Jafna

Levelling with the hoe continues the flat ground it touches instead of chasing your crosshair, and your Crafting skill decides how much ground one swing covers.

Jafna is Old Norse for to level, to make even.

Why

Flattening a large area with the hoe is miserable, and it is worth being precise about why, because the obvious answer is wrong. It is not that the tool is small. It is that the tool has no fixed idea of what height you are aiming for.

The hoe's Level ground eases every point under the tool toward the height of the placement ghost, and the ghost sits wherever your crosshair last met the ground. So the reference height follows the camera. Take one swing, walk two steps, take another, and the strip of ground both swings covered is pulled toward two different heights. You cannot aim your way out of that, because the thing moving is not your aim, it is the target. It is also why the ripples get worse the more carefully you work around the edges: every correction is another swing at another height.

Jafna gives the swing somewhere fixed to level to, and the game turns out to have been keeping it all along. Every zone's terrain data carries a flag per grid point meaning "a terrain operation has touched this", saved with the world and shared with everyone. So a swing can look at the ground it is about to cover, find the parts of it a previous swing already shaped, and use that height rather than your crosshair's. Flat spreads outward from wherever you started it, at one height, and keeps spreading in your next session and under another player's hoe.

A swing that covers nothing you levelled before is left completely alone, which is how you still start a new platform at a new height: stand clear of the old one and swing.

What it does

• A level swing continues the flat it touches. If it covers ground you already levelled, it uses that height. If it covers none, it behaves exactly like vanilla.
• It refuses rather than guesses. Where two platforms at different heights meet under one swing, it hands the decision back to your crosshair instead of averaging them into a ramp.
• You can hold a height. Press Left Alt to pin the one under your crosshair, and every swing flattens toward it wherever you stand, until you press again.
• Low ground is raised with stone. When a swing wants the ground higher than the hoe can lift it, that swing lifts its whole circle straight to your height and your pack pays for what the hoe would not have done, at the rate the hoe's own Raise ground charges. It leaves a step at the edge of the circle until you swing next to it. Like Raise ground, it needs a workbench nearby.
• Reach grows with Crafting. Nothing below about Crafting 25, growing to a 6 metre radius at Crafting 60 against the hoe's own 3. Never a discount: a swing costs exactly the stamina vanilla charges.
• Only your own swing is changed. Ground shaped by anything else, a location, another mod, a Devkit flatten or a player without Jafna, is shaped exactly as vanilla shapes it.
• A ward you cannot use blocks the whole swing, not just its centre.
• The build panel shows the numbers: the reach you have, the height the swing will use, where that height came from, and what raising the low ground will cost.
• No new prefabs, items, recipes or saved values. A world played with Jafna is an ordinary world, and the ground you shaped is ground vanilla's own operations shaped.

Holding a height

Continuing the flat answers "what height is this ground meant to be" from the ground itself. That is right most of the time and certain none of the time, and two cases it cannot settle turned up within an hour of playing: a higher platform beside you captures swings you are aiming lower, and a swing crossing a zone boundary has each zone decide from its own half of the footprint.

Both are the mod guessing at an intention you already have, so you can state it instead. With a levelling tool out, press Left Alt and the height under your crosshair is held. Walk anywhere, aim anywhere, and every swing eases the ground toward that one number until you press again. Nothing is searched for and nothing is guessed while it is on.

The panel says HOLDING height, press LeftAlt to release for as long as it lasts. That wording is deliberate: the single mistake this feature can cause is forgetting it is on, and a line that tells you how to stop cannot be read as decoration.

The key counts when you let go of it, and only when you pressed it on its own. Press another key or a mouse button while it is down, or let the game window lose focus before you let go, and nothing happens. That is for Alt+Tab. Switching windows starts with Alt going down while the game still has the focus, and the first version, which acted the moment the key went down, pinned a height whenever you tabbed out with a levelling tool in your hands, and it stayed on when you came back. The height held is still taken when you press, not when you let go.

Hold a height above the ground and swinging raises it all the way, for stone, as long as the height is within eight metres of where the world made the ground. The next section has the price. Hold one more than about a metre below the ground and the ground still stops short: hold 32m, stand on 34m, and it comes down to about 33m and no further. The hoe only digs a metre, or two on ground it raised before, and digging is the pickaxe's job.

A held height is not kept across a logout. Coming back, swinging, and watching the ground move toward a number you set yesterday for a reason you no longer remember - with nothing on screen having changed to warn you - is a worse trap than setting it again.

Left Alt is also vanilla's alt-placement key, which does have a meaning for terrain tools. If the placement ghost starts behaving oddly while you use this, move HoldKey to something of its own. A server never takes a keybind over, so it stays yours whatever the host runs.

Raising low ground, and what it costs

The hoe's Level ground moves each point a metre at most. It eases the point toward the height the swing is aiming at, keeps a running total, and stops once that total reaches a metre. Only raising ground clears the total again. So a swing aimed well above the ground used to bring it up a metre and then do nothing, however often you swung, while the panel kept showing a height the ground never reached.

Now a swing over ground further below your height than the hoe's metre can reach lifts its whole circle straight to your height, and you pay for it in stone. Hold 34m while standing on 32m and swing, and all the ground inside the swing that is below 34m ends at 34m, in that one swing, with the stone taken from your pack. Ground above your height is eased down by the hoe for free, as it always was.

That leaves a step at the edge of the circle, as tall as the ground was low there. Your next swing beside it that needs stone continues the flat and takes the step away. A step of less than a metre is within what the hoe does for free, so an ordinary swing beside it eases it into the hoe's usual slope instead. That is the trade, and it was chosen on purpose. The hoe eases ground toward your height rather than setting it: fully at the middle of a swing, less further out, and not at all at its edge. The other way to spend the stone was to follow that easing, finishing only the middle in one swing and creeping outward over the next few. Lifting the whole circle at once is faster, and the step is the price of it.

A paid swing takes more stone than one that followed the easing, because it does at once what that took several swings to do, but the ground costs the same in the end. Every point comes up its free metre first and you pay for the rest of the way, however many swings it takes to get there. Over ground two metres below your height, a swing at the hoe's own reach takes about 7 Stone, and one 12 metres across about 27.

A swing where the hoe's free metre is enough for every point in it is left exactly as the hoe does it, easing and all, and costs nothing. The hoe gets all of that ground there on its own over a few swings, and charging for it would make ordinary flattening cost stone. The flat top comes with paying, not with the hoe.

A point is left out of the fill in two cases, and then it gets only the hoe's own free, eased movement and costs nothing. The game never lets ground sit more than eight metres above where the world made it, so ground further below your height than that cannot ever get there, however much stone you carry. And when your stone runs out partway, the ground it did not reach stays where the hoe puts it, which is covered further down.

Neither is left out in silence, because silence is how this started: a height on the panel and ground that stops short of it with nothing to say why. Ground too far below gets a line in the build panel before you swing, Part of the ground here cannot be filled that high, and the swing puts Too far below to raise in the middle of the screen. Running out of stone has its own panel line and message, below.

The price is the hoe's own. Jafna finds the Raise ground entry on the hoe, takes what it costs, and works out how much ground one Raise ground swing adds to flat ground. Filling costs stone at that rate per cubic metre. Both numbers come from the running game and go in the log once a session, so if another mod changes what Raise ground costs, filling follows it.

So does where you may do it. Raising with stone needs a workbench nearby, because Raise ground does: its entry names the workbench, and the game will not let you swing it further from one than the workbench's build range, 20 metres for a bench with no extensions, measured from where you stand. Filling reads the station off the same entry and follows the same rule. Out of range, a swing that would need stone is the hoe's alone: the ground comes up its free metre, eased the hoe's way, and no stone is taken. The panel says Filling up to that height needs a Workbench nearby where the price would be, and the swing puts Raising needs a Workbench nearby in the middle of the screen. A world with NoWorkbench set lifts the rule and so does the nocost command, both as they do for Raise ground. NoBuildCost does not: Raise ground is free there and still wants the workbench.

On a slope Raise ground adds less for the same stone, so there filling is cheaper than doing it by hand. Alternating Raise ground and Level ground by hand can still beat it. Every Raise ground gives the next Level ground swing its free metre back, and a fill does not. If it did, every swing would get a free metre and flattening would raise ground for nothing.

Only the part the hoe could never do is charged. Every point gets the metre the hoe would have given it for free, less whatever earlier swings already used of it, and you pay for the rest of the way. A point less than three centimetres past its free metre is not raised past it and costs nothing, so going over ground that is already flat does not eat stone. Stone leaves your pack whole. When a swing needs part of a stone, a whole one is taken and the rest is kept toward your next swing until you log out. If the entry you swing costs stone of its own, the fill leaves that much in your pack for it.

When you run short, the swing spends your stone on the middle of the circle first and works outward, lifting each point all the way to your height, until the stone runs out. The ground further out gets only the hoe's own easing and costs nothing, and the middle of the screen says you ran out. So a short swing leaves a flat patch in the middle with a step round it. The middle comes first because that is where you aimed, and a patch that grows out from it leaves one clean edge to carry on from. The first version spread the stone evenly instead, which brought every point up by the same fraction of what it needed and left not even the middle at your height.

The build panel shows what a swing will cost before you take it, and that is what the swing takes. When you carry enough it is the price of the whole circle. When you do not, it says what you carry, what this swing will fill and take for it, and what all of it would cost: You carry 1 Stone, this swing fills the middle for 1 Stone, all of it costs 7 Stone. When you cannot pay for even the middle, it says the swing fills none of it, and that swing takes nothing.

A world with NoBuildCost set raises for free. The nocost command lifts the limit but still takes any stone you carry, which is what vanilla's Raise ground does as well.

AutoRaise in the config turns this off and gives the one metre ceiling back. On a server the host decides it.

Reach, and why it is earned

This is Skaft's rule applied to a second tool: Crafting buys reach and never buys a discount. The curve is the same one, out of the same shared source file, so "8 metres at 60" cannot come to mean two different things in two mods.

Reach is deliberately the smaller half of this mod. A wider swing is genuinely useful, because one swing has one reference height and so whatever a single swing covers is flat by construction. But it does not fix anything on its own. The moment an area needs two swings you are back to two heights, and the seam between a pair of 6 metre swings is a far worse thing to repair than the seam between two vanilla ones. Continuing the flat is what makes a big swing a good idea rather than a dangerous one, which is why it is on at every skill level and the reach is not.

The reach used is always the larger of the curve and the tool's own radius, so MinRadius can sit at zero and mean "a new character gets exactly the hoe the game shipped". Worth knowing when tuning: the hoe's own radius is 3 metres, so with the default curve nothing changes at all until about Crafting 25, and MaxRadius of 6 is double the vanilla radius at the top.

Wards

Vanilla checks one point when you level: the one under your crosshair. It does not check what the tool actually covers. So even the stock hoe can already cut ground out from under a neighbour's wall while you stand outside their fence, with the ghost showing blue and the ward never flashing. That is a small hole at vanilla's radius and a wide one the moment Crafting makes the tool bigger, so Jafna tests the whole footprint and refuses the swing if any of it falls inside a ward you have no access to. The hoe's op is round, so the test is a circle; a square one is padded to its corners instead.

Be clear about what that is worth. It is enforced where you swing, not where the world is saved. Terrain in Valheim is applied by whichever client owns that zone, and there is no server-side validation anywhere in that path, so this stops the mod and it stops an honest player. It cannot stop a hostile one. That was already true of vanilla and this does not make it worse.

Installing

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

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.

Core is optional and soft. With it, Jafna joins the version gate and the host's reach, ward and raising settings are the ones everybody plays by. Without it the mod works exactly the same for you, and the ward rule becomes an agreement between players rather than a property of the server.

Settings

Every setting is in BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.jafna.cfg, and each one carries its reasoning in the file rather than here, so there is only one place to keep up to date. The ones worth knowing exist:

• ContinueFlat turns the whole idea off and leaves you with vanilla levelling.
• MaxRadius is the radius a swing reaches at Crafting 60. It defaults to 6 metres, against the hoe's own 3.
• ContinueTolerance is how far apart the nearby shaped ground may be before the mod stops trusting it. A smoothed patch is a shallow dish rather than a plateau, so this is looser than it looks like it should be.
• RespectWardFootprint is the ward rule above.
• AutoRaise is raising low ground for stone. On by default.
• ShowReadout is the build panel lines.

BepInEx writes every entry to disk on the first run and the saved value beats a later default in code, so if a setting looks like it is doing nothing, read the cfg before anything else.

Multiplayer

Terrain is applied by whichever client owns the zone, which is often not the player swinging.

The flags a continued flat reads are already on that client's machine. The reach is not, and vanilla's terrain message has no room for it, so Jafna appends the number in a place nothing reads. An owner running Jafna finds it and uses it; an owner without Jafna never looks and applies a perfectly ordinary vanilla operation. Nothing breaks in either direction, and a player without the mod is never refused the server.

That appended note is also how the owner knows the operation is a swing at all. By the time a terrain operation reaches the owner, a hoe swing looks exactly like a location shaping its own ground, another mod's operation or a Devkit flatten. So your client adds the note to every swing you take, at the hoe's own width too, and to nothing else, and the owner reshapes only what carries it. Everything else it applies as vanilla, a swing from a player without Jafna included. A client on 1.0.0 added the note only to a swing wider than the hoe's own or aimed at a held height, so an owner on this version no longer continues the flat under that client's other swings.

Raising ground for stone splits the same way. Your client works out whether the swing needs stone and how far out from the middle of the swing your pack pays for, and sends that distance along with the reach. The owner lifts every low point inside it to your height, tells your client what it raised, and your client takes the stone. A distance rather than an amount of stone, so that a swing across a zone line stops at the same place on both sides of it, and the owner of each zone takes your client's word that the swing needs stone rather than deciding from its own half, so a paid swing has one flat top and not a flat half beside an eased one. Paying afterwards is on purpose: an owner without this version raises nothing and sends no bill, so you pay nothing for ground that never moved.

Whether you are near a workbench is also your client's answer, since only your client knows where you stand. When you are not, your client sends no distance at all, so the owner is never asked to raise anything for that swing and no bill can come back.

When somebody else owns the zone, the stone for a swing leaves your pack once their machine answers. Two quick swings can therefore be billed for more stone than you held. The difference is owed, and it comes out of the stone you carry at your next fill.

Your view of that ground can also be a swing behind. A quick second swing may still see ground the first one already raised, so it raises less of the patch than your stone would pay for and says you ran short while you still have stone. It can also take a swing for a paid one when the owner's ground is already close enough for the hoe alone; the owner then lifts only what it finds still low, and bills only that. Either way you pay for ground that really moved, and the next swing finishes the patch.

What the hoe actually does

Read off the running game on 20 September 2026, because none of it is on disk. The hoe's Level ground entry is mud_road_v2, and it is a smooth operation, not a level one: m_smooth true, m_level false, radius 3 metres, power 1, painting dirt over the same 3 metres. Raise ground is raise_v2 and Path is paint only. Nothing in the hoe's table uses m_level.

That matters for what this mod can promise. SmoothTerrain eases each point toward the target by 1 - (distance/radius)^power and clamps its own accumulated movement to one metre per point, and only a level or raise operation ever banks that into the permanent height and frees the budget again. So flattening with the hoe is asymptotic by design and capped near a metre per point. Jafna leaves the easing alone on every swing the cap would not stop short. It changes the height all those swings are easing toward, so they converge on one answer instead of following your crosshair. Going up, a swing over ground the cap would stop short is finished for stone: every point of the circle below the height comes up what is left of its free metre, counted where vanilla counts it, and the rest of the way goes into the same permanent height Raise ground writes to. So a swing never gets a fresh free metre out of being filled.

The hoe's piece table names no skill. Using it raises nothing, and Player.GetBuildStamina skips its discount branch, so unlike the hammer there is no second reward hiding behind the first - reach here is the only thing Crafting buys. It also means the reach is not self-earning: you cannot level your way to a wider hoe, the skill comes from crafting and upgrading at a station. That is the same shape as Skaft, where repairing buildings trains nothing either.

What has not been tested

Nothing has been run with a second player: the reach and the bill travelling between two machines, and an owner leaving a swing from a player without Jafna as vanilla. The ward footprint has never refused anything in a test either, because there was no ward to refuse it.

Raising low ground for stone went through a scenario in singleplayer on 29 September 2026. That covers a paid swing's whole circle landing on the height with a step at its edge, the stone it takes and each point's free metre coming off the bill, the middle coming up first when the stone runs short, and the workbench rule and its two messages. Not watched yet: the panel's price before a swing, ground past the eight metre limit being left alone and said so, and leftover stone carrying over to the next swing.

The hold key ignoring Alt+Tab was checked by hand the same day. A chord pressed with it spoiling the tap was not.

The same scenario checks that a Devkit flatten beside a flat at another height levels to its own height, and it passes. Nothing checks a held height or a Crafting reach staying off an operation that is not a swing.

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.