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 0.7.3: Builds on the successfully play-tested articulated chassis and passenger seats. This release removes sacks, restores the two prominent rear barrels and fixes the confirmed fur and rope construction errors. These changes need in-game balance and appearance testing. Multiplayer ownership handoff and hitch restoration after reload remain under validation.

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.
• 1,200 base maximum HP, with normal repair and damage behavior.
• 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 raised front bench.
• Widely spaced shafts that flare outward from the wagon mounts.
• Four proportionally scaled lox hides, with varied orientations and natural overhang, over the full-load tarp.
• 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 anywhere along either shaft, or at the central hitch, and press Use to attach a nearby tamed 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 either shaft or the central hitch again to detach the lox.

The wagon is lox-drawn by default. Optional player pulling can be enabled in the configuration below.

Cargo visuals

Visible cargo is based on inventory occupancy, not individual item type. As more slots are occupied, additional fixed-size 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.

Configuration

The articulated four-wheel chassis is now standard behavior. No diagnostic toggle is required.

BepInEx/config/greypoint.loxwagon.cfg contains:

[Wagon]
AllowHumanPulling = false
BaseChassisMass = 65
CargoMassScale = 0.60

• AllowHumanPulling: when enabled, the hitch uses player pulling instead of lox hitching. Off by default.
• BaseChassisMass: empty wagon mass, distributed across the articulated assembly.
• CargoMassScale: multiplier on vanilla inventory-weight contribution to wagon mass. The new default, 0.60, applies a 40% reduction; empty chassis mass stays at 65.

Restart Valheim after changing settings. Use matching versions and settings on the server and participating clients.

Upgrading

Existing configuration values are preserved. To test the new cargo balance, set CargoMassScale = 0.60 in your existing config and restart the game. This is six times the cargo mass contribution of the previous 0.10 setting.

From 0.6.1

The old Diagnostics.HumanPullTest and Diagnostics.ArticulatedChassisTest entries are removed automatically. Existing base-mass and cargo-mass settings are retained. Player pulling starts disabled under its new name; enable Wagon.AllowHumanPulling if wanted. There is no longer a rigid Cart-chassis option. Existing wagons receive the new maximum health when loaded, but their saved current HP is retained; repair them normally to reach full health.

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.

The mod remains under 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

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.

About this build

Version 0.7.3 keeps the forward cargo arrangement where it fits and restores two large horizontal barrels at the rear, with their round ends facing backward. All sacks are removed. The 65-piece layout uses four fixed crate sizes and three barrel sizes; size conversion remains inside the rotation transform to avoid shear. Crates beneath the rear barrels appear before them, and the two barrels appear together. Seven occupancy stages contain 5, 13, 22, 34, 47, 58 and 65 props. The 0.7.2 backing profile is unchanged.

The supplied 0.7.2 log confirmed that native rug meshes are not CPU-readable and that the rope shader lookup returned null. This release restores a GPU-only-compatible fur path: generated hide surfaces use complete native rug materials, full alpha outlines and normal maps, with proportional sizing and overhang. It also clones the loaded vanilla Cart rope material, preserving its shader and settings; each lashing builds independently and logs its result.

The accepted lox attachment position, full-length shaft interaction, seats, bench, wide shafts and chassis tuning are unchanged. Maximum health remains 1,200, empty mass remains 65 and the cargo mass scale default remains 0.60. Startup now explicitly logs the active config values. Existing configs are not overwritten.

Appearance and loaded handling need in-game testing. Collision and support checks use conservative rotated mesh bounds; they do not establish perfect contact with curved barrel meshes.

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.

Building from source

Game assemblies are not bundled. Supply the managed assemblies from your target Valheim installation and BepInEx/core, plus a .NET SDK compiler.

python scripts/build.py --game-managed /path/to/valheim_Data/Managed --bepinex-core /path/to/BepInEx/core --csc /path/to/sdk/Roslyn/bincore/csc.dll --dotnet /path/to/dotnet
python validation/check_geometry.py
python validation/check_tarp.py
python scripts/package_release.py

The packaging script creates one dist/LoxWagon-0.7.3.zip containing the DLL, current documentation, manifest, icon, source and validation tools. Update plugin/manifest versions, README and changelog for each release, then rebuild before packaging. The validation scripts require NumPy and SciPy. They check the shipped layout against the generated C# data, all rotated cargo bounds, support stages, cover clearance and hide mapping. They do not replace in-game rendering and handling tests.