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	Black Hole	pull enemies into a damaging singularity
Blood Mage	Blood Harvest	drain actual health lost to restore your own
Dark Mage	Dread Veil	wear living shadow to empower spells and reduce incoming damage

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	detonate the air around you, damaging and driving back enemies
30	Bloodstorm	become a blade vortex through three full rotations
40	Bearskin	wear a heavy pelt and take 40% less damage for twelve seconds
50	Rage Unbound	hold maximum Fury, double Wrathbound and steal life

At level 50, choose one final path:

Specialization	Signature ability
Ravager	Executioner's Wake	face the aim and swing the equipped weapon through three frontal crescents
Jötunn	Earthshatter	vault toward the cursor, then plunge onto it and break the ground
Warlord	Warband's Oath	reduce damage taken by nearby players

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.

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 and damage rate — are decided by the server.

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/

The assets and art folders are required: they hold the ability effects, portraits and icons. Copying Norns.dll on its own will start the mod without its artwork.

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.