CarveAndPlunder
Corpses no longer auto-drop loot. Kneel and work the body: skin animals with Knives for a knife-quality bonus, loot humanoids with a custom Looting skill, or let it rot and lose most of the loot.
About this mod Author’s original text
Carve & Plunder
Creature corpses no longer auto-drop their loot. You have to kneel and work the
body — skin it, dismantle it, or loot it — for the full haul. Ignore it and it rots,
scattering only a fraction of what it carried.
A kill is no longer the end of the encounter; it's the start of the harvest.
Highlights
- Skin animals with the vanilla Knives skill. A knife yields more than bare
hands ("Dismantle"), and a sharper knife yields more still — knife damage drives the
loot bonus, the Knives skill drives the speed.
- Loot humanoids (greydwarves, draugr, fulings, skeletons, …) with a custom
Looting skill — its own name, icon, and in-game description in the skills menu.
Hands only; the skill drives both speed and bonus loot.
- Hold-to-work (or press-once). Kneel and hold the Use key to channel the action —
an on-screen progress bar fills as you work. Moving too far from the corpse, swinging a
weapon or tool, or letting go of the key cancels it. Prefer a single tap? Flip
Hold To Work off and one press runs the action on its own.
- Corpses linger, then rot. Worked corpses give their full loot (plus your skill
bonus); ignored ones decay and drop only a fraction of it — half by default,
configurable down to nothing. Humanoid and animal corpses have separate lifetimes.
- Scoped and safe. Only creatures that leave a ragdoll are affected. Bosses and
non-ragdoll creatures (serpents, surtlings, …) keep vanilla instant-drop.
Installation
Install with a mod manager and the dependency comes with it. To install manually, drop
CarveAndPlunder.dll into BepInEx/plugins and install the dependency below.
| Dependency | Why |
|---|---|
| BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2333 | Mod loader. |
| Jotunn 2.29.0 | Server-synced config (a mod manager pulls it in automatically). |
Install on every client. On a server, install it there too: gameplay settings are
server-synced — the server's values are pushed to clients and locked, so everyone
plays by the same rules. Your hold/press preference and logging stay local to you.
How it works
- Kill a creature. Its ragdoll drops to the ground but keeps its loot.
- Walk up and look at the body — the hover shows Skin / Dismantle (animals) or
Loot (humanoids).
- Hold the Use key to kneel and work. The bar fills; when it completes, the full
loot drops, scaled up by your skill (and, for animals, your knife).
- Leave a body too long and it rots — dropping only a fraction of its loot (half by
default).
The Looting skill raises both speed and yield. The Knives skill raises skinning
speed, while the knife's sharpness drives the animal yield — so skin with the sharpest
knife you have for the biggest bonus.
Configuration
Every timer, skill rate, extra-loot bonus, the rot-loot fraction, and the creature
classification lists are configurable. See the
Wiki
for the full reference, or edit com.virtualbjorn.carveandplunder.cfg in BepInEx/config.
Support & questions
Found a bug, have a question, or want to request a feature? Reach virtualbjorn on
either Valheim modding Discord:
- OdinPlus —
- ValheimModding —
Include your BepInEx/LogOutput.log when reporting an issue, or open one on the
GitHub repo.
Install & use Install: BepInEx plugin
- The archive from playbuff is the mod itself — usually a BepInEx plugin (a .dll or a plugin folder once unzipped).
- 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.
- Manual route: install the BepInEx loader in the game folder, then drop the unzipped .dll or plugin folder into BepInEx/plugins/.
- 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.
Install these first, or the mod will not work: