PenPosts

v1.3.13·Updated 2026-10-12

Breeding caps per pen instead of per radius. Write "Pen" on a sign and whatever its fence encloses becomes a pen: animals only count their own pen when breeding. A full pen stops eating.

About this mod Author’s original text

PenPosts

Breeding caps per pen instead of per radius, so neighbouring pens stop blocking each other.

In the base game, an animal stops breeding ("too crowded") when there are too many of its kind within a radius around it, wherever they are: the next pen, the barn behind the wall, even wild ones. With PenPosts you mark a pen with a sign. Animals inside it only count the animals in that same pen.

How to use

Write a sign whose text starts with Pen:

| Sign text | Pen |

|---|---|

| Pen | 10 m radius around the sign (default) |

| Pen 12 | 12 m radius |

| Pen 15 Boars | 15 m radius, named "Boars" |

| Pen 12 Lox cap 6 | 12 m radius, named "Lox", with its own breeding cap of 6 (max 6 works too) |

  • The radius is measured flat from the sign. If an animal is inside several pens, the nearest sign wins.
  • Animals of the same kind and their young inside the pen count towards the cap.
  • The cap is each animal's own (from the game or your taming mod) unless the sign or the config sets one.
  • A full pen doesn't eat. When a pen is at its cap, its animals leave food alone, so no feed is wasted on animals that can't breed. They eat again as soon as there's room.
  • Finding a mate works exactly as before, and animals outside every pen behave exactly as before.

Look at a pen sign to see its radius, its cap and the tamed animals inside. Keep looking for a moment and the pen itself appears: a glowing ring on the ground at its edge and a see-through ball around it that also shows through the ground. It stays while you look and for 20 seconds after. No key is needed, so E (and Shift + E or Q) still edit the sign as usual.

Settings (anwo.PenPosts.cfg)

| Setting | Default | What it does |

|---|---|---|

| Default radius | 10 | Radius for a sign without a number (m) |

| Max radius | 40 | Largest radius a sign may set (m) |

| Pen cap | 0 | Breeding cap inside pens. 0 = each animal's own |

| No food when full | true | Animals in a pen at its cap don't eat |

| Show pen info on sign | true | Show radius, cap and animals in the sign's hover text |

| Show pen area when looking at the sign | true | Show the ring and ball while you look at a pen sign |

| Show pen area for | 20 | Seconds the ring and ball stay after you look away |

Multiplayer

Everyone needs the mod. Breeding is decided by whichever player's game is running the animals at the time, so mixed installs give inconsistent results.

Compatibility

  • Works with the base game's breeding and any mod that uses it.
  • With LetMeTameYou, its "Too Crowded / Ready to Procreate" hover text uses the pen too.
  • With Herd Bell, animals that a bell can still collect from keep eating in a full pen, so the bell keeps working.
  • Feeding troughs from other mods (such as Valharvest's) work as usual: animals with room in their pen eat from them, and animals in a full pen leave them alone, like any other food.
  • With Zen mods (Zen.ModLib, used by ZenRedecorate and others), their Q key works on pen signs as on any sign; PenPosts uses no key.

Removing the mod

Nothing new is added to the world. Without the mod, a pen sign is just a sign.

About

Made with Claude (Anthropic's AI model) and tagged AI Generated, as 's rules ask.

Built for Valheim 1.0.17 (Deep North; also 1.0.16) with BepInEx 5.4.2351.

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
PenPosts-1.3.13.zip
File size
109.3 KiB