AwayFromHome

v1.0.12·Updated 2026-10-04

Build a Keeper Stone and that place keeps living while you're elsewhere. Eight slots feed your animals and reload your smelters, a leash you can shape and see, and production that no longer stops dead

About this mod Author’s original text

🏡 AwayFromHome

"A farm is not its walls, Viking. A farm is whoever fills the trough while you are three fjords away."

AwayFromHome keeps a place working while nobody is standing in it. Raise a Keeper Stone in the middle of a pen, a smelting yard or a workshop. A rotating keeper visits it on your behalf — claims the ground, holds it long enough for real progress to land, and lets go again. Boars tame. Wolves breed. Kilns burn down their ore. You are somewhere else entirely, in the same world, doing as you please.

The stone is not a signpost. It is the middle of the pen. It holds eight slots of supplies, puts a real serving of food on the ground when the animals are hungry, shovels ore and coal back into your furnaces, and draws the outline your livestock are kept inside — which you set yourself, by looking at the stone and dragging a slider.

⚠️ READ THIS FIRST

🛑 Install this on the server, not only on clients.

AwayFromHome adds a new buildable object. Valheim does not politely skip an object whose type it cannot resolve — it deletes it, permanently. A client-only install on a dedicated server will silently destroy every Keeper Stone your players raise, along with whatever was stored inside it. Nothing brings those back.

Put the mod on the dedicated server as well as on every client, and keep them on the same version. This is not a recommendation. It is the one line on this page that costs you a save file if you skip it.

📜 Contents

  • ⚔️ Features
  • 🍄 The Keeper Stone
  • 📦 Eight Slots, Like a Chest
  • 🥕 It Feeds Your Animals
  • 🔥 It Reloads Your Furnaces
  • ⏳ The Time an Empty Server Stole
  • ⭕ A Leash You Can See
  • 🐴 A Ranch That Keeps Living
  • 🌱 Crops Get Nothing From This Mod
  • 🌐 Server-Authoritative
  • 👑 The Admin Panel
  • 🧭 Who Does the Tending
  • 🧙 Traders Stay On Their Feet
  • 🍗 Instructions
  • ⚙️ Configuration
  • Server-Synced (Admin Controlled)
  • Local to Your Game
  • 📦 Dependencies
  • 🧩 Compatibility

⚔️ Features

🍄 The Keeper Stone

A site is not a name in a menu. It is a thing you build.

Three broad caps erupt from a strapped, iron-banded stalk, and something under the fungus breathes a slow blue pulse. It is an ugly relic and it was never meant to be otherwise — a burial-chamber mushroom lashed to cold iron by somebody's grandmother, planted in the mud, left to watch the herd. Raise one with the hammer and the ground it stands on joins the keeper's rotation. Knock it down and it leaves.

Put it in the middle of the pen, not off at the gate. Everything the stone does is measured from where it stands: the food comes out at its feet, the furnaces it reloads are measured from it, and the leash is drawn around it.

Look at a stone and it reports where it stands, whether the keeper is there right now, who raised it, how many items are in its slots, the shape and size of its leash, and how many production pieces it is keeping stocked.

  • E — open the stone's eight slots, exactly like a chest.
  • Shift+E — set this stone's leash, with the outline drawn live on the ground while you drag.

That is the whole interface. There is no menu for a regular player and there does not need to be one. (Admins get a panel on F7; see below.)

Cost: 10 Mushrooms, 10 Yellow Mushrooms and 5 Surtling Cores, all recoverable when you take it down. Hammer, Misc tab, no crafting station required — deliberately, because the stone belongs at the far-flung outpost, and a workbench requirement would have meant it could only be raised where you already live.

📦 Eight Slots, Like a Chest

Press E and the stone opens as an ordinary container: eight slots, filled and emptied like any chest you have ever used. Food in one half, ore and coal in the other, and one stone runs a whole yard.

  • The contents are stored on the stone itself, so they save with it, survive a server restart, and are the same eight slots for everyone who opens it.
  • Knock the stone down and its contents spill on the ground, exactly as a chest does.
  • An empty stone is a normal

Install & use Install: BepInEx plugin

  1. The archive from playbuff is the mod itself — usually a BepInEx plugin (a .dll or a plugin folder once unzipped).
  2. Recommended: use a community mod manager (such as r2modman) — pick this game, import the mod, and the manager sets up BepInEx and its dependencies for you.
  3. Manual route: install the BepInEx loader in the game folder, then drop the unzipped .dll or plugin folder into BepInEx/plugins/.
  4. Launch the game — the BepInEx console logs every plugin it loads; seeing this mod in the log means it is installed.

Mods with listed dependencies need those installed too, or they will not load. Options are usually changed in-game or in the plugin's config file. In multiplayer, the host and every client need the same mods installed.

Dependencies

Install these first, or the mod will not work:

denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim

File & checksum

Filename
AwayFromHome-1.0.12.zip
File size
6.2 MiB