Nearby Chests: Crafting and Storage QoL for Valheim 1.0

Valheim 1.0 is finally out, and it’s a great excuse to start a fresh world. But a fresh world also means rediscovering the chore every base eventually runs into: the chest shuffle. You walk to the workbench and find you’re three Fine Wood short. You walk to the chest, grab the wood, walk back, and craft, then do it all again for Bronze. And when you get home from a trip, you open chest after chest to put everything back where it belongs.

The 1.0 release still works this way. Crafting only counts what’s in your own pockets, and the chest Stack button only fills the one chest you have open. So I made a mod for it: Nearby Chests.

What it does

Nearby Chests is a small, free mod that does three things:

1. You can craft and build using what’s in your chests. Anything in a chest within 20 meters counts as if you were carrying it.
2. The Stack button puts your stuff away for you. One press sends each item to the right chest, and new items find a sensible home next to similar ones.
3. A Tidy button cleans up messy chests. Anything that doesn’t belong in a chest gets sent to the chest where it does.

Craft and build from your chests

Walk up to the workbench, forge or any other crafting station and the recipes just work. The numbers in the crafting menu include everything in your nearby chests. If the Copper is in one chest and the Tin is in another, you can still make Bronze without touching either of them.

It uses what you’re carrying first, then pulls the rest from the closest chests. Upgrading gear works the same way. So does building with the hammer, hoe and cultivator, so if a wall needs 10 Wood, it comes straight out of your wood chest.

One button to put everything away

This is the part I use most. Come home from a trip, open any chest near your storage area and press Stack, or just hold E on a chest. The mod sorts out your whole inventory:

• Items go where they already live. If a chest already has Copper Ore in it, your Copper Ore goes there. It doesn’t matter which chest you opened, as long as the right one is nearby.
• New items go next to their relatives. Bring home an ore you’ve never stored before, and it goes into the chest with your other metals, not a random box.
• Brand-new kinds of items get a fresh chest. If nothing similar exists yet, the item goes into an empty chest, and from then on that chest is where that kind of thing lives.
• Out of chests? Two groups share one. If there are no empty chests left, a chest holding just one kind of thing makes room for a second, related kind. Meat goes in with your plants, stone in with your wood.

Every chest that gets items is also tidied up. Half-stacks are merged, and everything is sorted, so your ore sits next to the bars it smelts into.

Chests that stay organized

To decide what “similar” means, the mod sorts every item into a group:

• Metals: ores, bars, scrap, nails
• Hides: leather scraps, pelts, scales
• Wood and Stone
• Raw: meat, fish, eggs, honey
• Plants: berries, mushrooms, vegetables, grain, flour
• Cooked food
• Seeds
• Trophies
• Everything else by biome: Meadows, Black Forest, Swamp, Mountains, Plains, Mistlands, Ashlands and Deep North materials each get their own group.

The default groups cover the common materials and food from every biome, Deep North included. If you don’t like where something ends up, the group list is a simple text file you can edit (details on GitHub).

Clean up a messy chest

Every base ends up with that one chest where a stack of hides, a few Surtling Cores and some random loot got dumped “just for now”. Open it and click the new Tidy button, the small icon with three bars just left of Place stacks.

Tidy looks at what the chest is mostly used for, say metals, and sends everything else where it belongs:

• Things with a home go home. The hides go to your hides chest, the wood to your wood chest.
• Things with no home get a new one. If there’s no chest for something yet, it goes into an empty chest, and that chest becomes its home from then on.
• Out of empty chests? Two groups share. A chest with only one kind of thing in it takes a second, related kind, so meat joins your plants and stone joins your wood. A chest holding two groups counts as home for both, so Tidy leaves it alone.
• Then the junk chest. If you keep a catch-all chest for odds and ends, anything that still has nowhere to go ends up there.
• Otherwise they stay put. If there’s nowhere for something to go, it stays where it is.

Then it sorts the chest, so it’s back to looking neat.

What it won’t touch

Stacking everything would be a disaster the moment you head out on a trip, so these always stay with you:

• Food, meads and potions. Ingredients like berries and honey still get put away.
• Arrows, bolts and bait
• Weapons, armor, shields, tools and trinkets
• Anything on your hotbar, and anything you have equipped

And it leaves these chests alone:

• the Obliterator (for obvious reasons)
• gravestones
• dungeon loot chests
• a chest someone else has open
• chests you couldn’t open yourself anyway, like a friend’s private chest or one inside their ward

Playing with friends

Only you need the mod. It works on regular servers, and your friends don’t have to install anything. For them, chests behave like normal.

The one thing to avoid: you and a friend using the same chest at the exact same moment, say you crafting from it while they’re dumping loot into it. It’s unlikely, but in that split second one of you could lose what you moved.

Installing it

Grab the latest download from the Releases page. There are two versions:

• NearbyChests-x.y.z-with-BepInEx.zip: use this one if you’ve never modded Valheim. It includes BepInEx, the mod loader that almost every Valheim mod needs.
• NearbyChests-x.y.z.zip: just the mod, for when you already have other mods installed.

To install:

1. Open your Valheim folder. In Steam, right-click Valheim, then Manage, then Browse local files. It’s the folder with valheim.exe in it.
2. Extract the zip straight into that folder. Windows’ Extract All suggests a new folder named after the zip, so delete that last part of the path before you extract.
3. Check that winhttp.dll, doorstop_config.ini and the BepInEx folder sit right next to valheim.exe, not inside another folder. If they’re one folder too deep, the mod never loads.
4. Launch the game as normal.

To check it’s working, stand at your workbench next to a chest full of wood. Recipes that need wood should light up even though your pockets are empty.

Getting BepInEx from Thunderstore instead? The BepInExPack_Valheim download has a BepInExPack_Valheim folder inside it. Copy what’s inside that folder into your Valheim folder, not the top of the zip. Then add the mod-only zip on top.

To remove the mod, delete the BepInEx\plugins\NearbyChests folder.

Tweaking it

After the first launch, the settings are in BepInEx\config\NearbyChests.cfg. You can open it in Notepad. The ones you might want to change:

Wrapping up

Valheim 1.0 is the best the game has ever been. It still leaves base logistics to you, though, and that’s the part Nearby Chests handles: craft from your chests, put everything away with one button, and tidy up the messy ones with another.

It’s free and open source on GitHub. If you run into a bug or think an item belongs in a different group, open an issue there. Skål!