Bone & Ember

Valheim hides a lot from you. Your max health comes from what you ate, but the bar never says so. Repair is free, and most players never find the button. A friend told me it took them ten years to find repair, and they still weren’t sure how it worked.

Bone & Ember is a client-only mod that fixes the stuff that bugged me. It changes what you see and nothing else, so you can install it and join any server without anyone else doing a thing. I wanted it to look like it shipped with the game, so it’s mostly bone and ember on dark wood, with gold saved for stamina.

Every switch above is a real key from the mod’s config file. In game, the mod watches that file and applies a save the moment you make it, so you can A/B any feature live without restarting. That’s how most of these decisions got made.

Health you can read

The health bar is split into notches, one per food. Hover one and it tells you which meal is holding up that slice of your max. Food fades on Valheim’s own curve, fast at first and then slowly, so a segment shrinks the whole time and the caption shows up right when it’s worth eating again.

Walking back to your body

Vanilla keeps every death pin forever and gives you no way to tell a looted corpse from a live one. The compass strip across the top shows your unrecovered deaths with a distance under the skull, and once you’ve picked up your stuff, the marker goes away.

Repair, finally

Vanilla only draws the repair button when you’re already standing at a workbench. Bone & Ember keeps a repair line under the inventory that names what’s worn and where to fix it. The button says free, because every other game charges for repair, and that one word is probably why my friend never tried it.