ChestReach

Craft, build, refuel and cook with what is in the chests around you — no more carrying materials back and forth. Your inventory is used first; whatever it lacks comes from the chests nearby.

Frost arrows with nothing in the inventory: the amounts are what you carry plus the chests nearby, in blue what only the chests cover.

• Crafting and upgrading at any station with the chests around it (by hand: around you). Recipes light up when the chests have enough; multi-craft works too.
• Building with the hammer, hoe and cultivator from the chests around you.
• Stations: press E with nothing to put in, and one item comes from a chest — fuel for fires, torches, lamps, smelters and the oven; ore, wood, flax, barley and sap for the smelter, furnace, kiln, spinning wheel, windmill and refinery; food for cooking stations and the oven; mead bases for the fermenter; bones for the shield generator, ammo for the ballista.
• Repair all: one press of the repair button repairs every item.
• Area repair: ; repairs the damaged buildings around you, nearest first, each with the hammer's repair effect and sound (wards respected; pieces that need a station are repaired when that station reaches you).
• Materials read available/needed (what you carry plus the chests nearby); amounts covered by the chests show in their own colour; the tooltip tells how many you carry and how many are in the chests nearby; the message log says what was taken from the chests.

Building with an empty inventory: the wood comes from the chests	A smelter loaded and fuelled with nothing in hand
Area repair on ;: every piece repaired shows it	What you carry and what is in the chests nearby

No lag near big storage

The chests in the loaded area are indexed once; a chest's item counts are recounted only when that chest changes. A recipe row or a piece in the build menu is a table lookup — the crafting and build menus stay smooth next to a hundred chests.

Players without the mod can join

Client-side only. ChestReach takes from a chest the way the game opens one: it asks the chest's owner with the game's own request, and the owner's game — with or without the mod — hands it over. Nothing new travels over the network, nobody is ever refused for not having the mod, the host and a dedicated server need nothing. A chest someone has open is left alone. Nothing is stored outside the world: remove the mod at any time.

If the host has the mod, its settings (ranges, switches) apply to everyone with the mod.

Which chests

Placed chests, carts, ship storage and dungeon chests, within 20 m by default (of the station, of you when building). Not: graves, other players' private chests, chests behind a ward you have no access to, chests open in someone's hands. Every one of these is a setting.

Settings

BepInEx/config/j1ga.chestreach.cfg, or in-game with ConfigurationManager (F1): each feature on/off, the ranges for crafting, building and stations (up to 50 m), carts, ships, dungeon chests, ward access for every chest, excluded chest prefabs, repair, the area repair key and radius, the colour and the tooltip. Console: chestreach status.

Compatibility

Built against Valheim 1.0.20, BepInEx 5.4.23.5 (BepInExPack_Valheim 5.4.2351). Do not run it together with another craft-from-containers mod (RunicCrafting, AzuCraftyBoxes, CraftFromContainers and the like) — they do the same job.

Bugs and feedback

GitHub issues - please include BepInEx/LogOutput.log and the output of chestreach status (F5).

More mods by j1gA

	Mod
	LivingMap — Your buildings, roads and cleared forest on the map and the minimap — and a detailed map when you zoom in.
	StationSpeed — Faster smelters, kilns, fermenters and crops — consistent even for players without the mod.
	WeaponArts — One key, one active ability per weapon: stagger, taunt, heals, berserk, crits.
	ExtendedBosses — Raid-style boss fights: phases, adds, nests, shields, marks — built from vanilla parts.
	HostOwner — The host takes ownership of stations and bosses near it, so its mods work for everyone.
	HudLayout — Move, resize and restyle your HUD with the mouse: bars, food, hotbar, minimap, even other mods' HUD.
	HealthPulse — Low health warning: the screen edges pulse red like a heartbeat, faster as your health drops.

Source, full documentation and the changelog: https://github.com/tbsj1ga/ChestReachValheim

Developed with the help of an AI assistant (Claude by Anthropic); the design decisions, verification against the game code and in-game testing are the author's.