PenPosts

Breeding caps per pen instead of per radius, so neighbouring pens stop blocking each other.

In the base game, an animal stops breeding ("too crowded") when there are too many of its kind within a radius around it, wherever they are: the next pen, the barn behind the wall, even wild ones. With PenPosts you mark a pen with a sign. Animals inside it only count the animals in that same pen.

How to use

Write a sign whose text starts with Pen, on or inside the pen's fence:

Sign text	Pen
Pen	the fenced area around the sign (10 m radius if there's no closed fence)
Pen 12	the fenced area, or a 12 m radius without one
Pen 15 Boars	named "Boars"
Pen 12 Lox cap 6	named "Lox", with its own breeding cap of 6 (max 6 works too)
Pen 12 round	always a 12 m circle, whatever is built around it (circle works too)

• The pen is what's inside its fence. PenPosts walks out from the sign the way an animal would and stops at fences, walls, rocks and steps too high to climb. Doors and gates count as shut. The sign can hang on the fence itself; the side with the animals is the pen.
• Failsafe: if there's no closed fence (a gap, a gate left open), or it encloses more than the max area (1600 m²), the pen is a circle with the sign's radius, measured flat. The hover text says which.
• The fence is measured again now and then, so moving a fence or the sign updates the pen. If an animal is inside several pens, the nearest sign wins.
• Animals of the same kind and their young inside the pen count towards the cap.
• The cap is each animal's own (from the game or your taming mod) unless the sign or the config sets one.
• A full pen doesn't eat. When a pen is at its cap, its animals leave food alone, so no feed is wasted on animals that can't breed. They eat again as soon as there's room.
• Finding a mate works exactly as before, and animals outside every pen behave exactly as before.

Look at a pen sign to see its area, its cap and the tamed animals inside. Keep looking for a moment and the pen itself appears: faint grey-blue marks on the ground along its fence (or, for a round pen, a ring at its edge and a see-through grey-blue dome over it). It stays while you look and for 20 seconds after. No key is needed, so E (and Shift + E or Q) still edit the sign as usual.

Settings (anwo.PenPosts.cfg)

Setting	Default	What it does
Smart area	true	The pen is the area inside its fence; off = always the sign's radius
Max area	1600	Largest fenced area taken as one pen (m²); bigger falls back to the radius
Default radius	10	Radius for a sign without a number (m)
Max radius	40	Largest radius a sign may set (m); also how far out a fence is looked for
Pen cap	0	Breeding cap inside pens. 0 = each animal's own
No food when full	true	Animals in a pen at its cap don't eat
Show pen info on sign	true	Show area, cap and animals in the sign's hover text
Show pen area when looking at the sign	true	Show the pen's edge while you look at a pen sign
Show pen area for	20	Seconds the pen's edge stays after you look away

Multiplayer

Everyone needs the mod. Breeding is decided by whichever player's game is running the animals at the time, so mixed installs give inconsistent results.

Compatibility

• Works with the base game's breeding and any mod that uses it.
• With LetMeTameYou, its "Too Crowded / Ready to Procreate" hover text uses the pen too.
• With Herd Bell, animals that a bell can still collect from keep eating in a full pen, so the bell keeps working.
• Feeding troughs from other mods (such as Valharvest's) work as usual: animals with room in their pen eat from them, and animals in a full pen leave them alone, like any other food.
• With Zen mods (Zen.ModLib, used by ZenRedecorate and others), their Q key works on pen signs as on any sign; PenPosts uses no key.

Removing the mod

Nothing new is added to the world. Without the mod, a pen sign is just a sign.

About

Made with Claude (Anthropic's AI model) and tagged AI Generated, as Thunderstore's rules ask. Built for Valheim 1.0.17 (Deep North; also 1.0.16) with BepInEx 5.4.2351.