HelmWind
Locks the wind to a fixed angle off your ship's heading while you are at the helm with sails up, so you sail where you want instead of where the weather allows. Client-side. Wind strength and ship stats are untouched.HelmWind
While you are at the helm of a ship with the sails at half or full, HelmWind points the wind at a fixed angle off the bow instead of wherever the weather put it. Wind strength, ship stats and every sail force multiplier are left exactly as vanilla computes them, so this changes which way you can go, not how fast the boat is capable of going.
It is meant for people who like sailing but not tacking across the whole ocean to reach a trader.
Client-side only
Install it on your own machine. Nothing is synced, there are no RPCs, and no version check is sent to the server, so it works on vanilla servers and alongside players who do not have it. On a dedicated server it does nothing at all: the patch needs a local player at a helm, and a headless server has no local player.
Passengers on your boat see their own wind visuals, which will not match yours. Boat speed is driven by the helmsman, so everyone aboard moves together regardless.
Modes
One key cycles three states. It always starts in Offset when the game loads, and the current mode is never written back to the config file.
| Mode | Wind angle off the heading |
|---|---|
| Off | Not touched, vanilla wind |
| Dead astern | 0 degrees |
| Offset | Whatever Offset is set to, 60 by default |
The default key is F8. Each press shows the new mode in the top left corner.
To rebind it, edit ToggleKey in the config file or use a config manager mod. It is a
BepInEx keyboard shortcut, so modifiers work: LeftControl + F8 is a valid value. The key
is ignored while the console, chat, or a text prompt has the keyboard, so typing it into
chat will not flip the mode.
Configuration
The config file is BepInEx/config/SirRomey.HelmWind.cfg, written the first time you run
the game with the mod installed. Changes take effect immediately, no restart needed.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Enabled |
true |
Master switch. With this off the wind is never touched, whatever mode is showing |
Offset |
60 |
Angle in degrees between the wind and your heading, used by Offset mode. Range -90 to 90 |
ToggleKey |
F8 |
The key that cycles the three modes |
The sign of Offset picks which side the wind comes over. Valheim's sail physics is
symmetric about the centreline, so negative and positive values of the same size sail
identically and only change which way you heel. The magnitude is the part that matters.
Why 60 degrees
Sail force in Valheim is not best with the wind directly behind you. The curve peaks a bit past 60 degrees off dead astern, around 63, and 60 sits close enough to the top of it to make no practical difference. That is worth roughly 2.5% more forward speed than running dead downwind.
The trade is drift. At 60 degrees the boat crabs sideways about 19 degrees off its heading, so your actual track is not where the bow is pointing. Dead astern mode gives you zero sideways drift for that 2.5%, which is usually the better mode in a narrow channel or when threading islands.
Known behaviour
These are all working as intended, please do not report them as bugs.
The wind does not follow your heading smoothly. Valheim refuses a new wind target while a transition is already running, and a transition takes five seconds, so the wind catches up in steps of about that long after you turn. That timer is global and governs every weather transition in the game, so the mod leaves it alone rather than speeding it up for everyone.
At 60 degrees the boat visibly crabs, as described above. Switch to dead astern if that bothers you.
The vanilla wind console command still works. HelmWind stands down whenever the game's
debug wind is active, which is deliberate so you can test against a known wind.
Just after you take the helm there can be a beat before the game agrees you own the ship. The mod stays inert until then.
Installation
With a mod manager, which is the easy path: search for HelmWind and install it. The manager pulls in BepInEx for you.
By hand: install
BepInExPack Valheim
first, then drop HelmWind.dll into BepInEx/plugins inside your Valheim folder.
Compatibility
Built and tested against Valheim 1.0.7 with BepInEx 5.4.2350.
It patches one private method, EnvMan.SetTargetWind, and only rewrites the direction
argument. It does not touch wind intensity, ship fields, sail force factors, or the wind
transition timer, so it should sit alongside other sailing mods without much trouble. A mod
that also overwrites wind direction will fight it, and whichever runs last wins.
If a future game update changes that method, the mod logs an error at startup naming it rather than failing quietly.
Credits
Written by SirRomey. Licensed MIT, see LICENSE.
