Tollbound

Portals you earn one biome at a time. What you carry decides what you pay, and which bosses you have put down decides how much of it survives the trip.

Vanilla's portal rule is all or nothing: ore never goes through, and then one day the stone portal arrives and everything does. Tollbound fills that gap with a ladder — six new portal pieces, each built from its own biome's materials, each carrying a little more than the last.

Wood and stone portals behave exactly as vanilla. The stone portal already carries everything, so earning it in the base game is still the graduation. Tollbound's whole ladder sits before it.

How it works

Each portal is a licence with a ceiling. A Swamp portal carries Swamp-tier cargo and everything below it, and refuses anything above.

Portals of different tiers connect freely, and a crossing carries the lower of its two ends. A Swamp portal linked to a Black Forest one is a Black Forest crossing in both directions. Link either to a plain wood portal and nothing restricted goes through at all.

The toll follows the cargo, not the ground you are standing on. Every restricted item belongs to a biome, and carrying it pays that biome's spirit wherever the trip starts. Hauling bronze and iron out of your base costs greydwarf eyes and entrails, exactly as it would leaving the Swamp.

Kill the boss and that biome's cargo travels intact. Leave it alive and the spirit takes a cut of the metal on the way through. Ores and bars can be lost; dragon eggs, extractors, cogwheels and Hildir's chests never are.

Nothing is spent unless the whole crossing is allowed. A refused trip costs you nothing.

The ladder

Portal	Cargo it adds	Toll per crossing	Loss while the boss lives
Black Forest	Copper, tin, bronze, their ores and scrap	5 × Greydwarf eye	8%
Swamp	Iron, iron ore, scrap iron	6 × Entrails	11%
Mountain	Silver, silver ore, dragon eggs	4 × Freeze gland	14%
Plains	Black metal, black metal scrap	5 × Needle	17%
Mistlands	Dvergr extractors, Hildir's chests	4 × Bilebag	—
Ashlands	Flametal, cogwheels, springs, iron pits	5 × Charred bone	22%

Tolls stack across every biome in your pack, not just the portal's own tier. Losses are rolled once per unit, so a big haul loses roughly the listed share and a small one is luck.

By default one toll covers a crossing however much you carry. Servers wanting more friction can switch Tolls/Scaling to PerLoad, which charges a toll for every stack.

Building the portals

Each portal costs its own biome's metal. That means the first haul out of every biome is still a boat trip — you cannot build the thing that carries iron until you have brought iron home the hard way. From the second run onward the biome is open.

Portal	Cost	Station
Black Forest	Fine wood ×20, Greydwarf eye ×10, Surtling core ×2, Copper ×5	Workbench
Swamp	Fine wood ×20, Ancient bark ×10, Surtling core ×3, Iron ×5	Workbench
Mountain	Fine wood ×20, Obsidian ×10, Surtling core ×4, Silver ×5	Workbench
Plains	Fine wood ×20, Needle ×10, Surtling core ×6, Black metal ×5	Forge
Mistlands	Yggdrasil wood ×20, Black marble ×10, Surtling core ×8, Refined eitr ×2	Forge
Ashlands	Ashwood ×20, Grausten ×10, Surtling core ×10, Flametal ×5	Forge

Each portal glows in its biome's colour and carries its own icon in the build menu, so six of them in one base are still tellable apart.

Knowing where you stand

Look at a portal and it tells you what this particular crossing will carry, what the toll comes to, and what a living boss is putting at risk:

Swamp to Black Forest. Carries Black Forest cargo and below.
Toll: Greydwarf Eye x5   At risk: 42 at 8% to the Elder (~3)

The no-teleport slash in your inventory tells the truth too. Stand at a Swamp portal and it clears from your iron while staying on your flametal.

The spirits

Each biome's spirit speaks when a crossing is refused or paid for, in its own register — and changes tone once you have killed it.

The bog exhales. Nothing leaves the marsh unweighed.

The mud parts where you walk. The mire outlived him. So did the toll.

Lines live in BepInEx/config/Tollbound/voice.txt and can be edited or added to without reinstalling. The file is never rewritten, so your edits survive updates; sections added by an update are appended without touching anything you wrote. Set Appearance/SpiritDialogue to false for the itemised ledger alone.

Who needs to install this

Every player and the server. This changes game rules. The server registers the pieces and is what recognises them as portals at all; each client decides its own crossings. A client without the mod is refused at the version handshake rather than allowed in to desync quietly.

Gameplay settings are admin-synced from the server, so a client cannot lower its own loss rate or zero out a toll. Appearance settings are local.

Requirements

• BepInExPack Valheim
• Jotunn

Installation

Install with a mod manager, or drop Tollbound.dll into BepInEx/plugins/.

Compatibility

Backpacks

Backpack mods hold their contents in a nested inventory that the game's own teleport check never walks. Tollbound reads them directly, so cargo in a pack counts toward the crossing's ceiling, is priced into the toll, and can be taken by a loss roll — stashing ore in a backpack does not get it past a spirit. Tolls come from your own inventory first.

Supported: AdventureBackpacks and Backpacks.

Portal mods

TargetPortal is supported. Warping from a biome portal to a map pin is gated exactly like walking through one — same ceiling from both ends, same tolls, same loss rolls. Leaving a wood or stone portal by map is left alone.

Everything else

Both of the above are soft dependencies bound by reflection, so neither is required and their updates cannot break this mod. If one is installed but its API has changed shape, Tollbound says so in the log rather than quietly letting cargo through.

Tollbound portals deliberately do not set m_allowAllItems. Portal mods read that flag as "this portal has no restrictions" and skip their own safeguards, so setting it would make a biome portal more permissive than a vanilla one. Left unset, a portal mod Tollbound does not yet know about falls back to its own restrictions — stricter than intended, never a way to smuggle cargo.

Items another mod marks non-teleportable that Tollbound has no tier for are refused rather than carried free, so a mod or game update adding a new ore fails closed. Turn on Diagnostics/WriteItemReport and read BepInEx/config/Tollbound/item-report.md to see exactly what your install contains and how Tollbound classifies it.

One limit worth stating: backpack contents are readable only on the owning client, so a server cannot validate them.

Configuration

Settings live in BepInEx/config/com.ragemedia.tollbound.cfg, generated on first launch.

Section	Setting	Synced	What it does
General	VerboseLogging	no	Detailed per-event logging, including why each crossing was allowed or refused. Off by default.
Diagnostics	WriteItemReport	no	Writes a survey of every non-teleportable item in your install, and how Tollbound tiers it.
Appearance	SpiritDialogue	no	The spirits' centre-screen lines. Off leaves only the itemised ledger.
Appearance	IdleGlowIntensity	no	Brightness of a portal's glow before it pairs. Vanilla portals sit dark; the default keeps each biome tellable apart.
Appearance	ConnectedGlowIntensity	no	Brightness once connected. Vanilla uses 5.
Tolls	Scaling	admin	Flat charges one toll per biome per crossing. PerLoad charges one toll for every LoadSize units, so bulk moves cost proportionally more.
Tier – biome	TollItem	admin	Prefab name of the item that biome's spirit takes as passage. A name that does not exist falls back to the default and says so in the log.
Tier – biome	TollAmount	admin	How many, per crossing. 0 makes that biome toll-free.
Tier – biome	LoadSize	admin	Units covered by one toll under PerLoad. Defaults to 30 — one ore stack.
Tier – biome	LossRate	admin	Per-unit chance that biome's ore or bars are destroyed while its boss lives. 0 disables it.

Settings marked admin are server-controlled: a client cannot lower its own loss rate or zero out a toll. Appearance settings are local and change nothing but your own screen.

Source

github.com/egaroib/TollBound

Licence

MIT.