EquivalentExchange

EquivalentExchange is a total gameplay overhaul for Valheim inspired by Minecraft's Equivalent Exchange. Every item has an EMC value, and EMC becomes the universal currency: you craft, build, repair and travel by paying EMC instead of gathering and spending resources.

Compatibility warning

This is not a small add-on. The mod rewrites the core economy — crafting costs, building costs, repairs, food upkeep, loot and portal travel. It is likely incompatible with other global overhaul mods that also change crafting, loot tables or progression, and combining them can cause broken prices, duplicated rewards or blocked recipes. Test on a backup world and use a clean mod profile, ideally with only cosmetic, UI or small quality-of-life mods.

What changes

• Universal currency — item values are calculated from vanilla recipes and trade values; coins and valuables convert at their in-game price.
• Crafting with EMC — the craft button is split in two: the vanilla one spends resources, the second one ("x1 (N EMC)") spends EMC and keeps the materials. Ingredients are still required — EMC pays for the craft, it does not replace materials.
• Upgrades require a fully repaired item — vanilla restores durability to full on upgrade, which would bypass the paid repair loop. Damaged items are simply not shown in the upgrade list (repaired copies of the same item stay listed); if an item is damaged mid-upgrade (e.g. equipped armor takes a hit), the craft is cancelled and prepaid EMC are refunded.
• Building with EMC — construction pieces are paid for with EMC instead of resources. The EMC price is shown next to the piece name (red when the balance is insufficient). Pressing Ctrl while the hammer menu is active toggles between paying EMC (default) and paying vanilla resources; the mode resets to EMC whenever the hammer is re-equipped.
• Repair with EMC — every 30 seconds the Repair block restores 1% of a random damaged item's max durability for 1% of the intact item's value (registry + upgrades, rounded up, min 1 EMC); the final partial percent pays proportionally. Equipped gear is no longer auto-repaired — put it into the block. Full repair costs about the item's full value.
• Soul orbs — mobs drop an orb of EMC at the death spot; picking it up adds its value to your balance (combat income is collected by hand). Orb price per mob is hand-balanced and configurable (Souls.MobValues); bosses drop a larger orb and are never saturated. Killing the same mob family too fast lowers the orb value (anti-farm saturation, recovers over time and persists per character). Orbs are client-side, pull from a short distance, merge, despawn after two minutes and cap at 40 in the world — nothing to stockpile in the save. The ee_souls console command shows orb stats and mob prices.
• Slower gear wear — durability drain from hits, blocks, tools, torches and armor damage defaults to 50% of vanilla, tunable per category in the Durability config section (0 disables wear). Max durability is unchanged, so prices and saves are unaffected.
• Transmutation cell — three tabs under your inventory (Feed, Repair, EMC Extraction) slide out as 2×2 drawers with vanilla drag & drop, stack split and Ctrl-click quick move. Opening a tab closes an open chest, opening a chest retracts the drawers, and the chest panel sits below the tabs.
• EMC on slots — while a block panel is open, items in your inventory, hotbar and the block grids show their remaining EMC value on the slot.
• Food upkeep — the Feeding block consumes one food item per minute for 1 EMC, keeping vanilla food buffs running.
• Fuel with EMC — when there is no fuel in the inventory, fuel consumers (smelter, blast furnace, coal kiln, spinning wheel, campfire, fire pit, torch) accept EMC instead, priced at the registry price of one fuel unit. The device hover hint warns that the next contribution will spend EMC. Toggled by the Fuel.Enabled config entry (default on).
• Portal travel — cost scales with distance and carried weight.
• Mob loot — biome- and star-based chances for gear drops with partial durability. Any gear lying on the ground is marked with a faint, slowly rotating light beam (Epic Loot style) in the neon color of the item's own biome tier — a bronze sword glows BlackForest emerald even in Meadows. Beam opacity is tunable (Drops.BeamOpacityPercent).
• EMC in the HUD — your balance sits in a gold-framed pill with the EMC crystal right above the Forsaken Power slot, always shown as the full, unabbreviated number (visible down to 1 EMC). It stays in place even when no power is selected and hides together with the HUD (map, menu) or on death. Every income/spend pops a floating "+N"/"−N" number above the pill (green gains, red costs); rapid same-sign changes merge into one growing number. Toggled by Hud.FloatNumbers (default on).
• Character-bound balance — EMC is stored on your character and shown in the inventory and console as well.
• Localization — all player-facing texts follow the game language (English and Russian are bundled); switching the game language updates them on the fly.

Installation

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim via your mod manager (Thunderstore/Hexium).
2. Install EquivalentExchange with the same manager, or unpack the ZIP into BepInEx/plugins/EquivalentExchange/.
3. For multiplayer, the mod is required on both client and server.

No additional libraries required.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/equivalentexchange.cfg — coin exchange rate, portal prices, drop chances, gear wear, repair price, soul orbs, floating balance numbers, beam opacity, fuel payment and custom EMC values for individual items. Settings apply live; if you edit the file by hand mid-game, run the ee_config console command to reload it. The ee_souls command shows the orb economy state.

Feedback

Questions, bug reports and price-balance suggestions are welcome at [email protected].