VKTR_DiamondHUD

My friends have been playing with a controller for years. After trying it myself I was shocked at how much it holds you back compared to mouse and keyboard. Moving through the hotbar is a minigame of its own, and not being able to move with the inventory open adds a lot of small annoyances. This mod tries to give controller players the same freedom of action they'd get on m&k.

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What it does

It puts four slots around a diamond and hands them to the d-pad. One direction, one kind of thing. A tap moves the highlight, a hold fires the shortcut that belongs to that direction, and everything the vanilla layout leaves spare goes to the stuff a gamepad never had room for: your light, your shield, your belt, your armour after a death.

Input	What it does
d-pad up	cycle weapons — melee and magic
d-pad left	cycle bows, crossbows and spears
d-pad right	cycle food, meads and bombs
d-pad down	cycle tools
hold d-pad left	light on, light off
hold d-pad right	skip past the bombs to the first thing you can actually eat
hold d-pad down	sit down, stand up
heavy attack	scroll your ammo, or your bait with the rod out
X (Classic) / B (Alt1, Alt2)	eat or drink whatever the food slot is showing
guard + X	shield on, shield off, or straight back to sword and shield
guard + Y	put your weapons away, take them back out
both left shoulder buttons	cycle your belt, or get your armour back after a death
tap the sheath button (Alt1, Alt2)	crouch
L3 + R3 (Classic)	forsaken power

Layout = Auto reads the gamepad layout you picked in the game's own Controls settings and puts the shortcuts on buttons that layout leaves spare. Change layout mid-game and it follows, no restart.

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Your new HUD

The four slots

Slot	What's in it	Comes from
up	weapons — melee and magic	your hotbar
left	bows, crossbows, spears	your hotbar
right	food, meads, bombs	your hotbar
down	tools	your whole bag

What lands where:

• up — swords, axes, clubs, knives, atgeirs, spears you keep in hand, two-handers, and every staff. Anything you swing or cast. The Abyssal harpoon lives here too, since it never leaves your hands.
• left — bows, crossbows, and throwing spears. Everything you fight with at range.
• right — food, meads, and bombs. Things you spend rather than switch to.
• down — hammer, hoe, cultivator, pickaxe, fishing rod, the serving tray, and a one-handed axe that isn't on your hotbar. Anything with a build menu counts as a tool.

A one-handed axe is the one item that goes both ways. Keep it on the hotbar and it's a weapon, so it shows up with your weapons. Leave it in your bag and it's a tool, so it shows up with your tools. Move it and it swaps sides. Nothing to configure.

Hotbar or bag

Your hotbar is your fighting kit. What's on it is what you can reach mid-fight, and that's a call you make before the fight, not during it — so weapons, spears and food only ever come from the bar.

Tools are the opposite. A pickaxe is dead weight on the bar and you still want it in reach, so the tool slot reads your whole bag.

The rest lives on its own shortcut and costs you no slot at all: torches and lanterns, shields, your belt items, the Dverger circlet, ammo, and the spear that slides in when you throw one. Those read your bag too.

The fifth window

A small window next to the diamond changes with what you're holding:

• shield up — it shows your shield
• bow, crossbow or rod out — it shows your ammo and how much is left, and heavy attack scrolls it
• neither — it's not there

Your belt, in the middle

Whatever's in your utility slot sits in the centre of the diamond — Megingjord, Wishbone, anything else that goes there. Its icon gets pulled out of the status bar, since the diamond is already telling you.

When it's on screen

Immersive mode is on by default: the diamond fades out after three seconds of nothing happening and comes back the moment something does. It won't vanish on you in a fight. One exception — a lit torch keeps its slot up, because the durability bar on it is how much light you've got left. F1 turns the whole thing on and off.

Biome colours are on too. The frames take a colour from wherever you are: green in the meadows, gold in the plains, deep red in the ashlands. Set them per biome or switch it off.

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Features

The macros

Every d-pad direction does two jobs. A tap moves the highlight, a hold fires one shortcut:

• hold left — your light
• hold right — skip the bombs and land on the first thing you can eat or drink
• hold down — sit

Up is the exception. No hold on it, so you can keep it pressed and scroll through your weapons the way you'd expect. A hold takes a second by default; DPadHoldSeconds = 0 turns all three off and gives you plain scrolling on every direction.

The rest sit on guard, which is a button you're already holding when things go wrong: guard + X for your shield, guard + Y to sheathe, both left shoulder buttons for your belt and your armour. Holding guard also locks your weapon and tool swaps while leaving food and ammo alone, so you can't fumble your kit mid-block.

One button for your light

Hold d-pad left and you light up. Carrying a Dverger circlet? It goes on your head and both hands stay free. No circlet, and you get a torch or a lantern — and you keep the weapon you were already holding. Sword and shield: the shield steps aside and comes straight back when the torch goes away. Two-hander or bow: it draws your last one-hander first, so the torch has a hand to go in. Hold again and you're exactly where you started. While the light is on, d-pad left flicks between the lights you're carrying.

Shield mode

Shields are off the d-pad. Guard + X is the whole thing:

• shield up → it comes off
• one-hander in hand, or showing in the weapon slot → the shield goes on with it
• two-hander, bow, bare hands → it draws your sword and puts the shield up, one press
• no shield on the bar at all → it just draws your first weapon, so the button never does nothing

Equip a sword next to a shield once and the mod remembers the pair. After that, drawing that sword brings its shield along. Taking the shield off with guard + X is how you tell it to forget.

Accessory swap

Both left shoulder buttons cycle your utility items, straight out of your bag — no hotbar slot, no inventory screen. Swapping the Megingjord for the Wishbone while you're standing in a crypt is one press now.

Getting your armour back

The mod writes down what you were wearing when you died: chest, legs, helmet, utility, cape, trinket. Loot your grave, press both left shoulder buttons, and it puts all of it back on in that order. Empty slots count as empty — if you died without a cape, nothing waits for one. Press it again for anything that wasn't in the bag yet. Once every slot it recorded is filled, by that gear or by anything else, the combo goes back to cycling your belt.

If you're over the weight limit when you press it, the Megingjord goes on first, ahead of everything else on the list. It's the one piece that decides whether you can walk home at all, so it doesn't wait its turn.

Spears stack like ammo

The left slot counts every spear of that kind you're carrying, not just the one in your hand. Throw it and the next one comes out of your bag, into the slot the old one left, and straight back into your hand — you keep throwing instead of digging through your inventory. Upgrade levels stack in the count, and the slot shows the level of the one you're actually holding.

Bombs sit with the food

A bomb is something you spend, not something you switch to, so it shares the food slot. D-pad right scrolls past them with your meads, and the use button puts one in your hand ready to throw. Bombs never get paired with a shield. If you've got a pile of them in the way, hold d-pad right and you land on the first thing you can actually drink.

Fishing

Pull out the rod and your first bait loads itself. Your baits show up in the fifth window, same place arrows do, so you flick through them with heavy attack. Bait has an equip animation, unlike arrows, so it goes on the hook once you stop scrolling rather than on every press. Put the rod away and your arrows come back exactly where they were.

Nothing piles up

Tapping a direction only moves the highlight. The actual swap happens 350 ms after you stop, so scrolling past five weapons costs you one animation, not five.

You can keep cycling while an equip is already playing, and switch slot while you're at it. The new pick goes into the game's own action queue and starts the moment the current animation ends, so a press during a weapon change is never dropped.

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Configuration

The config file appears after the first launch: BepInEx/config/viktor.diamondhud.cfg. Changes take effect straight away, so you can tune the HUD with a config manager while you're standing in the world.

Section	Setting	Default	What it does
Bindings	Layout	Auto	Follows the game's Controls setting. Lock it to Classic, Alt1 or Alt2, or use Custom and place every shortcut yourself
Bindings	DPadHoldSeconds	1	How long a hold takes. 0 switches all three holds off
Bindings	ClassicGuardianPowerCombo	true	L3 + R3 for the forsaken power on Classic, where the d-pad no longer has room for it
Input	EquipDelay	0.35	The pause before what you picked actually gets equipped
Input	AutoShield	true	Drawing a paired weapon brings its shield with it
Input	AutoShieldWeapon	true	Guard + X also draws the one-hander your weapon slot is showing, not just the shield
Input	RestoreGearAfterDeath	true	Remember your armour when you die and put it back on the combo
Input	AutoMegingjord	true	Over the weight limit, the belt goes on before the rest
Input	SpearRestock	true	The next spear comes out of your bag after a throw
Input	RestoreAmmoAfterFishing	true	Your arrows come back when the rod goes away
Input	RequireGamepad	true	The diamond only shows while a controller is in use
HUD	AnchorX / AnchorY / PixelOffsetX / PixelOffsetY	0 / 1 / 170 / -320	Where the diamond sits
HUD	Radius / Scale	77 / 1	How big it is and how far apart the slots are
HUD	ImmersiveMode / ImmersiveIdleSeconds	true / 3	Fade out when nothing's happening, and after how long
HUD	BiomeTint	true	Frame colour follows the biome
HUD	ShowBeltWindow	true	Your belt item in the middle of the diamond
HUD	HideUtilityStatusIcon	true	Take that item's icon out of the status bar
HUD	ShowTorchWindow	false	A separate torch window that never fades. Off, because the slot already shows that bar

If the mod sorts a modded item into the wrong place, the name lists are how you fix it: ExtraToolNames, TorchNames, RodNames, CircletNames, ExtraBombNames, SpearExcludeNames, MegingjordNames.

Building a Custom layout? Set DebugButtons = true and the log prints every button as you press it, so you can see what your controller has spare.

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Notes

• Client-side only. It doesn't go on the server, your friends don't need it, and nobody's version has to match. Everything it changes happens on your screen and in your own hands.
• Your weapon and shield pairs live in a plain text file per character, one weapon = shield per line. You can open it and edit it.
• The gear you were wearing when you died is written to that same file, so closing the game between dying and looting your grave doesn't lose it.
• Bait takes a moment to equip and arrows don't, which is why the fifth window waits before loading bait and never waits on arrows.
• A shield you take off with guard + X is also the mod forgetting that pairing. Put them together again and it learns it back.

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Technical details

Tested on Valheim 1.0.15 with BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2351.

The mod borrows three pieces of the normal HUD instead of drawing its own, so another UI mod that moves the same pieces will argue with it. Each one has its own switch:

• the normal hotbar is hidden while the diamond is up — HideVanillaHotbar
• the status icons move next to the forsaken power, smaller, filling left to right — MoveStatusList
• the forsaken power can sit in the middle of the diamond — GuardianPowerInCentre, off by default

It also takes a few controller buttons off the game so the shortcuts can use them: sit, crouch, automatic weapon-holstering, and the face buttons while guard is held. SuppressVanillaSit, SuppressVanillaCrouch, SuppressVanillaAutoHolster and GuardOwnsMacroButtons hand them back one at a time.

The diamond slots are clones of the vanilla hotbar slots, so an item's icon, stack count, durability bar and upgrade level are drawn by the game, not repainted here. Nothing is written to your world or your character beyond that one per-character text file.

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Installation

With r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager: click install, done.

Manually: install BepInExPack Valheim, then drop DiamondHotbar.dll into BepInEx/plugins.