extra parts), but none for more stars, so a 3-star or higher creature (bred with Procreation Plus, or from a level mod) looks like a starless one. With Herd Bell it keeps the 2-star look and grows a little for every star above 2: 6% per star (Bigger per star), up to half as big again (Biggest size). Set Looks above 2 stars to SameAsTwoStars to keep the 2-star size, or AsInTheGame for the game's own look. It only changes how creatures look, on your own screen, and shows on creatures that load after you change it.

Mods that size creatures by their stars themselves, such as CLLC (Creature Level and Loot Control), may fight over the size; set Looks above 2 stars to AsInTheGame then.

Settings (anwo.HerdBell.cfg)

The file is created on first launch. The Ranch, Products, Creature yields and Star drops settings come from the host (or dedicated server), so everyone plays by the same rules:

• Needs a herd bell (on), bell reach (20 m), only while fed (on)
• Minutes per yield (15), big creatures yield slower (on), max stored yields (4), bonus per star (25%)
• Drop automatically (off): animals drop each yield at their feet as soon as it's ready, for use with auto-pickup chests
• Bosses yield (off), product overrides, excluded items, bell recipe (a change reaches everyone, no restart needed), and a yield for each creature
• Star drops: gentler star drops (on), like the bell (on), wild creatures too (on), stars that double (2), extra per star (1); the last two only count with Like the bell off

Each player sets their own Display settings: yield info on animals, bell volume, and how creatures above 2 stars look (Bigger, 6% per star, at most 1.5x).

Multiplayer

Everyone needs the mod, including a dedicated server if you use one. Yields are counted by whichever game runs the animal, the same way the game handles beehives, and are stored with the animal, so all players see the same numbers. Ringing the bell works for whoever rings it.

Compatibility

• Requires Jotunn.
• Made for Valheim 1.0.17 (Deep North) with BepInExPack 5.4.2351 and Jotunn 2.30.2.
• Works with drop mods such as Drop That: the gentler star drops are applied after their changes.
• Built to work alongside taming and breeding mods (LetMeTameYou, Procreation Plus, PortablePals), feeding troughs (an animal fed from a trough counts as fed) and auto-pickup chests. With PenPosts, animals a bell can still collect from keep eating in a full pen.
• It adds no new hotkeys.
• The bell can be moved with ZenRedecorate; its reach moves with it.

Removing the mod

The bells stop loading (the game logs them as missing). Yields an animal has stored stay saved on it and come back if you install the mod again. Nothing else in the world is touched.