Skeid

There is a muscle car in Valheim now.

I know. It makes no sense. A Viking survival game about chopping trees and fearing the swamp, and I have put a '67 American muscle car in it, with a handbrake and a boost and a stereo that plays YouTube. It does not fit. It was never going to fit.

I made it anyway, because the idea of four of us piling into a car to go and get killed by a troll was funnier than any argument against it. Then the driving turned out to be genuinely good, and now it is my favourite way to cross the Plains.

Skeið is Old Norse for a race or a course, and also a class of longship. So there is at least a thin excuse for the name.

What it does

Real suspension on all four corners, a handbrake you can slide on, a boost, and an engine note that answers the throttle. It fells any tree it hits, crushes the rocks and bushes that would otherwise stop you dead, and picks up anything you drive over rather than destroying it.

It floats if you put it in water. It takes no damage itself, which is fortunate, because you will hit things.

Two seats. The first person in drives, the second rides. Nobody gets in without a key.

Getting a car

Everything is admin-only for now. Open Highseat, go to the Skeid tab, and press Spawn. The car appears in front of you and you get a key.

To let somebody else in, hold Use on the car. A list of nearby players comes up. Click a name to give them a key, click it again to take it back. Keys live on the car, so they survive a server restart, and taking one back turns that player out of the seat.

The same things have console commands:

skeid spawn        put a car in front of you
skeid remove       remove the nearest one
skeid removeall    remove every car loaded on your machine
skeid keys         open the keys list for the nearest car

Driving

W / S	throttle and brake
A / D	steer
Shift	boost
Right mouse	handbrake, hold it into a corner to slide
Use	get out

Attacking also gets you out, because the game treats that as leaving a seat.

If you land it on its roof, get out and hold Use on it to flip it back over.

The stereo

Press F while in the car, or standing next to one you have a key to, and paste a YouTube link. Direct MP3, OGG and WAV links work too, and so do internet radio streams.

The sound comes from the car and fades with distance, so it carries to whoever is nearby instead of playing inside your head. Valheim's own music ducks out of the way while it plays, and fades back in as you walk away.

Anyone with a key can change the track, and everyone hears the same thing at the same point. Turn up halfway through a song and you join where everybody else already is.

There is a volume slider on the menu.

YouTube specifically needs Odin on Demand installed, because that is what brings along the pieces that can decode it. Without it the stereo still plays anything the game can handle on its own.

Settings

The Mods tab under Skeid has the handling: top speed, acceleration, braking, steering lock, grip, handbrake grip, boost length and cooldown. Paint colour is an HTML hex code and changes the bodywork only, so the chrome, glass, lights and tyres keep their own colours.

StereoRange sets how far the music carries, and StereoHotkey moves it off F.

Installing

Everyone needs it, including the server, or the car will not exist for them.

Highseat is required for the tab. The car and the console commands work without it.

Credits

The car is Muscle Car 3D Model by brightretro, from OpenGameArt, used under CC-BY 3.0. It has been converted to a Wavefront OBJ and is otherwise unmodified.

Skeid does not redistribute LibVLC. It uses it where it is already installed, so its LGPL licence stays with the package that ships it.