Hearthfolk

Hearthfolk

Your settlement, with people in it. Hearthfolk gives Valheim persistent human residents who live around your base: they sleep in your beds, eat at your fire, fell your trees, work your fields, guard your walls and follow you into the wilds. Every one of them is a real character in the world — visible, named, with their own inventory, their own gear and their own mood — and everything they do, they do physically, with the same tools and the same rules you play by.

💬 Join the Hearthfolk Discord — help, bug reports and screenshots of your villages.

Unofficial mod. Hearthfolk is a fan-created Valheim modification and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Iron Gate Studio or Coffee Stain Publishing. Use it at your own risk.

Founding a settlement

Build an Exiles' Hearth from the hammer's Misc tab and use it to open the settlement panel: a two-tab interface where you recruit residents, read their status and happiness, hand out work and tune how the settlement behaves.

Every resident has a persistent appearance you can shape — body type, any native hair or beard, hair colour, skin tone — with a live 3D portrait of the actual person you are editing, and a name you can change whenever you like. Appearance and names survive death, respawn and reloading, and they are synchronised to everyone on the server.

Press Use on a resident to open their inventory. It is a real inventory: give them an axe and they wield it, give them armour and they wear it, and everything they carry takes real durability and can break.

What residents do

• []Lumberjacks search the work area for trees, logs and fallen wood, chop with their own axe and carry the wood back to storage.[/]

  []Miners do the same with rocks and ore deposits, using their own pickaxe, and without deforming your terrain.[/]

  []Farmers work circular fields marked with buildable Farm Markers. Give them a Cultivator and they plant, tend and harvest any compatible crop, validate ground, biome, sunlight and spacing before planting, and replant enough of the harvest to keep the cycle going by itself.[/]

  []Cooks work every cooking station, stone oven included: they fetch raw food from your chests, put it on a lit fire, keep the fuel topped up and take every dish off the moment it is done, so nothing is left to overcook into coal.[/]

  []Caretakers keep the place running: refuelling fires and production machines, loading inputs, collecting output, sorting storage, and repairing damaged structures when given a hammer.[/]

  []Guards watch the settlement, walk patrol routes you draw yourself on an interactive map, and answer raids.[/]

  []Followers come with you. Command any resident with Crouch+Use and it walks at your heel, runs to catch up, boards the ship you sail and fights at your side, with Defensive, Aggressive and Passive stances.[/]

  Life in the settlement

  Residents sleep in ordinary player-built beds — Hearthfolk ships no sleeping structures of its own. They eat real meals, dinner before bed and breakfast before work, fetching food from any chest inside the hearth's work radius. They have moods: happiness reflects sleep, meals, seating, company, safety, a sheltered fire and suitable equipment, and residents who stay miserable long enough will pack up and leave. They heal, they die, and they return at the hearth after a delay, keeping their gear. They open doors on their way to work and close the ones they opened.

  Language and interface

  Hearthfolk speaks English, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Interface. Language picks one and defaults to Auto, which follows the language selected in Valheim — but it belongs to the mod alone, so you can play in English and read the settlement panel in your own language. Interface. UiScale resizes the panels for high resolution screens.

  Requirements

  Requires BepInEx and Jotunn. Install it on the server and on every client — minor versions must match. KGvalheim ItemDrawers is optional and not bundled.

  Known limitations

  • []Residents work in loaded zones only; there is no offline production.[/]

    []A resident's bed is released by dismissing them.[/]

    []Chest sorting covers materials, consumables, fish and trophies.[/]

    []Individual favourite foods are not implemented yet.[/]