Treadwell

Build roads worth taking.

Treadwell is a focused, vanilla-plus Valheim mod that makes roads less tedious to build and more rewarding to use. Level Ground, Pathen, and Paved Road can use a larger or smaller synchronized terrain brush, and dirt paths and paved roads provide modest sprint bonuses.

1.0.1 is the current production package. It removes the Stonecutter-free Paved Road option and restores vanilla Stonecutter requirements. Adjustable radii, the Keyboard-row Alt + Scroll — Change Size hint, road bonuses, and camera-wheel isolation are unchanged from the live-tested 1.0.0 behavior.

Features

• Adjustable terrain brush: with the hoe's exact vanilla Level Ground, Pathen, or Paved Road action selected, hold Left Alt or Right Alt and scroll up/down in 0.5 m steps. Level Ground ranges from 1–8 m; Pathen and Paved Road range from 1–10 m. The visible _GhostOnly brush marker and the placed terrain operation use the same proportional scale.
• Built-in control hint: the persistent keyboard placement row adds Alt + Scroll — Change Size only while one of those three verified terrain actions is selected and the piece selector is closed. It is hidden for Raise Ground, unrelated or changed pieces, invalid/ambiguous brush discovery, the open piece selector, and controller input.
• Input isolation: while the vanilla hoe is out in placement mode, Alt+scroll does not zoom the camera—even at a radius bound or with an ineligible hoe action selected. Without Alt, with another tool, or while the build-selection UI is open, ordinary camera zoom remains unchanged. Build-menu selection, placement rotation, controllers, and unrelated tools remain vanilla.
• Dirt paths: 10% faster sprinting and 10% less sprint-stamina use by default.
• Paved roads: 20% faster sprinting and 20% less sprint-stamina use by default.
• All four percentages are independently configurable from 0% to 100%.
• Bonuses apply only to the local player while sprinting on vanilla terrain-painted paths.
• A short 0.18-second smoothing window prevents flicker across small gaps in road paint.
• Cultivated soil, building floors, leaving the ground, and other non-terrain surfaces clear the bonus immediately.
• No status icon, popup, sound, gameplay message, custom world state, or server requirement.

Walking, sneaking, swimming, jumping, dodging, attacks, carts, creatures, natural terrain, cultivated soil, and building floors are unchanged.

Treadwell multiplies Valheim's calculated run-speed factor and final status-effect-adjusted sprint-stamina drain. It does not replace base values or bypass Run skill, equipment, status-effect, or global movement-stamina modifiers.

Installation

Treadwell requires BepInExPack for Valheim 5.4.2350.

Install through r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager, or copy Treadwell.dll to:

BepInEx/plugins/Treadwell/Treadwell.dll

Each player who wants the terrain controls or movement bonuses installs Treadwell on their own client. A server installation is not required, and Treadwell does not synchronize configuration or write custom mod state into the world.

Configuration

Treadwell creates exactly five settings in BepInEx/config/com.jstack424.treadwell.cfg:

1. Enable mod (default true)
2. Dirt sprint speed bonus (%) (default 10)
3. Dirt sprint stamina reduction (%) (default 10)
4. Paved sprint speed bonus (%) (default 20)
5. Paved sprint stamina reduction (%) (default 20)

Terrain radius intentionally adds no configuration setting. Each action keeps its own independent session-only radius, initialized to its verified vanilla outer radius: Level Ground 3 m, Pathen 2 m, and Paved Road 3 m. Level Ground is constrained to 1–8 m; Pathen and Paved Road are constrained to 1–10 m. The runtime requires one unique complete three-brush set in the active tool's piece table, using each action's exact localized identity, operation shape, recipe fingerprint, and 3/2/3 m baseline. Runtime prefab object names are diagnostic rather than identity gates, which corrects Pathen recognition when Valheim's live object name differs. Zero, missing, changed, or ambiguous matches fail closed without changing the terrain effect.

Vanilla's Stonecutter requirement is unchanged. Treadwell still checks the exact station-backed, one-Stone Paved Road recipe as part of its narrow adjustable-radius identification, but it never removes or replaces the crafting-station requirement.

All percentages are constrained to 0–100 and are read live. The master switch installs or removes Treadwell's isolated Harmony patches.

If an earlier test build created the configuration file, BepInEx may preserve its older defaults. Delete BepInEx/config/com.jstack424.treadwell.cfg once to regenerate the current defaults, or set the four percentages manually to 10, 10, 20, and 20.

Compatibility and safety

Treadwell 1.0.1 uses a contract-based compatibility gate. Valheim's displayed version, Unity version, and loaded assembly_valheim MVID are logged as diagnostics, but they are not exact-version blockers. Client and dedicated-server assemblies, and compatible Valheim 1.0 patch releases, may differ in build identity while exposing the same APIs Treadwell needs.

Before installing gameplay patches, Treadwell verifies every required Valheim method and overload it patches or calls, the matching Harmony prefix/postfix shapes, every accessed game field, the Unity component/property methods used for road discovery, and the expected piece-table, resource, enum, and terrain-paint contracts. Each required gameplay member must resolve to exactly one compatible signature; missing or ambiguous members fail closed. Gameplay patch installation is transactional. The hint's UI/input contract and Harmony patch are checked and installed separately: if that optional surface changes or fails, Treadwell skips or removes only its owned hint while terrain-radius gameplay remains active.

Radius controls recognize only Valheim's exact localized Level Ground, Pathen, and Paved Road actions with their verified semantic shapes. Prefab object names (mud_road_v2, path_v2, and paved_road_v2) are retained as bounded diagnostics, not brittle identity gates. Each action must have exactly one root Piece, one root TerrainOp, no legacy TerrainModifier, no rotation, and the verified operation/recipe shape. Level Ground is smooth + Dirt paint at 3 m; Pathen is Dirt paint at 2 m; Paved Road is 3 m smooth + 2.2 m Paved paint, with its station-backed one-Stone recipe. Treadwell scales the separate placement ghost's _GhostOnly geometry uniformly in XYZ even while that vanilla child is inactive. Pathen's visible particle is nested beneath its rotated 4×4×1 marker and uses Unity's Local particle-scaling mode, so Treadwell also scales that particle's own transform; particles attached directly to _GhostOnly are not double-scaled.

During the exact local Player.PlacePiece call, Treadwell temporarily scales the selected prefab so TerrainOp.Awake searches the full chosen area. It then intercepts the exact TerrainOp.Settings instance entering TerrainComp.DoOperation, after the terrain owner has resolved the operation identity, and temporarily applies the selected radius to that final settings object. The patch proceeds only for the active placement position and exact vanilla Level Ground, Pathen, or Paved Road semantic shape. A Harmony finalizer restores the final settings after the terrain operation and grass reset complete. Paved Road's 2.2:3 paint-to-smooth ratio is preserved, disabled channels are never changed, and conflicting third-party changes are never overwritten. Changing tools/actions, closing input, scene unload, plugin disable, or any input exception restores or clears transient state.

The build remains compiled and independently checked against the pinned Valheim 1.0.14 / Steam build 25364309 reference bundle. Its hashes and MVID document and protect build provenance only; they are deliberately not compared with the player's runtime assembly. The pinned IL verifies the terrain, placement, input, movement, and HUD contracts Treadwell still uses. Treadwell no longer patches requirement checks, forces build-availability refreshes, or writes any crafting-station field; vanilla Stonecutter, DLC, free-build, stone-count, placement, consumption, stamina, durability, skill, and effect handling remain unchanged.

Treadwell 0.1.2's road bonuses and then-current Stonecutter-free Paved Road behavior were live-tested successfully. In the 0.2.x test line, Alt-wheel camera-zoom isolation has positive live confirmation. Live tests of both 0.2.1 and 0.2.2 showed that Level Ground's marker could resize while its real terrain effect stayed at the vanilla radius; Pathen's real effect also remained unchanged in 0.2.1. Version 0.2.3 was live-confirmed as working really well, including the corrected actual terrain-radius path. Version 0.2.4 attempted to add the native-style Alt + Scroll — Change Size discoverability hint, but cloned m_buildAlternativePlacingKey under its existing Gamepad parent. Valheim hides that branch for keyboard controls, while Treadwell hides the keyboard-only hint for gamepad controls, so it could never become visible. Version 0.2.5 validated the sibling Gamepad/Keyboard layout contract and attached its isolated clone to the Keyboard container without changing Valheim's source label or revalidating gameplay from the HUD; its Alt + Scroll — Change Size hint was then live-confirmed in the active Keyboard row. Version 1.0.0 promoted that same live-approved gameplay and UI behavior. Version 1.0.1 removes the Stonecutter-free option and its associated runtime code after the option was linked to a reported and reproduced inventory-change performance regression; this exact package still requires live verification. The terrain RPC carries the operation prefab identity rather than custom radius values, so an unmodded remote terrain owner cannot receive the custom radius; multiplayer/remote-owner behavior remains explicitly unverified.

Development

Private Valheim and BepInEx assemblies remain untracked and are never packaged.

./scripts/build.sh
./scripts/test-package.sh

The build performs locked restore, warning-as-error Release compilation, pure behavior tests (including exact-contract acceptance/rejection and transactional rollback), an independent assembly-contract test against the pinned provenance assembly, reference fingerprint checks, repository checks, and an exact five-file package audit.

Source, issues, and license

• Source and issue tracker: https://github.com/JStack424/Treadwell
• License: MIT