Offline Companions
Hire NPC companions with their own health, stamina, food, inventory, and AI. They fight alongside you, gather, forage, farm, fish, hunt, smelt, repair gear, maintain your base, and follow you across V
About this mod Author’s original text
Offline Companions
Hire NPC companions from Haldor's shop - persistent allies with their own AI, inventory, combat, gathering, farming, fishing, hunting, smelting, cooking, and base maintenance systems.
Offline Companions adds persistent NPC allies to Valheim. A companion automatically spawns with you when you enter a new world for the first time. Additional companions can be purchased from Haldor's shop for 2,000 coins if the optional Trader Overhaul mod is installed, or spawned via console commands.
Companions come with their own inventory, equipment, stamina, food system, voice lines, and custom AI. They aren't pets or tames, they're teammates. Customize their appearance, gear them up with weapons and armor, feed them food for bonus stats, and command them through a radial wheel or point-and-click hotkey system. They'll fight beside you, gather resources, forage for food, farm your crops, fish for you, cook meals and brew meads, hunt wildlife, manage your smelting operation, maintain your base, haul your cart, repair their own gear, sit by the fire with you, sleep in beds, and teleport through portals alongside you.
Leave a companion at home and they'll autonomously repair damaged walls, refuel campfires and torches, sort your chests, and keep your smelters running. They level up skills, receive the Rested buff, and respawn at the last bed they slept in.
When a companion dies, they leave behind a tombstone. They'll respawn after a short time at their bed (or the world spawn) and automatically walk to their tombstone to recover their items.
Everything persists across sessions, zone transitions, server restarts, and player deaths.
Starter Companion
A companion automatically spawns with you when you enter a new world for the first time. Each character gets one free companion per world. Disable this with the SpawnStarterCompanion config setting.
Purchase (Optional)
Install Trader Overhaul to unlock the Companions tab in Haldor's shop and recruit additional companions. Each costs 2,000 coins from your bank balance. Customize their gender, hair, beard, skin tone, and hair color in the 3D preview before confirming. This dependency is optional — the mod works fully without it.
Interact
Tap E on your companion to open their inventory panel. Manage gear, feed food, rename them. Hold E (or X on gamepad) to open the radial command wheel for quick access to all action modes and toggles.
Command
Point your crosshair at objects in the world and press the command hotkey to issue contextual orders. The companion figures out what to do based on what you're looking at.
Hold E (keyboard) or X (gamepad) on a companion to open the radial command wheel. Move the mouse or gamepad stick to highlight an option, then click or press E to select. You can select multiple options before closing. Press Escape or B to close.
The companion's name is shown in the center. Active toggles show their current ON/OFF state.
| Segment | Type | Description |
|:---|:---|:---|
| Follow | Toggle | Companion follows you (default ON). Can be combined with any gather mode. Overrides Stay Home when ON |
| Gather Wood | Mode | Autonomously find and chop trees, logs, and stumps nearby |
| Gather Stone | Mode | Autonomously find and mine rocks nearby |
| Gather Ore | Mode | Autonomously find and mine ore deposits nearby |
| Forage | Mode | Autonomously find and pick berry bushes, mushrooms, flowers, and ground items nearby |
| Smelt | Mode | Autonomously refill kilns and furnaces with fuel/ore from chests, collect smelted output |
| Farm | Mode | Autonomously harvest ripe crops, replant seeds, and deposit produce into chests |
| Farm Zones | Action | Define square planting zones with specific crop assignments (right-click Farm segment) |
| Fish | Mode | Autonomously fish nearby water — requires fishing rod + bait in inventory |
| Hunt | Mode | Autonomously hunt Boar, Deer, Chicken, and Hare with ranged weapons |
| Cook | Mode | Autonomously cook meals at a Cauldron,
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: