Chaos Polymorph

Three transformation staves for Valheim:

Staff	Tier	What it does
Staff of the Masquerade	Meadows	A toy: turns you into the creature it holds, until you attack or get hit
Staff of the Chaos Polymorph	Black Forest	Lobs an orb that turns creatures into random beasts you have killed before
Staff of the Ember Hen	Plains	A panic button: everything around you becomes a harmless, unkillable creature for a few seconds

This mod gives no eitr on its own. Use it with a mod that adds early eitr food, such as Therzie's Wizardry or Path of Valheiman.

Install on the server and every client. Requires BepInEx and Jötunn. Config is server-synced.

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Staff of the Masquerade

Cast it and you become the creature the staff holds. Not for fighting: attack, or get hit, and the disguise falls off.

• Crafting: Workbench, level 1. Costs 10 Wood, 6 Flint, 6 Leather scraps, 4 Dandelions. Upgrades to quality 4.
• Choosing the creature: drag a trophy onto the staff in your inventory, like the Ember Hen staff. Any size works, bosses included. An egg sets it back to a Hen. Flyers, water creatures, babies and summons can't be slotted.
• Pocket-sized: anything bigger than a viking is shrunk to fit your viking-sized hitbox, so you get a mini Troll or a mini Lox instead of one sticking through the walls.
• Its own kind ignores you: dressed as a Wolf, wolves leave you alone, and any already chasing you lose interest. Everything else still sees a viking.
• What still works: doors, chests, picking things up, crafting and beds. Your stats, gear and skills don't change. Humanoid forms (Skeletons, Draugr, Fulings, Dvergr…) hold whatever you're holding; other forms hide it.
• What ends it: attacking with anything (casting the staff again included, so a second cast just changes you back), taking any damage, or running out of eitr.
• No free sneak attacks: the click that ends a disguise does nothing, and creatures of that kind nearby become alert to you as you change back.
• Eitr: 10 to cast, then it drains 1 eitr per tick and eitr doesn't regenerate. Quality slows the drain: a tick every 1s at Q1, 1.5s at Q2, 1.9s at Q3, 2.2s at Q4. A "Masquerade" status icon shows while it lasts.
• While disguised, the staff's topper shows a little green viking.
• Other players see your disguise, its puff of green and the creature's sound.

Staff of the Chaos Polymorph

Every creature caught in the orb's burst turns into a random creature from your own kill list for a short time.

• Crafting: Forge, level 1. Costs 10 Core wood, 4 Bronze, 2 Surtling core, 1 Ancient seed. Upgrades to quality 4.
• The orb: lobbed, bursts on the first thing it touches. Anything with part of its body inside the radius is caught. Does no damage by default.
• Duration: 5s at Q1, then each upgrade adds a little less: 9.25s at Q2, ~16s at Q4, and at least +2s per level after that.
• Your shape pool: every creature you've landed the killing blow on, saved per character. Creatures whose trophy you've discovered count too. Variants count as one shape (every Skeleton variant is just "Skeleton"), and a creature never turns into its own kind.
• Weighted toward weaker forms: lower-biome creatures are more likely. Forms stronger than the target are rarer still.
• Same health, different body: a 600 HP Troll becomes a 600 HP Skeleton, with the Skeleton's attacks, speed and weaknesses. It doesn't skip a health bar. It disarms a big hitter and exposes a weakness.
• Everything else carries over: star level, and any data other mods store on the creature (Monstrum, Path of Valheiman, CLLC…). It turns back exactly as it was, with the health its borrowed body had left.
• Death breaks the spell: kill the borrowed body and the real creature takes the killing blow. Loot, kill credit, world-progress keys and other mods' kill rewards (like Path of Valheiman XP) all come from the original.
• It's angry at you: transformed creatures target the caster when they change and when they change back.
• Eitr cost: 60% of your max eitr, never below 20. You can always cast with any real eitr food, but it uses most of your pool.

Staff of the Ember Hen

A quick self-centred cast. Every creature around you becomes a tame, passive, unkillable copy of the staff's creature for 4 seconds and runs around in a panic, away from you. Use the time to drink, run or reposition.

• Crafting: Forge, level 1. Costs 8 Black metal, 6 Linen thread, 10 Feathers. Upgrades to quality 4.
• Radius: grows with quality: 4m, 5.4m, 6.6m and 7.6m at Q1 to Q4. The duration and the 45-second cooldown stay fixed.
• Choosing the creature: drag a trophy onto the staff in your inventory. The trophy is used up and the staff keeps that creature, which shows in its tooltip and perches on the staff. An egg sets it back to a Hen.
  • Anything up to about 3m tall works, so a Neck, Greydwarf shaman or Skeleton is fine.
  • Trolls, Lox and other big creatures can't be slotted, and neither can bosses, flyers, water creatures, babies or summons.
• While emberized: creatures show the green tame health bar, never attack, and take no damage from anything. Monsters you didn't catch may stop to swing at them.
• Effects: an ember burst on cast, the creature's own sound, and a puff where each creature changes.
• Eitr cost: half your max eitr, never below 25.

Both staves

• Always immune: players, bosses, tamed creatures, summons, water creatures, Gammeltrolls, boss aspects and Hildir's minibosses.
• Exact revert: when a creature changes back, anything its temporary body picked up (a tamed flag, gear, a pet name) is removed.

Console commands

Command	Cheat	What it does
chaospoly_pool	no	Lists the shapes your Chaos staff can use
chaospoly_eitr	no	Shows your max eitr, the Chaos cast cost and its duration at each quality
chaospoly_learn <prefab>	yes	Adds a shape (testing)
chaospoly_forget <prefab|all>	yes	Removes killed shapes (testing)
chaospoly_nocooldown	yes	Turns all the staves' cooldowns off until restart (testing)

Configuration

BepInEx/config/lynx.chaospolymorph.cfg is created on first launch.

Section	Covers
1 - Staff	Chaos: recipe, station, max quality, duration curve, impact damage
2 - Eitr	Chaos: cost mode, percent of max, minimum, flat cost, cooldown
3 - Projectile v2	Chaos: blast radius, bounces (off by default), gravity, fuse, launch speed
4 - Forms	Chaos: tier weights, higher-tier penalty, tier overrides, exclusion lists (* wildcards), variant suffixes, trophies count as kills
5 - Behaviour	Both: health model (Pool / Borrowed / Percent), death breaks the spell, aggro, messages, effects, VerboseLogging
6 - Model	Chaos: custom model file, fit, outline, glow, icon pose
7 - Hen Staff	Ember: on/off, recipe, duration, cooldown, radius curve, eitr cost, cast animation, default creature, size limit, exclusions, sound, panic, effects
8 - Hen Staff Model	Ember (trim, twist and icon also used by the Masquerade staff): head trim, creature size/position/twist, animation, glow and light, icon
9 - Masquerade Staff	Masquerade: on/off, recipe, cast cost, drain curve, shrink limits, same-kind ignores you, hit ends it, bosses, flyers, exclusions, sound, effects
10 - Masquerade Staff Model	Masquerade: topper size, glow, light

Recipes, models and icons need a restart. Everything else applies live.

Known limits

• Kill credit goes only to the player who lands the killing blow.
• If you uninstall the mod while a creature is transformed, it stays in that form permanently.
• The Ember staff's inventory icon always shows a Hen. The staff in your hand and its tooltip show the creature it actually holds.
• The Ember staff trims Staff of Protection's head off by copying its mesh back from the graphics card. If that fails on your system, it uses a plain wooden shaft instead.
• Disguises have no jump or swim animations of their own, so a jumping Hen floats. Your hitbox stays viking-sized whatever you look like.
• Emberized creatures are tame for real while it lasts, so they can be petted or named. Everything is wiped when they change back.

Credits

• Chaos staff model: "Monkey Staff" by madmachabre, from https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/monkey-staff-c05ccb9719c849048fefcc281b3c6598, licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/). The model ships unmodified and is loaded as-is.
• Ember and Masquerade staves: built at runtime from Valheim's own Staff of Protection and creatures, so no extra model files ship with the mod.
• Mod icon: a render of the Monkey Staff model.
• Built with BepInEx, Harmony and Jötunn.