Rusty Heathens War Ships

Turn your Longship or Drakkar into a warship. Build vanilla ballistas on deck, let them automatically target enemies, or take control and fire them yourself.

Features

• Mount multiple ballistas on vanilla Longships and Drakkars.
• Ballistas move with the ship and restore their attachment after saving and logging back in.
• Automatic targeting when no gunner is operating the weapon.
• Manual aiming with full horizontal rotation, 75 degrees up and 60 degrees down.
• Uses normal ballista ammunition, resource costs, crafting requirements and cooldowns.
• Automatic targeting excludes players and tamed animals. A shot-path check blocks firing directly through the parent ship or a player/tame.

Installation

Install the same version on the server and every player's client. For single-player, install locally. Requires BepInExPack Valheim, which mod managers install automatically as a dependency.

Install through Thunderstore Mod Manager or r2modman. For manual installation, copy the plugins/RustyHeathensWarShips folder into BepInEx/plugins.

When updating, close the game and stop the server first. Replace the previous DLL and keep only one active copy. The plugin ID is com.rustyheathens.warships for servers using a mod allowlist.

Build and use

1. Dock a Longship or Drakkar near the normal required crafting station.
2. Select the ordinary Ballista with your hammer and build it on an upward-facing deck surface. Normal unlocks, materials, station, ward and clipping checks apply.
3. Leave space behind the weapon for the gunner and a clear shot path.
4. Load normal ballista ammunition using the usual interaction. Without a gunner, the weapon operates automatically using native trophy filters and cooldowns.

Control	Action
Shift + E while looking at the ballista	Enter manual control while standing nearby on the ship.
Mouse	Aim.
Left mouse button	Fire when loaded and ready.
E or Escape	Leave manual control and resume automatic targeting.

Release Shift+E after entering control. Leave the helm or a seat before operating a ballista. Opening inventory, chat or a menu also leaves manual control. Only one gunner can operate each ballista at a time; control times out if the gunner disconnects.

Saving and removal

Mounted ballistas save their position relative to their ship. They wait for their parent ship when it temporarily unloads. Normal ship destruction invokes the ballistas' native resource and ammunition drop behavior.

Remove mounted ballistas with the hammer before dismantling the ship or uninstalling the mod. Vanilla Valheim cannot maintain the attachment without this mod.

Upgrading from 0.1.0–0.1.2: rebuild older mounted ballistas once to establish the corrected saved attachment. An unresolved old mount remains visible and cannot fire; remove it with the hammer and rebuild it.

Compatibility and testing

Built against Valheim 1.0.21. Player testing confirmed deck placement, movement with the ship, automatic firing, manual firing and persistence after logging back in. The supplied follow-up log records three restored Drakkar attachments without errors or exceptions. The build passed 149 offline assertions and compiled without warnings or errors. Broader dedicated-server and multiplayer testing remains limited.

Rafts, Karves, modded ships, ship-packing mods, custom teleporting ships and ship-prefab replacements are unsupported. Only the vanilla ballista receives ship placement; ballistas on land keep their normal behavior. Console-spawned ballistas are not automatically attached.

Bolts retain native projectile spread and travel. Shot-path checks cannot prevent every possible collateral hit. Normal combat and weather damage remain enabled.

When reporting a problem, include your game version, mod version, ship type, steps to reproduce and BepInEx/LogOutput.log from the affected client and server where applicable.

The separate source archive includes the implementation and reproducible build/test scripts. No game, Unity or BepInEx reference DLLs are bundled. Artwork is promotional branding; ships and weapons use native Valheim models.