SignStyler

Sign Styler

A rebuilt sign-writing interface for Valheim: a formatting toolbar, a colour picker and a live

preview, in place of a text box that fights you.

Client-side only. Sign text is stored in the sign's own text field, exactly as vanilla stores

it. Other players see your styled signs without installing anything, the server needs nothing, and

uninstalling leaves every sign exactly as it was.

What it fixes

| Vanilla | With the mod |

|---|---|

| The field renders tags as you type: ` vanishes the moment you type the >` | Rendering is off inside the field — tags stay visible and editable |

| 50 characters, tags included | 400 by default, configurable up to 2000 |

| No idea what it will look like until you commit | Live preview under the field, plus a character counter |

| Tags typed by hand, from memory | A toolbar for every tag, with sliders for the numeric ones |

| Icons only reachable by pasting from a web page | A grid of every glyph the sign's font can actually draw |

What's in the toolbar

Character styles — B, I, U, S and no parse. They light up for whatever is in force

under the caret, read back from the text rather than remembered from your clicks, so they stay

honest when you edit the tags by hand. Shortcuts: Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+U.

Colour — one entry for text colour, one for highlight, each showing the colour that target

currently holds and opening the picker already pointed at it. The picker is a side panel with a

saturation/value square, a hue strip, a hex field with copy and paste, an alpha slider, a palette

you build up (+ save, right-click a swatch to remove it) and the session history. Clicking a

swatch loads the colour — it doesn't apply it, so looking is not the same as writing.

With nothing selected, applying a colour colours the word under the caret rather than refusing.

There's also Insert empty tag at caret, for colouring text you haven't typed yet.

Colour vision — a button cycling the picker through normal vision, protanopia, deuteranopia,

tritanopia and achromatopsia. The square, the hue strip and every palette chip are redrawn as a

player with that deficiency sees them, so two colours that collapse into one muddy tone show up

before the sign is written rather than after. Only the display changes: the hex field and the tag

keep the real colour. A sign is read by everyone who walks past it, and roughly one man in twelve

sees red and green differently from its author.

Icons — a grid of the characters your keyboard has no key for: crossed swords over an

armoury, a hammer over a workbench. Read from the sign's own font at runtime, so every glyph

offered is one the sign can genuinely draw — nothing comes out as an empty box. Search by

Unicode name (sword finds ⚔, skull finds ☠) or by codepoint, and cycle the categories to

browse. An icon costs one character, same as a letter.

And yes, emoji. Valheim's signs fall back through fourteen fonts, one of which is an emoji

face, so 😀 💀 🔨 go on a plank like any other character — no font to install, no sprite tag, one

character each. They're on the grid because the font can draw them, same rule as everything else.

Numeric tags — size, voffset, line-height, cspace, rotate and alpha, each with a

slider and a typed value. Dragging rewrites the tag already in your text instead of stacking a

new one on top, and the preview follows in real time — which is what makes offsets usable, since

those values are found by eye.

Installation

Through a mod manager ( Mod Manager, r2modman, Gale): install, and BepInEx comes

along as a dependency. Manually: BepInEx for Valheim, then drop SignStyler.dll into

Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/SignStyler.

Launch once and the config file appears at BepInEx/config/fr.anthony.signstyler.cfg. It holds

a single setting — CharacterLimit, 400 by default, bounded 50 to 2000. It's re-read every time

a sign is opened, so Configuration Manager changes take effect without a restart.

Tag cheat sheet

bold / italic / underline / strikethro