MySix Cartographer

Tick Detailed map on the Cartographer tab, zoom in, and there is your base from above: its roofs in their own materials, every door, the wall or fence round it, the trees by kind, the field you tilled. It is drawn live: change the world and the map changes with it. Cut down a tree and a few seconds later it is gone; put up a wall and it appears, for everyone on the server who has the detailed map on.

Down the coast, the troll cave you ran past yesterday is already marked, and so is the copper. Your Cartographer, a red wisp, marked them as you went, and uncovered the land the detailed map is drawn on. One map, shared by everyone on the server.

In testing: an early version for the MySix group to try out. It may change, and anything odd is worth reporting.

The detailed map

Tick Detailed map on the Cartographer tab (Cartographer.DetailedMap, each player's own, off by default). Zoom in on the tab, or look at the minimap while it follows the tab, and you see your world from above:

• Buildings in their materials: everyone's houses and the world's own ruins, with dark outlines. A roofed house shows its roof, as from above: the walls and doors under it are not drawn, but the doors that are ways in stay. Walls and fences are bands. Doors and gates are amber and drawn over everything, so the way in always shows. Dungeons' rooms, which the game keeps far above their entrances, are never drawn on the land.
• Trees by kind: pines, firs, birches, oaks, beeches, the swamp's dead trees, snowy trees, Ashlands and Mistlands trees, drawn above the buildings, oaks the biggest in the meadows. Big rocks, fallen trunks, giant bones and roots too; a deposit broken open only by its pieces still there that show above the ground.
• The ground you've worked: dug, levelled, paved and tilled.
• Live: every five seconds the server looks over the explored land round each player. When something there has been built, cut down, mined, moved or dug, it draws that part again and sends it to everyone who has it. The new drawing fades in over the old.
• Only where the Cartographers have been: the server draws the map from the world itself, wherever the Cartographers have explored. Everywhere else stays under fog, drawn just as the game draws its own. After start-up it draws all the explored land in the background, round players first.
• Sharp land underneath: your own game draws the land from the world's seed at every zoom, each biome with its own ground and water colours and clear borders.
• The game's colours: tick Detailed map, game's colours and the same map is drawn in the colours of the game's own map - its olive meadows, dark woods, orange plains, brown swamps, white mountains and grey water - every tree, wall and rock as sharp as before, in tones that sit with them. The atlas's bright colours stay the default; each player's own choice (Cartographer.DetailedMapStyle), switched any time.
• Left out: furniture, beams and poles, saplings, small clutter and anything that moves. Boats and players are icons instead.
• Easy on the connection: the server sends the parts you look at a little at a time, at most one message a second to each player, to leave room for the game's own traffic.
• Admin switch: Cartographer.DetailedMapAllowed (server, on by default). Off, the tick box goes from the tab, the server draws and sends nothing, and it deletes what it drew.

Getting a Cartographer

• Red wisps drift by the lore runestones at night (not the Mountains' drake lore stones). Catch one as you would any wisp; a caught one comes back after about 3 minutes.
• Make it at a workbench from 1 red wisp, 5 raspberries and 2 wood. Use it from the inventory to send it out or call it back. It circles you as a dim red light and takes no equipment slot.
• While it is out it marks what you pass and uncovers the tab's map, and with it the land the detailed map is drawn on.
• No wisps needed: Cartographer.AlwaysOn (server, off by default) has everyone mapping all the time, with nothing to catch or carry.

Marks that place themselves

• What you pass: while your Cartographer is out it marks dungeons, ruins, villages, towers, bosses, shipwrecks, lore runestones, ore, berry patches, mushrooms, seeds, nests and more, biome by biome. Each boss has its own head. Dolmens, where skeletons rise at night, are marked as barrows, and stone circles as standing stones.
• How close: close enough to have seen it yourself, so the map does not find things for you. A place low to the ground (a burial chamber, a dolmen, a cave) is marked from 35 m plus half its size, never from more than 60 m; a tall or huge one (a tower, a plains village, a rock spire, a giant) from twice that, up to 120 m. Most ore, and berries, mushrooms and seeds, are marked from about 15 m. Anything within 10 m of you is always marked, whatever cuts your sight.
• What you can see: trees hide things, wherever they grow: the more trees round you, the shorter every distance, by up to a fifth in thick woods, in the Meadows as much as in the Black Forest; a clearing hides nothing. Open country shows them further (two fifths further on the plains and at sea with no trees round; the mountains' peaks and cliffs hide as much as they show). Fog and storms cut it by up to a quarter, a snowstorm by three tenths, and night by a quarter - only a tenth with a torch, a lantern or a Wisplight lighting your way. These do not add up: the biggest cut rules. In the Mistlands nothing is marked unless something is pushing the mist back round you (a Wisplight, a wisp torch, anything that clears it), and then three tenths less far.
• How far it sees now: under the legend on the big map, the detection range as a percentage, and a row for each effect on it with its own icon, say "Night: -25% detection range"; the one that rules in full, the others faded. Without a Cartographer out it says so: -100%. With the big map shut, the same effects show as status icons under the game's own beside the minimap, while your Cartographer is out.
• All of it can be set: every distance, and each effect on or off with its strength (section [Sight] of the settings, kept in the world).
• Never marked twice: a whole ruin or village is one mark, a patch of berries or mushrooms is one mark, and ore deposits close together fold into one.
• Gone when it's gone: a nest you destroy, a hive you take, tin or obsidian mined out, a seed plant picked or a ruin broken down to nothing leaves the map. A copper deposit or muddy scrap pile broken open keeps its mark until the last piece is mined, and a mark passes on to the next one of its kind close by, crossed off and named as it was. A ruin stays marked while at least a tenth of its old building pieces or furniture still stand.
• Buried things stay buried: silver veins and buried muddy scrap piles, the things the Wishbone finds, are marked and drawn only once part of them shows above the ground. Dig one out and its mark appears.
• Farms stay off the map: crops sown on cultivated ground are never marked; the same plants growing wild still are.
• Portals, homes, boats and graves are marked by the server for everyone: every portal with its tag, every home (a fire or other heat with at least 12 of a player's building pieces within about 8 m), every boat, followed as it sails, and every player's grave, with the player's name, until everything in it has been taken. No Cartographer needed.
• What the place is: zoomed in, a mark whose icon stands for many kinds of place says what it is under it - Burial Chambers, Troll Cave, Sunken Crypts, Infested Mine, Stone tower, Fuling village, Giant's bones and more - in the game's own words where it has them, and in your language.

One map for everyone

• Click a mark to cross it off when it's done (a cleared dungeon, a mined-out deposit). Alt-click (Option-click on a Mac) names it, say whose house it is; a portal's name is its tag. Right-click hides it. All three are for everyone. With a controller (Steam Deck): LB crosses off, RB hides, A names the mark at the map's centre.
• The Cartographer tab sits at the top of the map beside your own, and the minimap follows whichever you choose. Other players, traders, raids, pings and the places the game marks show there too. The legend is in groups (Players, Places, Ore and materials, Things to pick) that fold away with a click on their heading; click a kind to hide or show it. You can zoom in closer than on your own map, and the minimap keeps the zoom you leave it at, on each tab.

Your options on the tab

Each player's own:

• Detailed map on or off.
• Icon size: a slider from half to twice the usual size, the usual size in the middle, on the map and the minimap alike (Cartographer.IconSize, each player's own, 50 to 200%, 100 by default). Places you travel to are drawn bigger than what you pick on the way: dungeons, villages, fortresses and bosses biggest, then ruins, towers and other landmarks; ore a little smaller than usual, berries, mushrooms and seeds smallest.
• Colour or black and white icons, drawn in the game's own map style (colour to start with).
• Detailed map, game's colours: the detailed map in the colours of the game's own map, or the atlas's own (the default).
• Fewer marks zoomed out: as you zoom out, the lesser kinds of mark make way a step at a time - things to pick first, then ore, then the lesser places, then the great ones - and come back as you zoom in; portals, homes, boats, graves, bosses and the game's own marks always show, and the legend fades the kinds made way, with a small lens (Cartographer.FewerMarksZoomedOut, on by default).
• Show hidden marks, faded.
• Hide your Cartographer wisp from everyone, while it keeps mapping.

Kept with the world

• Marks and the explored map are kept inside the world save, crossed off, hidden and named as they are. They go wherever the world goes: Steam Cloud, another computer, a server. The world's copy is the one used.
• A backup is kept in a file beside the mod's settings, in BepInEx's config folder. For a world from before Cartographer 0.6.3, it brings the marks into the world once, at the world's next save.
• Your choices on the tab (colours, icon size, kinds hidden and groups folded in the legend, hidden marks shown, your wisp hidden, the detailed map on or off and its colours, fewer marks zoomed out, the minimap's zoom) are kept in the world for you too.
• The detailed map is kept only in a file of its own beside that backup, never in the world save. Whatever is missing from it is drawn again.
• Items: the red wisps by the runestones are part of the world. A Cartographer or red wisp you carry is in your bags like any item, so it is lost if you later remove the mod.

Everyone who plays together needs it, the server included.

Part of the MySix mod suite. Every mod in the suite needs MySix Core, which adds the in-game mysix command for reading and changing settings. Settings are kept in the world itself, so it plays the same on any computer or server: one for everyone is changed once by an admin or the host, and each player's own choices are kept in the world for them.

Installing

Install with a mod manager - the Thunderstore Mod Manager, Gale and r2modman all work - or unzip the DLL into BepInEx/plugins yourself. Everyone playing together should run the same versions.

Settings

The Settings wiki page lists this mod's 40 settings: what each does, its choices and default, who can change it, and the exact command to type. In short: press F5 in game to open the console and type mysix to list every setting, mysix set <setting> <value> to change one.

Languages

Every MySix mod supports all the languages Valheim offers: whatever language you play the game in, the text these mods show is in that language too. Abenaki is the one exception for now - there it shows in English, as we could not find a translation we trust. We mainly test in English, but we will do our best to support every language the game supports; if something reads wrong in yours, please let us know.

Note on achievements

Valheim switches achievements off for anyone with a mod installed. MySix Mods Not Cheating, part of the MySix bundle, keeps them working.

Version 0.8.0. The Changelog tab lists what changed in each release.