Fleyta

Fleyta lets you shove a beached boat back into the water. Stand beside a boat that is aground, press the shove key (B by default), and it slides toward the nearest water until it floats. Then the boat is the game's again. It does nothing to a boat that is already afloat, and nothing to the raft.

Why

Vanilla gives a player on foot no way to move a boat at all. A hull run onto a beach is recoverable only by climbing aboard and rowing against the sand, or by waiting for waves that may never come. That is the whole annoyance, and this is the whole fix. It is deliberately narrower than the things it could have been: it does not push you off a dock while aboard, it does not nudge a boat along open water, and it does not drag a boat across land. One gesture, for the one situation the game has no answer to.

Two design calls follow from that.

The direction comes from the terrain, not from you. The mod finds the nearest direction in which the ground drops to floating depth, without first climbing a ridge, and pushes that way. Standing on the sea side and pressing the key still sends the boat to the sea, because "which way is the water" is a fact about the boat's position and not about yours. If no water is within 30 metres, nothing moves and you are told so. A boat left halfway up a beach is worse than one that stayed put.

The key is a key, not hold-E. A hull has nothing to hover over: the only thing the crosshair can land on is the helm, where E already means "take the wheel", and holding it would fight the tap that boards. The helm's hover text names the shove key when pressing it would do something.

How it feels

• One press, 20 stamina, and the boat slides at a walking pace until it is over water deep enough to float. Nothing to hold, no need to stay.
• A heavier hull is slower. The speed scales with the square root of the hull's mass, so a longship is slower than a karve by seconds and not by minutes.
• It refuses, and says why, when the boat is already afloat, when someone is aboard, when you are out of reach, or when the water is too far.

Installing

Needs BepInEx. Nothing else. Through a mod manager it is one install. By hand, put Fleyta.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Fleyta/.

Then start the game once and quit. That first run writes the config file. It does not exist before the mod has loaded, which is the usual reason people think it is broken.

Settings

The file is BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.fleyta.cfg. Open it in any text editor. Every setting has a comment above it, so the file explains itself. The two worth knowing first are FloatDepth, how deep the sea floor must be before a boat counts as afloat, and BaseSpeed. Neither was measured against the real hulls when the mod was written, so they are the numbers to tune if a boat stops in the shallows or the slide feels wrong. Turning Verbose on writes each decision, including the hull's real mass, to the log.

Note that changing a default in a new version does nothing on a machine that has already run the mod. BepInEx writes every entry on first run and the saved value wins.

Needs a play test

Not run in game yet, and never in a world with other players, so the hand-over to the boat's owner described under Multiplayer is unproven. Two settings depend on a vanilla behaviour that could only be read from the code. An unattended hull is damped hard in the water: the game multiplies its horizontal speed by 0.1 every physics step while nobody is aboard and the hull's centre is 0.5 m or more under the water line. A shove therefore does not coast into the sea, and where the hull is already in that regime but not yet over FloatDepth the push crawls. Tune FloatDepth and Acceleration together: a FloatDepth that is too deep makes the last metres crawl, an Acceleration that is too low makes them stall. Verbose logs where a shove ends.

Multiplayer

Everyone needs it. A boat is moved by whichever player's game owns it, and force applied from any other machine is silently thrown away. So the mod measures the terrain on your side and sends the request to the boat's owner, who does the pushing. That owner can be anyone, so every player needs the mod, at the same version. A player without it cannot be the one who shoves, and would drop a request sent to a boat they own.

If Core is installed, this mod registers with its version gate and the host's settings apply to everyone connected to it, in memory only - your own config file is never written to and comes back the moment you disconnect. Keybinds and Verbose stay yours. Without Core the mod still runs; what is lost is the enforcement.

Bugs and ideas

Both go to the site. longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/bugs is for anything broken, and longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/ideas is for what a mod should do next. You can vote on other people's ideas there as well.

Signing in takes a Steam or Discord account. I work from that list, so the votes decide what I pick up next.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.