PenPosts
Breeding caps per pen instead of per radius. Write "Pen" on a sign and whatever its fence encloses becomes a pen: animals only count their own pen when breeding. A full pen stops eating.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
Put a sign inside the pen (or on its fence) and write:
Pen 10 Boar 8
- Pen makes it a pen. The pen is whatever the fence around the sign encloses.
- 10 is the pen's size in metres, only used if there's no closed fence around the sign (then the pen is a 10 m circle). You can leave it out.
- Boar 8: boars in this pen stop breeding when there are 8.
That's all. Look at the sign to check it: green marks on the ground mean the fence closes the pen, and the sign's text lists the cap and the animals inside.
Other things you can write
| Sign text | What it does |
|---|---|
Pen |
a pen where every animal uses its own breeding cap |
Pen 10 Boar 8 Lox 4 |
a cap for each kind you name |
Pen 10 cap 8 |
one cap of 8 for every kind in the pen (max 8 or Pen 10 8 work too) |
Pen 10 Boars |
a word without a number is just the pen's name |
Pen 10 round |
always a 10 m circle, whatever is built around it (circle works too) |
Pen 10 square |
always a 20 m square, turned the way the sign faces (box works too) |
Animal names work in the singular or plural (boar, boars, wolves). A kind you don't name uses the sign's cap for every kind, if it has one, else the Pen cap setting, else its own cap.
How the pen is found
- 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. Gates count as shut even when they're open, and gaps narrower than about 0.75 m are ignored. The sign can hang on the fence itself; the side with the animals is the pen.
- A wider gap, or a fence around more than 1600 m², makes the pen a circle around the sign instead (or a square, with the Fallback shape setting). The sign says why, and for a gap how wide it is and where ("1.2 m gap 6 m north-east of the sign").
- 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.
- Animals stay in. A tame animal that gets out of a fenced pen anyway (through a gap small enough to count as closed, a gate left open, or by slipping through a wall, a rock or the side of a cave) is put back where it last stood inside. One that sinks into the pen's floor is lifted back onto it, and a young one born on the wrong side of the fence is put inside. To take an animal out, tell it to follow you or ride it. Flying animals are free to go. A tame animal that falls through the ground or a floor into nothing is put back where it last stood. Animals in caves dug with Hearth Below, or on any floor under the ground, stay where they are.
- 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 marks on the ground along its fence or square (a round pen gets a ring and a see-through dome). It stays while you look and for 20 seconds after. No key is needed, so E still edits the sign.
- Green: the pen is fine, a closed fence or the round or square shape the sign asks for.
- Grey-blue: the fence couldn't be used (an opening, too big, none found), so the pen is the fallback circle or square for now.
- Orange ring: the opening that keeps the fence from closing. Yellow ring: a gap narrow enough to ignore.
The marks change as soon as the pen does, so closing a gap turns them green while you watch.
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 circle |
| Fallback shape | Round | Shape of a pen without a closed fence: Round or Square |
| Default radius | 10 | Size for a sign without a number: the circle's radius or half the square's side (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 for pens whose sign doesn't set one. 0 = each animal's own |
| No food when full | true | Animals in a pen at its cap don't eat |
| Keep animals in | true | Animals that get out of a fenced pen, or sink into its floor, are put back; ones following you or ridden are free to go |
| 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: green when the pen is fine, grey-blue when it fell back to the circle or square |
| 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
Qkey 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.