Stackmaster

Turn a messy Viking inventory into a tidy, adventure-ready loadout.

Stackmaster by JStack424 combines automatic inventory sorting, deliberate nearby-storage depositing, protected-stack replenishment, storage-aware requirement totals, and optional nearby-chest material use for building and crafting in one Valheim workflow.

Vanilla-plus by design

Stackmaster is built to preserve the vanilla experience. It adds no gameplay advantage: no free resources, extra carrying capacity, powers, cheats, or progression shortcuts. Instead, it removes repetitive container rummaging so you can spend more time adventuring and building immersive spaces. Put a pantry behind real doors and cook at the nearby station without fetching every ingredient by hand, or unload a mining haul into its organized storage without visiting every chest one by one.

Convenience stays deliberate. Auto-deposit works only when you look at or interact with a chest and press Left Alt + E; simply walking near your base never empties your backpack.

Testing status: Stackmaster 1.0.0 promotes the live-tested 0.4.2 candidate without gameplay changes. Automated coverage includes the independent storage-total and crafting/building permission combinations and the 30-second ownership-lease safeguards. Broader multiplayer, dedicated-server, workbench-extension, and load/unload edge-case testing remains incomplete; back up valuable characters and worlds and report any item loss, duplication, crash, corrupt item data, blocked chest, or synchronization disagreement.

Features

• Inventory sorting
  • Sorts movable backpack slots alphabetically whenever the inventory opens.
  • Adds an Auto-sort chest checkbox beneath each supported opened vanilla chest.
  • Sorts an enabled chest when its UI opens and again when it closes, so removing items does not require a reopen to restore order.
  • Remembers disabled chests locally per player, world, and chest without writing preferences to shared world state or affecting other players.
  • Keeps the whole quick bar, equipped items, and protected stacks fixed.
• One consistent storage scope
  • Inside a vanilla workbench build zone, follows every overlapping workbench zone as one connected base mesh and includes loaded supported chests anywhere in that exact union.
  • Excludes nearby chests outside the connected mesh, even if they are within the fallback radius.
  • Outside every workbench mesh, uses the configurable player-centered radius (20 metres by default).
  • Applies the same scope to deposit, replenishment, building, and crafting; a chest's Auto-sort chest checkbox never changes storage eligibility.
• Auto-deposit
  • Runs only when you press Left Alt + E while targeting or interacting with a vanilla chest.
  • Deposits only into eligible vanilla containers in the active storage scope that already hold a compatible item.
  • Fills partial stacks first, prioritizing the targeted chest and then searching nearest to farthest.
  • Leaves unmatched items and overflow safely in the player inventory.
• Auto-replenish
  • Refills protected stacks, including ammo and consumables, to optional target quantities during the same storage action.
  • Sets, changes, or removes protection and replenishment targets directly with Left Alt-click.
  • Keeps protected stacks fixed while sorting and follows one compatible stack when it moves or survives a merge inside the player inventory.
  • Clears a stack's protection and target after that whole stack is manually transferred to a chest or dropped into the world; partial moves keep the protected remainder.
  • Prunes older orphaned targets before a storage hotkey action, so an item you no longer carry does not keep reporting target item missing.
• Storage-aware build and craft requirements
  • Separately controls storage-backed crafting, storage-backed building, and visibility of base-wide storage totals; all three options default to on.
  • When enabled for an action, counts and consumes exact costs from the player plus accessible vanilla chests in the active storage scope, regardless of current network ownership.
  • Independently shows selected build-piece, crafting, and upgrade costs as required / total available, including selected upgrade quality and multi-craft totals.
  • Affordability and red/white flashing always follow what the action may actually consume: player-held materials when its storage permission is off, or combined player-plus-storage stock when it is on.
  • Adaptively fits longer exact crafting and building totals such as 45 / 172 and 999 / 999 inside the vanilla amount label instead of clipping the final digits; short totals retain the normal font size.
  • Handles quality-specific and multi-craft quantities without consuming whole stacks or charging duplicate costs twice.
  • Uses the player inventory first, then chooses only the minimum distinct chest set needed by the complete action plan.
• Safety
  • Reads nearby build and craft totals without claiming chest ownership.
  • Requests ownership only for required chests, then rechecks active-scope membership, access, ownership, chest use, serialized revision, stack identity, and quantity before removal.
  • Withdraws exact quantities and rolls back completed steps if a later removal fails.
  • Cancels before consuming anything and shows The required materials are currently in use when a required chest is busy.
  • Keeps only ownership demonstrably acquired and used by a successful build on a 30-second sliding lease, yielding immediately when another player manually opens that chest.
  • Ends every logical in-use reservation immediately; crafting, cancellation, failure, rollback, disable, disconnect, logout, unload, and shutdown still release tracked ownership immediately.
  • Never mutates inaccessible, unknown, unsupported, or actively used containers.
  • Shows compact totals, shortages, meaningful skips, and incomplete-search notices.
  • Disables all item-changing behavior if its runtime compatibility checks fail.

Controls

• Open inventory: Sort movable player slots when the player-inventory Auto-sort checkbox is enabled. An opened vanilla chest follows its own Auto-sort chest checkbox on both open and close.
• Left Alt-click an unprotected stackable item: Set protection and an optional replenishment target. Press Enter to accept the prefilled legal full-stack amount, type a lower legal amount, or enter 0 for protection only.
• Left Alt-click an unprotected non-stackable item: Protect it immediately.
• Left Alt-click a protected item: Unprotect it.
• Left Alt + E while targeting a vanilla container: Deposit matching items and replenish protected targets.
• Left Alt + E while a vanilla chest is open: Run the same action using that chest as the target without closing it.

Version 1.0.0 supports keyboard and mouse. Controller-specific controls are not included yet.

Configuration

Stackmaster has exactly six settings:

1. Auto-sort enabled — on by default and also controlled by the checkbox below the player inventory. Chest auto-sort is controlled separately in each chest UI and is not a seventh global setting.
2. Nearby-storage radius — 20 metres by default; configurable from 1 to 50 metres and used by all chest-powered features only while the player is outside every valid connected workbench mesh.
3. Storage-action keybind — Left Alt + E by default.
4. Allow building from storage — on by default and independently controls building eligibility and consumption from storage.
5. Allow crafting from storage — on by default and independently controls crafting/upgrade eligibility and consumption from storage.
6. Show storage amounts in craft and build menus — on by default; independently shows player-plus-eligible-storage totals in both requirement UIs without granting permission to consume those stored items.

All six global settings are available through the normal r2modman/BepInEx configuration editor after the first launch. Existing building/crafting opt-outs migrate automatically to the renamed permission settings, so an explicit false remains off and the obsolete keys disappear after launch. Per-chest auto-sort choices are local-only preferences scoped to the current player, world, and stable chest identity; a missing or unreadable identity safely skips chest sorting.

Installation

Install with r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager, or another Thunderstore-compatible manager. BepInExPack Valheim is installed as a separate dependency; Stackmaster does not bundle BepInEx or Harmony.

For a manual install, install denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim 5.4.2350 or newer, then place Stackmaster.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Stackmaster/.

Compatibility and support

Stackmaster 1.0.0 is built and fail-closed for Valheim API 1.0.12 / Steam build 25253764, Unity 6000.0.75f1, BepInEx runtime 5.4.23.5, and Harmony 2.9.0.0. It supports vanilla containers only. A mismatched or unsafe runtime disables Stackmaster before its inventory hooks can change items.

Inside a base, Stackmaster discovers the complete connected union of loaded canonical vanilla workbench build zones using each station's current game-reported build range. Outside a base, the configurable player-centered radius is the fallback. Nearby build/craft totals read stable serialized snapshots from accessible vanilla containers in that active scope without claiming them, including containers owned by another peer. Mutation remains stricter: after player-first allocation, Stackmaster requests ownership only for the minimum required chests, revalidates their owner/data revisions and exact contents, briefly reserves them for the synchronous transaction, and cancels before mutation if any required chest is busy, denied, stale, or unavailable. Valheim’s owner-authorized request is asynchronous, so the first remote-owned action prepares ownership and prompts a retry; only the second, normal vanilla action may consume resources. Prepared ownership has a 10-second retry window. After a successful chest-backed building placement, only the exact acquired chests actually used remain locally owned on a 30-second sliding lease, renewed by each subsequent successful build use. Logical in-use reservations are never retained. A remote player's manual open request immediately invalidates the build lease and continues through vanilla's normal ownership transfer. Crafting and every cancellation, failure, rollback, disable, disconnect, logout, unload, shutdown, exception, or unused acquisition release only ownership Stackmaster can still prove it acquired, with identity, session, owner-revision, and current-owner guards.

Plugin GUID: com.jstack424.stackmaster

Source, issue tracker, and MIT license: https://github.com/JStack424/Stackmaster

Development

The repository keeps pure inventory policy separate from Valheim/Unity adapters. The deployable plugin targets .NET Framework 4.8, pure planners target .NET Standard 2.0, and automated tests target .NET 8.

Private compile-time references must come from your own Valheim/BepInEx installation and remain under the ignored lib/local/StackmasterReferences/ directory (or an ignored path override). They are never committed or packaged. On Windows, scripts/Inspect-StackmasterEnvironment.ps1 performs a read-only environment inventory, and scripts/Collect-StackmasterReferences.ps1 copies only the required compile-time assemblies from paths you explicitly provide.

./scripts/build.sh

The build restores locked dependencies, builds Release, runs the pure-domain suite, runs repository safety checks, and rejects copied runtime/game assemblies in plugin output. See the approved behavior contract and implementation/test plan for the full design and release gates.