GrillspettFlattenEarth
Flatten large areas of terrain in one press. Hard-levels a configurable radius (Page Up/Down to resize) to the height under your cursor while a Hoe ground tool is selected - no more raising low spots
About this mod Author’s original text
Grillspett Flatten Earth
BepInEx mod for Valheim. Adds a hotkey that flattens a large area at once,
raising low ground and lowering high ground to match the height under your
cursor — unlike vanilla's Hoe "Level" tool, which only smooths a small radius
per click and needs the ground pre-adjusted for big height differences.
Features
- One-press large-area flatten — hard-levels everywhere within the radius
to the exact height under your cursor, both raising low spots and lowering
high spots at once.
- Adjustable radius on the fly — Page Up / Page Down resize the area
in 5m steps (up to 100m), with a chat message confirming the new size.
- Circle or square area shape, optional stamina cost, cooldown, and fully
rebindable hotkeys — all configurable, no need to edit anything by hand.
- Multiplayer & dedicated-server safe — reuses the game's own terrain
networking instead of a custom one, so edits stay correctly synced.
- Client-side only — nothing to install on a dedicated server.
How it works
While one of the Hoe's ground tools is selected (Raise Ground or
Level Ground), press the hotkey (default: Home) instead of
left-clicking. The mod reads the exact spot the game is already previewing
(the same point vanilla would edit) and runs a hard terrain-level operation
over a much larger radius in a single call.
This is deliberately different from vanilla's own tools, which turned out
not to be a good fit for a big flatten: Raise Ground does a true level,
but only within a 1.5m radius; Level Ground only smooths (blends
toward the cursor height, with more effect near the center and almost none
near the edge) and always repaints the ground as dirt. Reusing either as-is
over a big radius would give a gentle dome/dip, not a flat plateau.
Instead, the mod temporarily forces the selected piece's own settings to a
hard, paint-free level at the configured radius, places it through the
game's normal piece-placement code, then immediately restores its settings
so regular small-radius clicking is unaffected afterwards. This has to reuse
the real selected piece rather than a custom object: Valheim's terrain
networking never sends the actual radius/settings over the wire, only a
hash of the piece's prefab name - the receiving side looks up its own copy
of that exact, already-known piece to get the real settings, so a made-up
piece fails that lookup outright. Reusing the real piece keeps the whole
operation on the same networked path (TerrainOp/TerrainComp) vanilla
pieces use, so ownership and syncing behave the same as a normal Hoe use.
Press Page Up / Page Down at any time to increase or decrease the
flatten radius in 5m steps; the new radius is shown in a chat message.
On extreme cliffs a single press may not fully flatten the area (same as
vanilla) - just press the hotkey again.
Configuration
Settings are written to
BepInEx/config/grillspett.valheim.flattenearth.cfg after the first run:
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| FlattenKey | Home | Key that triggers the large flatten. |
| IncreaseRadiusKey | PageUp | Key that increases the flatten radius. |
| DecreaseRadiusKey | PageDown | Key that decreases the flatten radius. |
| Radius | 20 | Radius in meters (2-100). |
| RadiusStep | 5 | Radius change per press of the increase/decrease keys. |
| SquareArea | false | Flatten a square instead of a circle. |
| StaminaCost | 0 | Stamina per use; 0 disables the stamina check. |
| CooldownSeconds | 0.3 | Minimum time between uses. |
Installing
Install through a mod manager (r2modman, Mod Manager,...) like
any other mod — it depends on
BepInExPack_Valheim,
which the manager installs automatically.
Installing manually instead: copy GrillspettFlattenEarth.dll into
BepInEx/plugins/GrillspettFlattenEarth. Either way, it only needs to go in
your client profile — it just triggers the game's existing, unmodified
terrain-networking RPCs (the same ones vanilla Hoe use already sends), so a
dedicated server d
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: