Fire Salts

Give your next evening by the fire a little color. Craft a handful of fantasy salts, toss one into the flames, and enjoy 30 seconds of teal, rose or violet light with small sparks, crackles and pops.

Fire Salts is decorative. It adds no fuel, damage, warmth bonus or terrain changes. When the color ends—or the fire goes out—the native fire returns to normal.

Crafting

Use a level 1 workbench, with the normal shelter requirements, and select its Craft tab.

Recipe	Ingredients	Makes	Color
Seaglass Salts	2 resin + 1 coal + 1 greydwarf eye	3	Teal green
Roseember Salts	2 resin + 1 coal + 1 raspberry	3	Rose pink
Moonviolet Salts	2 resin + 1 coal + 1 blueberry	3	Violet

Discover the workbench and pick up each recipe's ingredients to unlock it. These recipes do not appear in hand crafting or the Upgrade tab. These are fantasy game ingredients, not instructions for real fire additives.

Tossing a salt

1. Put salts in a hotbar slot.
2. Face a burning campfire, hearth or bonfire. About four metres away worked on level ground; slopes and obstacles affect the native throw.
3. Press the hotbar key to toss one. A successful toss consumes one salt and changes the color for 30 seconds.

Normal inventory drag/drop also works. A dropped stack consumes only one salt; its remainder stays on the ground. Pick up misses manually: automatic pickup is disabled so it does not catch your throw. Inventory right-click displays instructions rather than tossing.

A fire accepts one color at a time. A fresh throw stays eligible for 12 seconds; a salt still in the fire bed may react if the previous color ends within that window. Extinguishing the fire ends the effect. Native fuel, smoke, cover and weather rules continue to apply. Torches, braziers, smelters and other fires are not supported.

Installation

Fire Salts is standalone: its only mod dependency is BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2351. Install Fire Salts with your mod manager, or import the FireSalts-0.1.1.zip package directly using its local-mod import option. Launch modded from that same profile.

For manual installation, copy BepInEx/plugins/FireSalts/FireSalts.dll from this ZIP into your BepInEx profile. The package contains the plugin directly; there is no second ZIP to unpack.

Upgrading from the private preview: remove the old Unknown-FireSalts-0.1.0-private-playtest-and-source.zip entry in your mod manager, then import this package. That old outer bundle contained another archive, so importing it did not install the DLL. Keep exactly one Fire Salts DLL in the profile.

Recipes missing?

• Confirm your profile contains FireSalts.dll and the game log says Loading [Fire Salts 0.1.1].
• Use the workbench's Craft tab, discover the ingredients, and clear any crafting search/filter.
• A ZIP file sitting inside BepInEx/plugins is not an installed plugin. Import the direct package above, not a source/checkpoint archive.

Settings and limits

Client settings are in BepInEx/config/smeagsmods.firesalts.cfg: Visuals and Sound. They control local presentation without changing item consumption or duration.

At most eight colored fires within 32 metres render per client. No extra lights are created. Each rendered fire adds at most 24 short-lived particles and a quiet sound pulse at most every two seconds. Native smoke particle colors, light intensity/range, emission rates and gameplay components remain unchanged. Native colored light may illuminate smoke, and existing particles can retain their color until their usual lifetime ends.

In very dense scenes, bounded detection may miss a toss; the item remains recoverable. Other mods that change the same fire materials or particles may conflict. Remove salts from inventories, containers and ground drops before uninstalling. Back up saves and start with a disposable world when trying this early release.

Verification and multiplayer

Tested on Valheim 1.0.20 in an isolated local world: all three salts on all three supported fires, real native throws, single-item consumption, actual 30-second restoration, miss recovery, extinction, native crafting costs and bounded visual effects. Offline checks cover the rules and installed API compatibility. See TESTING.md for the exact release evidence.

Real multiplayer and dedicated-server behavior remain unverified. If testing multiplayer, install the same version on every client and the server. The fire owner consumes one owned dropped item and publishes a shared start time/color; other peers derive the same expiry. Single-process ownership and late-arrival simulations do not establish remote correctness. There is no version handshake. A process failure between consumption and state publication can lose an effect.

Private test audio was muted; audible balance and manual mouse/keyboard playtesting remain unverified. The inventory icons use the approved original pouch-and-crystal artwork, with distinct teal, pink and violet designs. The dropped world items still use tinted native resin models, not new 3D pouches. The approved Thunderstore cover icon is separate artwork.

Original code and procedural sound effects, MIT licensed. Native game assets are referenced only in memory and are not redistributed. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for provenance.

Support

Questions, feedback and screenshots: SmeagsMods Discord.