LoxWagon

Turn Haldor's merchant wagon into a functional lox-drawn expedition wagon.

LoxWagon makes the large merchant wagon buildable and usable as a proper Plains-era transport wagon. Hitch it to a tamed lox, ride the lox normally, and haul a large cargo inventory behind you on an articulated four-wheel chassis.

Alpha 0.6.1: The wagon is working in local testing, including the articulated chassis, cargo storage, visible load progression, full-load lox-hide cover, and passenger seats. Multiplayer ownership handoff and hitch restoration after reload are still under active validation. Back up valuable persistent worlds before deploying an alpha build.

Features

• Uses the vanilla Haldor merchant wagon design at runtime. No Iron Gate game assets are distributed with this mod.
• Hitch to a tamed Lox and drive by riding the lox with its normal saddle.
• 32-slot cargo hold in an 8 x 4 inventory.
• Four-wheel articulated chassis with approximately:
  • +/-32 degrees of front steering yaw
  • +/-18 degrees of front pitch articulation
  • rear chassis roll locked for stability
• Visible cargo progression as occupied inventory slots increase.
• Fully loaded stage at 31-32 occupied slots with a taut lox-hide cargo cover and tie-downs.
• Two forward-facing passenger seats on the front bench.
• Cargo weight affects handling without making the wagon impractical for lox hauling.
• Uses normal Valheim durability, repair, destruction, storage, and network systems wherever practical.

Build recipe

Build the wagon with the Hammer. No crafting station is required.

• 40 Fine Wood
• 20 Iron Nails
• 10 Black Metal
• 10 Lox Pelt
• 10 Linen Thread
• 10 Tar

Materials are recovered through normal dismantling behavior.

Using the wagon

1. Build the wagon with the Hammer.
2. Bring a tamed lox to the front shafts.
3. Aim at the hitch and press Use to attach the lox.
4. Mount the lox with its normal saddle and ride normally.
5. Access the wagon inventory from the cargo interaction area.
6. Passengers can use either front bench seat.
7. Interact with the hitch again to detach the lox.

The wagon is intentionally lox-drawn and cannot be hand-pulled during normal use.

Cargo visuals

Visible cargo is based on inventory occupancy, not individual item type. As more slots are occupied, additional crates and barrels appear in the wagon bed. At 31-32 occupied slots, the full expedition load and lox-hide cover appear.

The visible cargo is cosmetic and does not add separate physics colliders. Actual cargo weight comes from the inventory mass system.

Requirements

• Valheim 1.0.16
• BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2351
• Jotunn 2.30.2

When installed through r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager, the required package dependencies are declared in manifest.json and should install automatically.

Important 0.6.1 setting

The 0.6.1 DLL still exposes the articulated chassis behind a diagnostic setting. For the intended current wagon behavior, use:

[Diagnostics]
HumanPullTest = false
ArticulatedChassisTest = true

The current handling baseline is:

[Wagon]
BaseChassisMass = 65
CargoMassScale = 0.10

Restart Valheim after changing the chassis setting. For multiplayer testing, use matching LoxWagon versions and matching settings on all participating peers.

Multiplayer status

LoxWagon uses a networked wagon root and synchronizes the articulated child chassis through the wagon's ZDO rather than creating a separate network object for every wheel.

0.6.1 is suitable for controlled multiplayer testing, but the following cases still need broader validation before the mod should be treated as fully server-hardened:

• ownership handoff while hitched
• client disconnect/reconnect while attached
• hitch restoration after server restart or world reload
• simultaneous claims on the same passenger seat under latency

For multiplayer testing, install the same LoxWagon version on the server and every client.

Installation

r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager

Once published, search for LoxWagon in the Valheim community and install it with dependencies.

For testing before the listing reaches the mod-manager cache, import the Thunderstore package ZIP as a local mod.

Manual installation

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim and Jotunn.
2. Place LoxWagon.dll under Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Keep only one copy of LoxWagon.dll installed.

Compatibility

• BeastsOfBurden: not required. LoxWagon contains compatibility guards intended to prevent BeastsOfBurden from taking over this custom wagon while leaving ordinary carts alone.
• HUDCompass: not required. LoxWagon identifies itself as Wagon through the normal Vagon component.

Current limitations

• Multiplayer ownership transfer and reload-time hitch restoration remain active test areas.
• Passenger seat occupancy uses native-style proximity checks rather than an atomic network reservation.
• Extreme cross-slopes and one-wheel-up terrain have not been exhaustively tested.
• The current 0.6.1 release still requires ArticulatedChassisTest = true for the intended chassis behavior.

About this build

LoxWagon is under active development. Version 0.6.1 preserves the accepted articulated chassis and cargo baseline while refining the front bench, passenger prompts, and the full-load lox-hide cover.

Significant portions of the code, debugging workflow, validation tooling, and documentation were developed with assistance from OpenAI ChatGPT. The Thunderstore listing should therefore include the AI Generated category.