Varda

Varda

Dungeons pin themselves on your map when you go in. Portals you build pin themselves with

the tag you gave them.

Why

A varða is a cairn: a stack of stones somebody left beside a route so the next person

could find it again. It marks where people have been. It does not point at anything nobody

has found yet, and that distinction is the entire design of this mod.

Every map mod arrives, sooner or later, at pinning ore. It is the most requested feature and

it is the one that quietly ends the game it is installed in: a detector tells you where

something is that you have not discovered, and the part of Valheim that was exploring

becomes the part that is reading a list. Silver is the clearest case. Finding it is a

mountain, a wishbone, a night out in the cold and a real chance of dying, and all of that

collapses the moment the map knows.

What Varda pins is memory, not discovery. You walked into that crypt at dusk and came out

somewhere else entirely. You built that portal and tagged it mine. Neither pin tells you a

single thing you did not already know. It saves you opening the map, holding the mouse

still and typing a name, thirty times an evening, while something is chewing on you.

Which is also why the trigger is going in and not walking past. A pin for every cave mouth

within sight of the road is a detector with extra steps, and "I have been down there" and

"there is a door over there" are different facts about the world.

What it actually does

Two things.

A dungeon pins itself the moment you step through the door. Burial chambers, troll

caves, sunken crypts, frost caves, mines, anything the game moves you into. The pin wears

Varda's own dungeon icon and no label, because the icon already says what it is. Turn

NameDungeons on and it carries the dungeon's own name as well, the one on the banner you see

as you go in, so a modded dungeon is labelled correctly without this mod knowing anything about

it. Coming back out does not add a second pin, and neither does going back in next week.

A portal you built pins itself with its tag, and the pin follows the tag when you change

it. Every portal gets a pin of its own, so a hub of portals built side by side shows each one

under its own tag. Portals somebody else built are never pinned: that is their network, and

putting it on your map is reading their notes rather than writing your own.

When the portal goes, its pin goes with it. Take it down with the hammer, lose it to a

troll, or have somebody else break it, and the pin comes off your map. Walking away from a

portal is not the same thing and never counts. If it went while you were not there, say while

you were offline or on the other side of the world, the pin can stay until you are next

standing near that spot. Once the area around you has finished loading and there is still no

portal of yours there, the pin comes off then. Only the pin Varda put on that portal is taken.

Break one portal in a row and the pins on the others stay, as does a pin you placed beside it

by hand and any dungeon pin. RemoveDestroyedPortals

in the settings turns this off, if you would rather keep a mark where a portal used to be.

One portal can be kept off your map. Look at a portal you built and press H: its pin comes

off and stays off. Press H again while looking at it and the pin comes back, with its tag. The

portal's hover text says which the key will do, under the line for setting its tag. It is

yours alone, remembered per character, per world and per portal. Nobody else's map changes, the

portal itself is untouched, and a pin you placed by hand is never touched. While

RemoveDestroyedPortals is on, a destroyed portal is forgotten along with the fact that you hid

it, at once if you are there and otherwise the next time you stand near that spot, so a new

portal built in its place gets a pin. With it off, the choice stays with the spot, and a new

portal built exactly there starts hidden. The key is HidePortalKey in the settings. Setting it

to Non