Hearthfolk

Your settlement, with people in it. Hearthfolk gives Valheim persistent human residents who live around your base: they sleep in your beds, eat at your fire, fell your trees, work your fields, guard your walls and follow you into the wilds. Every one of them is a real character in the world — visible, named, with their own inventory, their own gear and their own mood — and everything they do, they do physically, with the same tools and the same rules you play by.

💬 Join the Hearthfolk Discord — help, bug reports and screenshots of your villages.

Unofficial mod. Hearthfolk is a fan-created Valheim modification and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Iron Gate Studio or Coffee Stain Publishing. Use it at your own risk. See LICENSE.md and NOTICE.md included with this distribution.

Founding a settlement

Build an Exiles' Hearth from the hammer's Misc tab and use it to open the settlement panel: a three-tab interface where you recruit residents, read their status and happiness, hand out work, configure Settlement Places and tune how the settlement behaves.

Recruitment becomes more expensive as a settlement grows. With the default Recruitment.Coins=10 and Recruitment.CostMultipliers=1,5,10,30,70,100, its first residents cost 10, 50, 100, 300, 700 and then 1000 coins each. The current population seeds the next step when an existing world first loads the update, including residents in unloaded zones and those waiting to respawn. Every successful recruitment then advances the saved counter, even if somebody is later dismissed. Servers can replace the multipliers or set them to 1 for the old fixed price.

Every resident has a persistent appearance you can shape — body type, any native hair or beard, hair colour, skin tone — with a live 3D portrait of the actual person you are editing, and a name you can change whenever you like. Appearance and names survive death, respawn and reloading, and they are synchronised to everyone on the server.

Settler.VisualScale changes every resident's visible size from 0.75 to 1.30 and defaults to 1. The collider, interaction reach, physics and navigation body stay at their normal size. The setting is server-synchronised and also prevents vanilla enemy or world-level modifiers from enlarging residents in one save.

Press Use on a resident to open their inventory. It is a real inventory: give them an axe and they wield it, give them armour and they wear it, and everything they carry takes real durability and can break.

A settlement belongs to the player who raised its hearth, and by default only that player manages it. Settlement.SharedAccess opens it up: WardPermitted shares it with everyone an active ward covering the hearth lists as permitted, which is how the rest of Valheim shares a base, and Everyone with any player who can walk up to it. Sharing covers the whole settlement — the panel, roles, resident inventories, and the banners, patrol points, farm markers and Settlement Places any of you place — and a resident recruited at a shared hearth joins that settlement rather than the recruiter's. Followers take Crouch+Use from any player whatever this is set to.

What residents do

Lumberjacks search the work area for trees, logs and fallen wood, chop with their own axe, clear the remaining stumps and carry the wood back to storage. Each one has two exclusive work modes: Cut trees performs that full clearing loop, while Plant seeds stops cutting, fetches allowed tree seeds from its inventory, chests or ItemDrawers, and plants saplings throughout the hearth and Lumberjack Banner work areas. Saplings use natural forest ground rather than cultivated soil, and keep a configurable 15-metre clearance around the hearth so they do not grow through the settlement's central house.

Miners do the same with rocks and ore deposits, using their own pickaxe, and without deforming your terrain.

Farmers work circular fields marked with buildable Farm Markers. Give them a Cultivator and they plant, tend and harvest any compatible crop, validate ground, biome, sunlight and spacing before planting, and replant enough of the harvest to keep the cycle going by itself. Each Farmer has a crop filter, can be assigned exact fields, switched between full-cycle, plant-only and harvest-only work, and given stock targets. Renewable vanilla wild plants — berries, mushrooms and herbs such as thistle — are farm crops too: planting consumes one real harvested item and the plant matures on its normal vanilla respawn timer. Planting resources can come from either chests or ItemDrawers.

Cooks work every cooking station, stone oven included: they fetch raw food from your chests or ItemDrawers, put it on a lit fire, keep the fuel topped up and — the reason the role exists — take every dish off the moment it is done, so nothing is left to overcook into coal.

Caretakers keep the place running. They refuel fires, torches and production machines from chests or ItemDrawers, load compatible inputs, collect finished output, sort your storage, and with a hammer in hand repair damaged structures. Each of those tasks can be switched on or off per Caretaker.

Foragers pick what grows on its own — berries, mushrooms, thistle, dandelion, wild seeds and whatever else a biome leaves lying about — and carry it home. They need no tool at all, which makes this the first useful job for a resident who owns nothing yet. They never touch a planted crop or anything standing inside a field: that is the Farmer's harvest.

Hunters take game inside the work area and bring back the meat, the hide and the trophy. They prefer a bow and open the fight at range, close with a blade when something reaches them, break off and recover when badly hurt, and never touch a tamed animal, a boss or a raid creature whatever their filters say. Which species they hunt is a per-resident list, and every one of them is on by default.

Companions, Guards and Hunters each choose how they fight: melee only, bow only, or bow then blade. A resident fully draws a player bow, leads a moving target at the release and spends matching ammunition from its real inventory. Open that inventory and drag weapons into the melee and bow loadout slots, or use Alt+Click as a shortcut; the automatic ranking remains as a fallback when the preference is missing, broken or out of ammunition.

Guards watch the settlement, walk patrol routes you draw yourself on an interactive map, and answer raids. An armed resident carries the best weapon it owns, only pairs a shield with a one-handed weapon, and restocks arrows from your chests or ItemDrawers when it carries a bow. Residents raise the shields they carry between their own attacks; after three blows stopped in quick succession their guard drops briefly rather than holding forever without player stamina.

Followers come with you. Command any resident with Crouch+Use and it walks at your heel, runs to catch up, boards the ship you sail, crosses dungeon entrances with you and fights at your side. Three stances: Defensive answers a fight and never starts one, stepping in when something strikes you or your companion, or when a creature has gone alert and is charging either of you; Aggressive goes looking; Passive never fights at all.

Life in the settlement

Residents sleep in ordinary player-built beds. Hearthfolk ships no sleeping structures of its own: raise whatever house you like out of Valheim's own pieces, put beds in it, and each resident claims a free bed. With no Settlement Places this is the original search within 30 metres of the hearth. A Home Area marker can move an assigned resident's search to a separate house or dormitory, while a resident card can assign one exact physical bed. Personal-bed links survive world reloads by physical identity rather than by a transient object id, and a destroyed or repeatedly unreachable bed falls back through the Home Area and then the old hearth search. A bed you have slept in yourself is never taken.

They eat real meals — dinner before bed, breakfast before work — fetching food from any chest or ItemDrawer inside the hearth's work radius, reserving a chair when one is free. A Gathering Spot marker lets assigned residents carry that meal to a hall, tavern or village square and also draws idle residents there to sit, stand and socialize. Fuelled fires and covered seats are preferred, but a roof is never required. No configuration is needed for food storage: intake roles and sorting filters govern work materials, not food.

They have moods. Happiness reflects sleep, meals, seating, company, safety, a sheltered fire and suitable equipment, and the panel explains every recent cause. Idle residents form conversation groups, face one another and chat. Residents who stay miserable long enough will pack up and leave, so a settlement is something you look after rather than something you own.

They heal out of danger, die like anything else in Valheim, and return at the hearth after a delay, keeping tools, weapons, shields, worn equipment and their exact durability. Food, arrows and gathered cargo remain at the death site in a recoverable tombstone. The panel shows a live countdown that survives world reloads.

They open doors on their way to work, close the ones they opened, and detour through a gate when a wall stands between them and where they are going.

Setting it up

Mark chests with Ctrl+Use to make them settlement intake chests for Lumberjacks, Miners, Farmers, Foragers, Hunters or any combination, and to choose what may be sorted into them; unconfigured chests infer their contents. Raise Lumberjack, Miner, Forager and Hunter Banners to extend where those roles may work. Their configurable radius defaults to 100 metres and can be raised to 400 metres, so a few banners can cover a broad region. Add Patrol Points to shape a guard's route, and Farm Markers to lay out fields. Build Home Area and Gathering Spot markers to define domestic places, then rename them, tune their radius and assign residents individually or in a batch from the Places tab. Residents can be moved from one hearth to another anywhere in the world, keeping their name, appearance, role and inventory.

Language and interface

Hearthfolk speaks English, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Interface.Language picks one and defaults to Auto, which follows the language selected in Valheim — but it belongs to the mod alone, so you can play in English and read the settlement panel in your own language. It is local to you and never pushed by a server. Translations are plain text files beside the DLL, so a correction, or a whole new language, needs no rebuild.

The panels are drawn outside Valheim's interface canvas, which its UI scale setting cannot reach, so they have their own: Interface.UiScale, from 0.75 to 2.5. Raise it on a high resolution screen.

Requirements

Requires BepInEx and Jotunn. Install it on the server and on every client — minor versions must match.

KGvalheim ItemDrawers is optional and not bundled: when it or Firehunter1980's unofficial QuickFix is installed, player-seeded drawers inside the work area are preferred automatically as sorting destinations. Cooks and Caretakers can also withdraw their raw food, fuel and machine inputs from those drawers. All resident supply routines also consider them for meals, ammunition and planting resources.

Known limitations

• Residents work in loaded zones only. There is no offline production while the zone or the game is unloaded.
• Chest sorting covers materials, consumables, fish and trophies. Equipment, ammunition and quest items are left alone.
• Food preference favours variety and lower-value meals; individual favourite foods are not implemented yet.
• Sending a resident to another settlement needs both hearths to have the same founder, even where Settlement.SharedAccess shares them.