Hazel Stakes

An anti-spawn marker for Valheim. Craft a hazel stake at the workbench, carry a stack of them, and plant them from your inventory. Each stake blocks natural monster spawns within 25 metres, as a campfire does, and draws your territory on the ground when you look at it. It replaces the scattered campfires players build for the same job: same protection, same durability, with no fuel, light or smoke.

What it does

• Blocks spawns like a campfire. A placed stake carries the campfire's own player-base area, 25 metres by default. Spawn entries that are allowed inside bases still spawn there, as they do next to a campfire.
• Shows its territory. Look at a stake and a dashed amber outline appears on the ground around all the land covered by it and by every loaded stake within 64 metres. Covered ground has no lines inside it, and a gap shows as its own small loop. The outline fades half a second after you look away.
• Stays out of the way. No HUD element, no map marker, no count of nearby stakes.

Crafting and planting

Craft a Hazel stake at a level-one workbench:

Material	Amount
Wood	2
Feathers	1
Leather scraps	1
Greydwarf eye	1

Stakes stack to 50 and weigh 1 each. Equip a stake from your inventory or hotbar to show its placement preview, then attack to plant it. No hammer or nearby workbench is needed. Each successful placement uses one stake; an invalid spot uses nothing. Unequip to cancel.

Action	Result
Look at a stake	The outline of that stake and every loaded stake within range shows, then fades after you look away.
Use (E) on a stake	Pin the outline so it stays on while you walk the perimeter.
Use again on any stake	Unpin. Walking beyond the overlay range of the pinned stake also unpins.
Equip a stake	The preview's circle joins the outline of nearby stakes and moves with it.

The outline is local to your client; other players do not see it.

Durability and raids

• A stake has the campfire's health and damage material, read from the campfire itself, and does not wear in the rain. Monsters hit a stake only when it is in their way.
• Repair a damaged stake with the hammer. A destroyed stake stops blocking spawns.
• Removing or destroying a stake returns one finished stake, not its ingredients.
• Stakes count toward your base exactly as campfires do, so raids come to staked land.
• A stake is not a ward and gives no protection against players.

Installation

Requires Jötunn. Install Hazel Stakes on the server and on every client, at the same version. A client without it, or with a different version, is refused when joining, with a version message. The artwork is embedded in the DLL; there are no loose art files.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.valheim.hazelstakes.cfg. Server settings are admin-only and are sent to connected clients; client settings are per player.

Section	Setting	Default	Meaning
Server	Radius	25	Metres of spawn protection and outline radius. 25 matches the campfire.
Server	Recipe	Wood:2,Feathers:1,LeatherScraps:1,GreydwarfEye:1	Workbench ingredients for one stake, as vanilla item prefab names. An invalid value keeps the previous recipe.
Server	OverlayRange	64	Metres from a hovered, pinned or held stake within which outlines show.
Client	RingColour	warm amber	Outline colour.
Client	HoverLinger	0.5	Seconds the outline stays after you look away.

Compatibility and known limitations

Version 0.1.0 is the first public release and is in initial development, so settings may still change between 0.x versions. Placed stakes use the HazelStake prefab and carried stakes the HazelStakeItem item; both names are kept stable so saved worlds keep their stakes.

• Built against Valheim 1.0.15, BepInExPack 5.4.2350 and Jötunn 2.30.1, and played on a Windows client. macOS and Linux clients have not been tested in game.
• Spawn blocking reuses the campfire's player-base area. It has not yet been measured in a controlled night-time comparison.
• With DeadReckoning installed, a placement preview it hides (for example on a ship) also hides that preview's circle; outlines from looking at or pinning a stake are unaffected.

Reporting problems

This mod is maintained by the OMGBrews group, and there is no public issue tracker yet. When reporting a problem, include the Hazel Stakes and Jötunn versions, whether it happened on a server or a local world, what you did and saw, and your BepInEx/LogOutput.log. Log lines beginning [HazelStakes] describe the stake's registration, recipe and campfire parity values.

Why hazel

Saga law marked out a duelling ground, a battlefield or a court by driving hazel poles in a ring. A ring of hazel stakes around your land is the same claim.