Norns

The Norns sit at the roots of Yggdrasil and weave the threads of every life. Yours is being cut to length the moment you step ashore.

Norns is a class system for Valheim.

How it works

Choose your first thread. A new character is stopped the instant it enters the world and must pick a class. There is no skipping it. Later, the class can only be changed at the Shrine and only after explicit confirmation.

Each class keeps its own XP, level, milestones and specialization. A class never played starts at level 1; returning to an old class resumes exactly where its thread was left. Ability cooldowns remain shared, so swapping cannot reset them.

Grow to fifty. Experience comes from enemies you actually help defeat and from personal milestones. Obsolete creature tiers gradually stop granting kill XP, but enemies retain their native value during raids or outside their home biome. Boss kills and new lands carry your thread toward the endgame instead of rewarding passive farms.

One ability every ten levels. Five in all, at levels 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50. And from the very first level, a permanent passive that makes your class mean something long before your first spell.

Choose a final thread at level fifty. Return to the Shrine and awaken one of three specializations for your class. The choice can only be changed at the Shrine.

The Mage

Seidr — the craft Odin learned from Freyja.

Eitr runs in a Mage's blood from the first day: you carry your own reserve, no Mistlands feast required, and it deepens as you level. Then, one by one:

Casting requires an equipped magical staff trained in Elemental Magic or Blood Magic. Compatible staves added by other mods are recognized automatically.

Magic should not begin only in the Mistlands. Norns adds three earlier focuses:

Staff	Progression	Attack
Apprentice Staff	Black Forest, Workbench level 2	restrained ember projectile
Runic Staff	Mountains, Forge level 3	rapid frost shards
Seidr Staff	Plains, Forge level 4	short-range lightning discharge

Each has four quality levels and deliberately conservative damage: the staff fills the space between cooldowns, while Norns spells remain the Mage's real source of power. Vanilla and compatible modded staves take over naturally from the Mistlands onward. All three are original Norns models — a crooked ember reliquary, an asymmetric frost antler and a black-metal loom of fate — and vanilla weapon prefabs supply only proven attack and network behavior.

Level	Spell
10	Fireball	a rune-forged fireball, where you look
20	Frost Nova	freezing air detonates outward from your chest
30	Arc Lightning	the storm leaps from foe to foe
40	Runic Ward	runes close over you
50	Fall of Ragnarok	the sky itself catches fire

At level 50, choose one final path:

Specialization	Signature spell
Void Mage	A complete void roster + Black Hole	slow with void bolts and rifts, blink instantly, dilate time and open a public way home
Blood Mage	A complete blood roster + Blood Harvest	mark, bleed, drain, turn health into a barrier and burst the wounds you opened
Necromancer	A complete necrotic roster + Army of the Dead	wither the living, raise thralls that fight for you and curse what still stands

Void replaces all five standard spells with Void Bolt, Void Blink, Void Rift, Time Dilation and Void Portal; Black Hole remains its sixth Final Thread. Void Portal lasts 60 seconds, is public, leads to the caster's current bed spawn and obeys vanilla portal restrictions.

Blood replaces them with Blood Bolt, Hemorrhage, Sanguine Chains, Crimson Bulwark and Rupture: a chain that marks prey, opens wounds, drains them, converts your own health into a barrier and finally bursts everything you have marked. Blood Harvest remains its Final Thread.

The Necromancer replaces them with Wither Bolt, Raise Dead, Corpse Bloom, Grave Chill and Death Sentence, and closes with Army of the Dead. Risen thralls are real networked servants that follow you, fight and crumble when their time runs out; a condemned enemy detonates when it dies, which is exactly what your horde is for.

The Berserker

Uruz — strength that refuses the yoke.

Melee wounds dealt and hostile blows endured build Fury. Every point makes physical melee attacks more dangerous, up to a level-scaled maximum, but Fury begins to fade after five seconds outside combat. Berserker abilities require an equipped two-handed melee weapon and spend this dedicated resource instead of Eitr. Greatswords, battleaxes, heavy hammers, polearms and dual-wield sets qualify; one-handed and ranged weapons do not.

The Uruz Cleaver makes that identity playable from the Meadows: a great flint-and-bone axe crafted at a level-one Workbench from 12 Wood, 8 Flint, 4 Leather Scraps and 2 Deer Hide. Its dark double-bit head, corded haft and crimson Uruz rune are an original model, and its conservative damage introduces the class without replacing later metal weapons.

Level	Ability
10	Rending Blow	raise the weapon into a crimson sky-beam and arm the next melee strike
20	War Cry	stagger everything nearby and flood yourself with Fury; costs nothing
30	Bloodstorm	become a blade vortex through three full rotations
40	Bearskin	take 40% less damage, regenerate, and pull every enemy onto yourself
50	Rage Unbound	erupt on the spot, then hold maximum Fury, double damage and steal life

At level 50, choose one final path. Each replaces the five abilities above with its own, and adds a sixth. Staying unbound is also a choice: you keep the base five and forgo the sixth slot, and you can change your mind at any time.

Specialization	Replaces the five with	Sixth ability
Ravager	Eviscerate, Maim, Flensing Storm, Bloodlust, Slaughter	Executioner's Wake — the killing blow on a wounded enemy
Jötunn	Tremor, Seismic Slam, Titan's Grasp, Mountainform, Jötunn Form	Earthshatter — vault toward the aim and break the ground
Warlord	Rally, Warding and Sundering Standards, The Warband Stands, Muster	Warband's Oath — three unkillable fallen warriors draw the enemy off you

Controls

The six defaults are Left Alt + 1 through Left Alt + 6. Press F7 to open the ability-bar editor: drag the bar, resize it with the mouse wheel, or click a slot and press any new key combination. Layout, editor shortcut and all six independent bindings are also available in the local configuration.

Every ability has its own painted icon, world-space effect and spatial sound. The effect volume can be adjusted independently in the local configuration. Personal buffs and persistent spells also appear in Valheim's active-effect list with the same painted icon, a tooltip and their remaining duration. Instant attacks do not create misleading status entries.

Languages

Norns speaks English, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Everything the mod shows you is translated: ability names, flavour text, tooltips, runes, items, buildables, status effects, combat messages and every panel.

The language is a Norns setting, not the game's. It lives under [General] Language in the local configuration and only affects Norns, so you can play Valheim in English and read your abilities in your own language. Auto follows the game's language and is the default. The setting applies immediately, without restarting.

It is per player and is never sent to the server: two people on the same world can read in two different languages. Note the consequence — names are translated too, not only descriptions, so two players on different languages will see different names for the same ability. Agree on one before comparing notes.

Anything a translation has not covered falls back to English, key by key. In Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean the Norns panels switch to a system font, because Valheim's own fonts carry no glyphs for those scripts.

If a line reads badly in your language, is cut off, or promises something an ability does not actually do, please report it — a screenshot says more than a description.

Runes

The Runesmith's Anvil adds a second progression path alongside class levels. Every boss from Eikthyr through Fader unlocks three runes for each class: one Major that changes how the kit behaves and two Minor runes that tune damage, costs, cooldowns, defence, regeneration, Fury or elemental riders. There are 42 runes across seven tiers.

Carving a rune consumes its listed materials once and permanently teaches it to that character. Runes are knowledge, not inventory items: they cannot be lost on death, dropped or traded. At the Shrine, set one Major and two Minor runes for the current class; changing the loadout is free. Each class remembers its own set independently.

Boss progress belongs to the world, while carved knowledge belongs to the character. A rune already learned keeps working when you visit a world that has not yet defeated its boss. Rune strength can be adjusted by the server without changing the Major rune behaviours.

Shrine of the Norns

Build the shrine from 60 Stone and 30 Wood near a workbench. Its monumental two-tier stone foundation spans more than five metres, beneath a towering arched loom and an Elder monolith wrapped by three living strands of fate. Two warm torches light the ritual at night. Interacting opens the Codex, where you can inspect or change class, level, passive and spells; at level 50, it is also the only place where any class can choose or change specialization.

Multiplayer

Norns must be installed on the server and on every client, with matching major and minor versions. Balance settings — kill experience rate, milestone experience rate, damage rate and rune power — are decided by the server.

Version 2.0.0 is not compatible with the closed 1.x beta line. Update the server and every client together; saved character progression is preserved.

Installation

Requires BepInEx and Jotunn.

The recommended route is a mod manager, which handles everything for you.

For a manual install, copy the whole Norns folder into BepInEx/plugins/, so that you end up with:

BepInEx/plugins/Norns/Norns.dll
BepInEx/plugins/Norns/assets/norns_vfx
BepInEx/plugins/Norns/art/
BepInEx/plugins/Norns/lang/

The assets, art and lang folders are all required: they hold the ability effects, the portraits and icons, and the translations. Copying Norns.dll on its own will start the mod without its artwork and with raw keys such as [spell_fireball_name] in place of every line of text.

Updating from a beta: replace the whole folder rather than only the DLL, and make sure the server and every client run the same version.

Credits

Designed, tested and maintained by Hadorn96.