Changelog

1.1.0 (2026-10-01)

Client and server must both run 1.1.0: there are new answers between them, and the version check turns a mismatched client away.

Fixed

• Groups were lost on a server restart. A group file holding only ACS_groups: {} (what the server writes for a world without groups) was taken as broken, and from then on nothing was saved. Everything taught afterwards was gone after the next restart. An empty file is valid now: ACS_groups: {}, ACS_groups: with nothing below it, an empty or missing file.
• A repaired group file that still carries the hint loads quietly. If the admin fixed the file but left the two # ACS-PROBLEM: lines at the top, the server loads it like any other file and saves it again without them: no .broken-* copy, no warning, and the .bak keeps the last clean version. Before, the leftover hint alone counted as a correction, with a warning and a copy that was identical to the file saved right after.
• The group file says who writes it. Two new comment lines at the top: the file is written by AutoChestSort, comments and layout are lost on the next save, and it should be edited only to repair a locked file, then reloaded (panel button or acs_groups_reload).

Added

• Revert watch. After a move has passed its read back, ACS keeps watching both chests for up to 180 s. If a foreign write puts one of them back on exactly the content it had before the move, with no sign of a player, it is recorded as an incident: a warning in the server log (target chest: the moved item is probably lost; source chest: it probably exists twice), the conflict counter reverts, and the chat warning counts it like any other conflict. ACS does not compensate it, it reports it. With player activity at the chest in that time (opened, in use, a new owner, several writes) it is only an info line, not an incident. Background: on a dedicated server the game of a player near a chest can write to it (rain damage, building support) in the same instant as a server move, both writes carry the same revision and each side drops the other one, and the next write from the player's game can silently bring the old content back - after the read back has already said "ok".
• Incident ledger incidents.log. One line per incident, append-only, shared by all worlds of the server, in the AutoChestSort folder of the BepInEx config next to worlds/. It is created with the first incident. Every server start logs incident ledger: N incident(s) on record (this world: M), last: ....
• acs_incidents [n] lists the last n incidents from the server's ledger, newest first (default 10, at most 100), with the totals overall and per world. Any player, no open chest needed, read only.
• Rain guard. An unroofed chest takes rain damage every 60 seconds, and every hit is a write into the chest. ACS learns that rhythm from the chest's health and does not write to the chest in the two seconds around its next expected hit (a few seconds longer after a repair). The new wait reason ForeignWriteExpected (rain write expected, N s left) shows in the debug log, in acs_sort status and in acs_dump. Only chests of clusters with a player within activationRadius are sampled, every 0.25 s. No setting. Not covered: the first hit of each rain period, attacks, and chests on a building that the game rewrites for its support - those keep the usual quiet window.
• New lines in acs_sort status and acs_dump: sorter rain guard: ... and sorter revert watch: ...; acs_dump also shows sorter provenance: ... (how many chest changes were ACS's own writes and how many came from outside).
• Move lines in the debug log carry a move number per session (move #12 ...), so a warning of the revert watch can be matched to its move.
• acs_debug_server on|off|status switches the server's verbose log live from the client console. on and off are for admins only (the server's admin list); anybody else gets refused, you are not on the admin list and the server logs the attempt. status is open to every player. acs_debug is now local only: it switches the log of your own game and no longer the server's.

Changed

• No automatic reload of the group file any more. The server reads it when the world starts and after that only on request: the new ↻ button in the chest panel or the new console command acs_groups_reload (any player, no open chest needed, at most every 5 seconds).
  • An edit without a reload is ignored.
  • The server does not overwrite it, it locks instead: if the file on disk changed when the server wants to save, it saves nothing and waits for a reload.
  • A learn confirmed in the UI can be discarded by the reload: the reload takes the edit over and drops the group changes the server had not saved yet. The server log lists them.
  • Hot reload of the config file (.cfg) is unchanged.
• A broken group file locks instead of guessing. Every player's chest panel shows only malformed group yml – see server log (or group yml changed on server – reload) in the name field, the four buttons are hidden and only the reload button is there. After a failed reload the player who pressed it reads reload failed – malformed group yml. Every group change is refused while the file is locked.
• The sorter pauses while the group file is locked, tidy-up and group reconcile included, so a start with a broken file can no longer empty Input and group chests into Misc. Input chests fill up until the file is repaired and reloaded.
• Strict check of the group file — this can lock files that loaded in 1.0.0. One line the server cannot read now locks the whole file, even next to readable groups: a line without name: value, a group line without indentation, anything after the block, an empty group name, input/misc as a group, an empty item name (- ""). 1.0.0 skipped such lines and used the rest; the next save then dropped them without a trace.
• Content after a closing ] is an error. Only a # comment may follow an item list; bau: [Wood] Stone or test: [] :: lock the file. 1.0.0 ignored the rest of the line, so Stone was lost without a word.
• An item name with spaces is an error. No prefab name contains a space, so bau: Wood Stone, - Wood Stone or [Wood Stone, Resin] lock the file (quoted names too); write one item per entry or [Wood, Stone]. Before, such an entry was read as the single unknown item Wood Stone and removed.
• A list inside a list entry is an error. A - entry holds one item name, so - [Wood], - [Wood, Stone], - [], - {} or - wood: Wood lock the file; write - Wood per line or bau: [Wood, Stone]. Before, - [Wood] was read as the unknown item [Wood] and removed. A quoted - "[Wood]" is still read as an item name and removed as unknown.
• The group file must be UTF-8 (with or without BOM). A file saved as Latin-1/ANSI or with a UTF-16/32 byte order mark is not read at all: the file locks, the log says "the group file is not valid UTF-8 (saved as Latin-1/ANSI?) - save it as UTF-8 and reload" and names the first bad byte, no hint is written into it and it stays untouched; a byte-exact .broken-* copy is made. 1.0.0 read such a file with � in place of every umlaut and saved that on the next change.
• Hint at the top of a locked file. The server writes two # ACS-PROBLEM: comment lines at the top of the group file naming the first problem and its line (the rest of the file stays as it was), so the admin finds it without the log. Written once, only with a quarantine copy in place and only into UTF-8 files (a file that is not UTF-8 is locked without a hint); removed by the first save after the repair.
• Autocorrect of item mistakes on start and reload. An item in two groups stays in the first one, an item or a group listed twice is merged, and an item name the game does not know is removed (in 1.0.0 it was only warned about). The corrected file is saved right away, every fix is logged with group and line. The original goes into a .broken-* copy first — the admin's comments and layout survive only there. Nothing is corrected when that copy cannot be written.
• Safety net for unknown items. If all items are unknown, more than half of them or more than 20, nothing is removed and the file locks instead ("prefab check looks unreliable or the file lists mostly unknown items"): that looks like a missing mod, not like typos. While the game cannot answer the check yet, nothing counts as unknown.
• Backup and quarantine next to the group file. Before every save the previous version is kept as <world>.yaml.bak — always a clean, loadable version, and an empty one never replaces a .bak that holds groups; a corrected original never becomes the .bak. A broken file, or one that is about to be corrected, is copied as <world>.yaml.broken-yyyyMMdd-HHmmss before anything else happens, at most five copies.
• New answer codes between client and server for the lock (malformed, reload failed, changed on disk) and a new request for the reload. A 1.0.0 client cannot talk to a 1.1.0 server, and the other way round.
• Beautify waits 20× closeCooldownSeconds instead of 60× — one minute at the default instead of three. The log line for a chest that is not quiet yet names the quiet window, the time left and the last change (quiet window 60 s, 42 s left, last change 18 s ago), and is written again when the window restarts because the chest changed.
• Spreading: among chests of equal size the least movement wins. When several chests of a group have the same usable room, the planner now picks the assignment of item types to those chests that moves the fewest items (an exact least-movement assignment instead of a tiebreak). This stops the ping-pong where a whole stack type moved between two equal chests because a few stacks of another type tipped the tiebreak. After the update a group may reorder itself once - small types can move to the equal chest where they now belong; after that the layout stays put. Not covered: a tie between chests of different size that happen to have the same usable room (a bigger chest partly taken up by gear the mod does not move, for example). That case is known and can still cost the odd extra move; the cycle guard stops a real back and forth.
• The spreading plan is kept while a chest of the group is open or settling. No more rebuilds and repeated "equal chests reassigned" lines while somebody fills a chest; the next plan is worked out once every chest of the group is quiet again, and compared with the kept one.
• ACS's own writes keep the plan valid. A beautify rewrite, a merge of partial stacks inside a chest and the spreading moves themselves no longer throw the plan away. An Input or tidy-up move into a group chest does change what the group holds, so the plan is rebuilt; the debug log tells such an own move apart from a change from outside.
• The "cannot be sorted any further" line is keyed by the content of the group, so a beautify rewrite no longer repeats it.
• acs_sort status and acs_dump have a new line sorter distribution planning: ...: plan changes N (content changed N, inside one class of equal chests N, cross-class split ties N), reassigned among equal chests N, plan build max X ms, last Y ms, cycle stops N, plan builds skipped while blocked N. A plan change after a real change of content is counted as content changed, not as a change inside a class of equal chests.

Requirements: BepInExPack 5.4.2351, Jotunn 2.30.2, Valheim 1.0.x (tested on 1.0.15 and 1.0.16).

1.0.0 (2026-09-18)

First public release.

• Name chests in the chest window; chests with the same name form a group.
• Teach a group with +: the item types lying in that chest now belong to the group.
• The server empties every Input chest, one stack per second, into the matching group chest nearby, or into Misc, or leaves the stack where it is.
• Chest-to-chest tidying: items in the wrong chest move to their group, unassigned items to Misc.
• Clusters: chests within graphEdgeRadius (default 12 m) of each other form one sorting area.
• Spreading stage: a group with several chests is filled so that one chest holds one item type wherever possible, with stack top-ups and buffer moves.
• Optional beautify pass (beautifyChestItemOrder, off by default): tidies each group chest, same items side by side, full stacks first.
• Server settings in a BepInEx .cfg with Jotunn admin sync and hot reload; acs_* console commands for status, dump and diagnostics.
• allowVanillaClients (default false): a server refuses clients without the mod. Set it to true for mixed play.
• Every move is checked: add at the target, remove at the source, read back and verify. Counters for lost, duplicated and unbalanced items in acs_sort status.

Requirements: BepInExPack 5.4.2350, Jotunn 2.30.0, Valheim 1.0.x (tested on 1.0.12 and 1.0.14). The mod has to run on the server and, unless allowVanillaClients is on, on every client.