Kynda

Fewer trips to the smelter. Same amount of metal out of it.

Built against the installed game (0.221.12, Unity 6000.0.61, BepInEx 5.4.23.3, Harmony 2.9).

The balance line

This replaces an auto-fuel mod, and it deliberately is not one. Auto-feeding does not make Valheim more convenient so much as delete a system from it. You never think about coal again, and the mid-game logistics problem quietly stops existing.

So the whole mod sits on one line:

It changes how often you walk to a smelter. It never changes what comes out of one.

m_secPerProduct and m_fuelPerProduct are never touched. Three ore in one press costs exactly three ore. Twenty iron takes the same time and burns the same coal whether it went in as one load or three. You buy fewer trips, not more metal.

Status: v1.0

Feature	State
Add several items per press	works in game
Two upgrade pieces that raise capacity	work in game; models not yet seen at eye height

Both halves ship. The batching has been used in a real session. The upgrades work and their models were remade, but the remade pair has only been judged from renders, which is the one thing still outstanding.

The upgrades register prefabs, and that is permanent. ZNetScene keys a piece on its name hash and discards a ZDO whose name no longer resolves, so a world that later loads without this mod loses every Tun and Woodrack standing in it, silently and without an error. That is why Kynda registers with Core's version gate: the gate refuses a mismatched connection rather than letting it quietly eat what you built.

Upgrades.Enabled = false turns them off, for a world where you want the batching alone.

Batching

Hold Shift and press at a smelter, and three ore go in instead of one. Same for coal, and for logs on a campfire, hearth or torch.

The modifier is held rather than toggled because a plain press has to stay exactly vanilla. A mod that batches unconditionally has taken the single add away rather than added a batch, and topping a nearly-full smelter with one last ore is a thing you actually want to do. Set BatchModifier to None to make batching the default and give up the one-at-a-time press.

Because a held modifier is invisible, the station's hover text says so: a smelter you can batch shows a [Shift] x3 line under the usual use prompt, in the game's own key-prompt style.

It covers every Smelter-based station (smelter, charcoal kiln, blast furnace, windmill, spinning wheel, eitr refinery) because they are all the same component, so modded ones come along for free. Fireplaces are a separate class and are handled alongside.

Batching stops early at the station's capacity or when you run out, so it can never put in more than pressing repeatedly would have.

The two upgrades

Two pieces, not one, because a charcoal kiln eats wood and a smelter eats ore and coal. A single generic bin looked like it belonged to neither: it was a box that said "storage" and nothing else.

Piece	Cost	Serves
Tun, two open casks, one of ore and one of coal	20 fine wood, 15 iron nails	Smelter, blast furnace
Woodrack, rounds stacked in courses under a lean-to roof	25 fine wood, 20 deer hide, 25 bronze nails	Charcoal kiln, windmill, spinning wheel

Build one from the hammer's Crafting tab within 4m of the station it serves. Look at one and it tells you which station it is feeding and what that station's capacity now is, or says plainly that it is feeding nothing, which is what a woodrack parked next to a smelter will tell you.

Looking at one also draws the link, the same run of motes a chopping block draws to its workbench, so you can see at a glance which station an upgrade belongs to in a row of them.

One per station. These are a one-time improvement rather than something to stack, and the capacity figures are chosen to land on a round number exactly once. A second bin beside the same station changes nothing and says so when you look at it, because a silent no-op reads as a bug. MaxPerStation raises it if you disagree.

Station	Bare	With its upgrade
Charcoal kiln	25 wood	50
Smelter	10 ore, 20 coal	30, 60

Each piece carries its own figure, rather than the mod having one. The kiln holds 25 and should land on 50; the smelter holds 10 and should land on 30. That is +25 and +20, and no single rule gives both: a flat amount misses one end, and doubling gave the kiln its 50 but left the smelter at 20.

The trough's coal figure is twice its ore figure because a smelter burns two coal for every ore it melts. Matching them would leave the coal gone with a third of the ore still waiting, which is the upgrade only half working.

The Tun upgrades a smelter. The Woodrack upgrades a charcoal kiln. Nothing else.

Which kind of bin a station could take is still read off its own components - a fuel slot means the Tun, no fuel slot means the Woodrack - but which stations actually get one is a named list, because that is a decision about what the mod is for rather than a fact about how a station works. A blast furnace and an eitr refinery are fuelled and would match on components alone; they are late-game stations that do not need the help. A windmill and a spinning wheel are single-input like the kiln; neither is what a rack of split logs is a picture of.

Both lists are config, so a modded station that wants in, or a server that disagrees, is a line in the .cfg rather than a rebuild. A bin standing beside a station it does not serve tells you it is feeding nothing rather than pretending.

Bronze gates the trough behind the smelter it upgrades, so it cannot exist before there is anything to smelt. The woodrack deliberately is not gated that way: a charcoal kiln is a Black Forest build, and an upgrade you cannot build alongside its station is one you never build at all.

A piece whose materials you have never held is absent from the hammer menu rather than greyed out, which is vanilla behaviour: on a character that has never picked up bronze the Tun is simply missing while the Woodrack is there. TestMode drops both to one wood.

Capacity only. Never throughput. That is the line above.

Design notes

How batching rides the game's own add, why the trough still answers to its old prefab name, how the surfaces and the link effect are borrowed, and the manual pass before a release: DESIGN.md.

Kynda uses Core, and why it has to

Core is a soft dependency: install Kynda on its own and it works. What Core adds is the version gate, a handshake that compares mod versions and build ids on connect and refuses a client that does not match.

Batching would not need one. Three ore in one press is three presses of one ore - same time, same coal, same metal - so a player who has it and a player who does not are playing the same game at different walking speeds, and there is nothing for a server to hold anyone to.

The upgrades are a different matter, and they are why the gate is here. They are registered prefabs, and a client that cannot resolve a prefab name discards the ZDO rather than erroring. A mismatch does not fail loudly and it does not merely hide a Tun: it deletes every Tun and Woodrack standing in that world. The gate refuses that connection instead, which is the only way the mod can protect what somebody built.

Without Core the upgrades still work and the mod says so in the log - it just cannot stop that happening. Run it ungated on a world you control, not on one you share.

Config

BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.kynda.cfg

Batching

Key	Default	What it does
BatchModifier	LeftShift	Hold to batch. None makes batching unconditional
SmelterItemsPerAdd	3	Ore or coal per press at any Smelter-based station
FireplaceItemsPerAdd	3	Logs per press at a fire

Upgrades

Key	Default	What it does
Enabled	true	Add both buildable upgrades. They register prefabs, so a world that later loads without this mod discards every one already built
Donor	piece_chest_barrel	Prefab cloned for its machinery. Its look, collision and icon are all replaced, so this is not a visual choice
Range	4	How close an upgrade must be to the station it feeds
MaxPerStation	1	How many of one kind count for a single station. One, because these are a one-time improvement and the figures land on a round number exactly once
Stations	per piece	Which station prefabs each upgrade serves. smelter for the Tun, charcoal_kiln for the Woodrack
OreCapacity / FuelCapacity	per piece	Extra items each upgrade adds; see the Tun / Woodrack sections
ShowLink	true	Draw the game's station-link effect to the station when you look at an upgrade
LinkHeight	0.8	How far up the upgrade the link starts, in metres

Tun / Woodrack

The config section is still [Trough]. Renaming a section resets every saved setting under it, which is a worse trade than a stale header. The prefab name is still kynda_tun as of 1.0.0, renamed from kynda_hopper while nothing had shipped and there was therefore nothing standing to lose. From the first release it is fixed for good: ZDOs key on its hash, so changing it destroys every one already standing.

Each piece has its own section with the same four keys.

Key	Tun	Woodrack
Name	Tun	Woodrack
Cost	FineWood:20,IronNails:15	FineWood:25,DeerHide:20,BronzeNails:25
Model	kynda_trough_casks.obj	kynda_rack_courses.obj
Scale	1.5	1.5
OreCapacity	20	25
FuelCapacity	40	(none, its stations have no fuel slot)

Model carries its own collision and icon: the .col sidecar and the _icon.png are matched by filename, so dropping in a new model brings its shape and its picture with it. assets\variants\ holds every rejected design, the twin-barrel trough and the first lean-to among them, so trying one is a config line and a relaunch, not a rebuild. The csproj does not copy that folder, so a shelved shape is buildable without being deployed; move a file up into assets\ to put it back in play. A variant with no rendered icon falls back to the donor's, with a warning.

Diagnostics

Key	Default	What it does
TestMode	false	Both upgrades cost one wood, so they can be checked without bronze
Verbose	false	Log each batched add
PrefabSearch	(empty)	Words to search loaded prefab names for, when hunting a material donor

SmelterItemsPerAdd or FireplaceItemsPerAdd set to 1 restores vanilla behaviour for either.

PrefabSearch defaults off because it indexes every loaded object carrying a mesh, close to two thousand, and then writes a few hundred names into a log shared with every other mod. Genuinely useful while hunting for a prefab to borrow a material from, pure cost afterwards.

A value already in the .cfg beats a new default in code. BepInEx writes every entry to disk on first run, so changing a default here does nothing on a machine that has already run the plugin. Edit the .cfg too.

Building

dotnet build

Deploys to the repo-local testprofile\, or build into the shared play profile with own-profile\build-all.ps1.

Author

Kynda is an original mod by Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software). Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Thijssen. MIT licensed. See LICENSE.