Byrding

Your worn armour and your rations get their own panel beside the inventory. Open your pack and click Gear, between the Armor and Weight readouts.

Nine slots: helmet, chest, legs, cape, utility, trinket, and three foods. That is nine pack slots handed back.

A byrðingr was the broad-beamed Norse cargo ship, the burden-bearer, built to haul what a longship could not.

Why This Exists

A viking in full armour with three foods on the go has eight of their thirty-two inventory slots gone before they have picked anything up, and they were never really free slots: you cannot use them for anything else without taking your trousers off.

Byrding does not give you more inventory. It gives the things you are already wearing somewhere else to be.

What It Does

• Equip something and it moves to its slot. Right-click a helmet in your pack and it goes on your head and into the helmet slot in one motion.
• Right-click it in the panel and it comes back. It comes off and returns to your pack.
• Dragging works both ways. Drag a chestpiece onto the chest slot to put it on; drag it out to take it off.
• Three food slots. Drop food in and right-click to eat it, without it taking up pack space in between. Picking up more of the same food tops up the stack already in the slot.
• The wrong thing will not go in. A slot only accepts what belongs in it.
• Your pack still fills up at the same rate. The gear slots are not counted as free space, so "inventory full" means exactly what it always did.

Nothing here changes what you are allowed to wear. Every one of the nine is a slot the game already has, so there is no balance change, nothing to configure on a server, and nothing to agree with other players. Circlets still go in the helmet slot, because in Valheim a circlet is a helmet.

Install

Client only. Every player installs their own; a server install does nothing. The slots are cells of your own inventory, saved by the game's own code in your own character file.

Other players do not need it. They will not see anything different about you.

Compatibility

Byrding will fight any other mod that adds equipment slots or extra inventory rows, including ExtraSlots, AzuExtendedPlayerInventory and EquipmentAndQuickSlots. Pick one.

It should be happy alongside mods that only decorate the inventory. The gear panel does not draw its own cells — it borrows the game's, so anything another mod hangs on an inventory cell travels with it. Runemark's rarity frames and tooltips work that way and follow an item into the panel.

Uninstalling

Run byrding_unpack first, then log out, then remove the mod.

Byrding keeps your gear in two inventory rows the game normally hides. Without Byrding installed, the next time you log in the game shrinks your inventory back and drops anything in those rows at your feet. Nothing is destroyed, but nobody wants to find their armour on the floor of a crypt. byrding_unpack empties the slots into your pack so there is nothing left in them to drop.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.byrding.cfg

Setting	Default	What it does
Enabled	true	Turn Byrding off without uninstalling. Anything in the slots is moved back into your pack, still worn, so this is safe to toggle either way.
OpenWithInventory	true	Show the panel whenever the inventory is open. Off means it waits for the Gear button.
SlotSilhouettes	true	The engraved shape in each empty slot.
PanelOffsetX / PanelOffsetY	0	Nudge the panel, for when another mod wants the same piece of screen.

Console Commands

Command	What it does
byrding_unpack	Empty every gear slot back into your pack. Run this before uninstalling.
byrding_status	What Byrding thinks your inventory looks like and what is in each slot.
byrding_dumpui	Write the inventory window's object hierarchy to the log. Only useful if the Gear button has landed somewhere odd.

None of them need admin or devcommands.

How It Works

For anyone reading the source, or wondering whether this is safe.

Valheim's Inventory can grow in rows but not columns — SetHeight is public, there is no SetWidth, and the core AddItem rejects x >= m_width unconditionally. Byrding appends two rows under the visible pack and keeps its nine slots there.

Those rows survive a save with no serialisation code at all, because Inventory.Load calls AddItem with skipValidPositionCheck set, and that check is the only thing that would reject a row below the current height. A Byrding save is an ordinary vanilla save.

The gear stays inside the inventory rather than in a container of its own, because Humanoid.EquipItem opens with if (!m_inventory.ContainsItem(item)) return false; and Player.EquipInventoryItems only ever re-equips what it finds in there. Anything held outside the inventory simply could not be worn.

The panel is not drawn. InventoryGrid works out a cell's grid coordinates from its index in a list, never from where it is on screen, so the cells for those two rows are picked up and moved into a panel of our own — and keep their icons, tooltips, durability bars, drag handling and gamepad focus, because they are still the game's own cells.

The one genuinely dangerous thing in the game's code is Humanoid.DropInvalidItems, which throws anything outside the visible grid on the ground and runs on every login. Three patches exist for the sole purpose of making sure it never sees the gear rows as invalid.

Credits

The approach of hiding slots in extra inventory rows is the one shudnal worked out for ExtraSlots, which is released into the public domain under the Unlicense. Byrding is a smaller mod with a narrower brief, but it would have taken a great deal longer to get right without that groundwork to read.

Everything else was derived by decompiling the game's own assembly_valheim.dll.