Merchant Signposts

Valheim's no-map mode makes the travelling merchants nearly impossible to find without looking up the seed. Merchant Signposts places fingerpost signs along trails leading to Haldor, Hildir and the Bog Witch, so exploring the right biome is rewarded with a physical marker in the world instead of a map pin.

What it does

• Trails of signposts. Around each merchant's candidate camps, the server plans trails of signposts from the world seed. Each signpost is a vanilla post with a vanilla sign board that points toward the camp and names the merchant.
• Themed per merchant. Haldor's signs use a Dvergr post with gold lettering, Hildir's a wood post with pink lettering, and the Bog Witch's a darkwood post with green lettering.
• Follows the game's choice of camp. Each merchant has several reserved camp locations until a player first comes near one; the game then keeps only that one. Signposts pointing to the discarded camps are removed at the next sweep, and those around the surviving camp remain.
• Self-repairing. When the world loads, the server removes stale signposts and restores missing ones in generated areas. Player-built posts and signs of the same kinds are never touched.

Signposts use only vanilla pieces, so they replicate to every player like any other build piece and are saved with the world.

Installation

Server-side only. Install it on the dedicated server, or in the profile of the player who hosts the world. Players who join do not need it and see the signposts without it; a joining client that also has it does nothing extra. It requires BepInExPack for Valheim.

If the server ran an earlier hand-installed build, remove that plugin folder first. BepInEx loads the higher version of a duplicated plugin, so an old copy labelled 1.x would replace this release.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.valheim.merchantsignposts.cfg holds the merchant table, the post and sign pieces, per-merchant colours, and trail density. Placement settings apply after a restart. The defaults suit a standard world; set Placement.WorldPlacement=false to stop placing and reconciling signposts while leaving existing ones in place.

Hosts and admins can also use the signpost console command: signpost plan <merchant> lists the nearest planned trail points, and signpost sweep requests a reconciliation sweep.

Compatibility

Version 0.1.0 is the first public release and is in initial development, so settings may still change between 0.x versions. Built against Valheim 1.0.15 with BepInExPack 5.4.2350. It has run on a Linux dedicated server since September 2026 and was checked on a Windows-hosted local world.

Reporting problems

This mod is maintained by the OMGBrews group, and there is no public issue tracker yet. When reporting a problem, include the version, the world seed, where the signpost was, and the server's BepInEx/LogOutput.log, whose [MerchantSignposts] lines record each sweep.