LivingFactions
NPC factions that live on their own: they build settlements piece by piece, gather, trade, lay roads, send caravans, wage war - and deal with you. English and Russian.Living Factions — a Valheim mod
NPC factions that live their own lives. They found camps, gather wood, stone and food, raise buildings piece by piece, grow from camp to hamlet, village, town and city, send out settlers, trade, feud, go to war, raid and capture each other's settlements — whether or not you are watching. And you can deal with them: earn their trust, trade, bring gifts, declare war, buy peace, swear an alliance.
Built for Valheim 1.0.17 with BepInEx 5 and Jötunn. Status: early, playable in single-player and as host. Dedicated servers and remote clients are not supported yet.
What is in the world
| Faction | Who | Home | Temper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raven Clan | humans | Meadows, Black Forest | balanced, honourable |
| Wolf Clan | humans | Black Forest, Meadows, Mountain | warlike |
| Stag Clan | humans | Meadows, Plains | merchants, peaceful |
| Fuling Horde | Fulings | Plains | hostile raiders |
| Dvergr Hold | Dvergr | Mistlands, Black Forest, Mountain | traders, proud |
| Greydwarf Brood | Greydwarfs | Black Forest | spreads fast, no trade |
| Draugr Court | Draugr | Swamp | hates the living |
Each starts with one camp. Factions that find no room at first arrive later. Settlements you have visited are pinned on your map.
- Growth. A settlement keeps stores of wood, stone, food, metal and coins. Its people are split between gathering, building and guarding. It builds what it needs: huts and houses when crowded, a storehouse when full, farms and workshops for whatever is short, a watchtower, smithy and market on the way to a town, a palisade and great hall on the way to a city. Only a faction's capital becomes a city; a few settlements become market towns.
- Buildings are real. Everything is made of ordinary build pieces, placed in construction order, so a half-finished house is a floor, some walls and no roof. Away from players the settlement develops in the simulation; when you return, it catches up.
- Politics. Relations drift with shared borders, trade, incidents and common enemies. Wars bring raids that loot, burn buildings and can capture a settlement. If you are standing in a settlement when it is raided, the raiders really arrive.
- You. Each faction keeps a reputation for you. Talk to anyone (
E) to see where you stand, what the settlement has and what it lacks.- Gifts raise reputation — double for whatever they are short of, with diminishing returns.
- Trade: buy from their stores, sell them your goods; prices follow scarcity and standing.
- Killing their people or smashing their buildings costs reputation; enough blood and they declare war on you. Killing monsters near their homes, or raiders attacking them, earns it.
- War can be declared outright. Peace costs silver. An alliance needs real trust (70+).
- Factions notice whose side you are on: allies of your enemies cool toward you.
New in 0.3.0
- Roads between neighbouring settlements, laid over dry land, with lamp posts every 30 m.
- Caravans: a trader with two guards leaves or arrives by the road.
- Hired fighters: a friendly settlement hires out two fighters who follow you for 15 minutes.
- Tower guard, villagers running errands between shifts, a paved square in every hamlet and up.
- Chronicle widget tells what the nearest settlement and the other factions are busy with.
- Settings menu: the "LF" tile on the inventory screen (Tab) - features, language, limits.
- Russian and English; the mod follows the game's language.
- Two relic axes (Wolf Fang, Stag's Horn).
Install
With a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager): install the package; BepInEx and Jötunn come with it.
By hand:
- Install BepInExPack Valheim and Jötunn.
- Copy
LivingFactions.dllintoValheim/BepInEx/plugins/LivingFactions/. - Start a world. The factions arrive on the first day you play with the mod; an existing world works too. Back up your world first — settlements level terrain and place pieces.
Faction state is saved next to the BepInEx config, in
BepInEx/config/LivingFactions/<world>_<uid>.json, whenever the world saves.
Console
Start the game with -console, press F5:
| Command | |
|---|---|
lf status |
every faction and settlement, with distance |
lf factions |
your standing with each faction and who is at war |
lf chronicle [n] |
recent history |
lf advance <days> |
run the simulation ahead |
lf tp <settlement> |
travel to a settlement |
lf rep <faction#> <value> |
set your reputation |
Config
BepInEx/config/alexandr.livingfactions.cfg: simulation pace, race factions on/off, wars
on/off, settlement limits, how many inhabitants appear as characters, language (auto, en,
ru), on-screen chronicle messages.
Building from source
Requires the .NET SDK and a Valheim install with BepInEx and Jötunn (set VALHEIM_INSTALL if
it is not in the default Steam folder).
dotnet build src/LivingFactions -c Release # builds and copies the plugin into the game
dotnet run --project tools/SimHarness # runs the simulation headless with 31 checks
src/LivingFactions.Core is the simulation and has no dependency on the game; the harness runs
it against a stand-in world and verifies determinism, save/load, invariants across 25 seeds and
a diplomacy scenario.
Known limits
- Single-player / host only for now.
- Villagers walk to trees, rock piles, fields and building sites and swing their tools there, and gather at the fire at night; what is produced is still decided by the simulation (their swings do not fell trees).
- Race factions use the same building style as the clans.
- Removing the mod leaves the buildings in the world as ordinary pieces.