Nearby Chests: Crafting and Storage QoL for Valheim 1.0

Every Valheim base ends up with the same chore: you’re three Fine Wood short at the workbench, so you walk to the chest, grab the wood, walk back. Then you do it again for Bronze. Crafting only counts what’s in your pockets, and the Stack button only fills the one chest you have open.

Nearby Chests is a small, free, client-side mod that fixes that. It does six things:

1. Craft and build from your chests. Anything within 30 meters counts as if you were carrying it.
2. Feed smelters, kilns and fires from your chests. You still press the button yourself, one item at a time; the coal just comes from a chest instead of your pockets.
3. Put everything away with one press. Stack sends each item to the chest it belongs in, and finds a home for things you’ve never stored before.
4. Tidy a messy chest. One button sends anything that doesn’t belong somewhere better, and pulls in strays that do belong.
5. Keep a slot out of it. Middle-click a slot in your inventory and Stack leaves whatever is there alone.
6. Grab materials for a build. Ctrl+click with a piece selected on your hammer and its materials come out of the chests into your pockets.

Only you need it. Your friends don’t have to install anything, and it works on normal servers.

Install it

The easy way is a mod manager: install Nearby Chests from Thunderstore with r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager, and BepInEx comes along with it.

To install by hand, download from the Releases page:

1. Open your Valheim folder — in Steam, right-click Valheim → Manage → Browse local files. It’s the one with valheim.exe in it.
2. Extract the zip straight into that folder. Windows’ Extract All suggests a subfolder named after the zip; delete that last part of the path before extracting.
3. Check that winhttp.dll, doorstop_config.ini and the BepInEx folder sit right next to valheim.exe. One folder too deep and nothing loads. This is the mistake that trips up most first-time modders.
4. Launch the game.

To confirm it worked, stand at your workbench next to a chest full of wood: recipes needing wood should light up with empty pockets. Or check BepInEx\LogOutput.log for Nearby Chests x.y.z loaded.

Using BepInEx from Thunderstore? The BepInExPack_Valheim download has a BepInExPack_Valheim folder inside it. Copy what’s inside that folder into your Valheim folder, then add the mod-only zip on top.

To uninstall, delete BepInEx\plugins\NearbyChests.

Crafting and building

Walk up to any station and the recipes just work — the numbers in the menu include your nearby chests. Copper in one chest and Tin in another still makes Bronze. What you’re carrying is spent first, then the closest chests. Upgrades and hammer/hoe/cultivator building work the same way.

Feeding stations

Press a smelter’s add-ore or add-fuel prompt with empty pockets and the ore or coal comes out of the nearest chest. Same for the blast furnace, charcoal kiln, windmill, spinning wheel, eitr refinery and shield generator, for wood on a campfire, bonfire or hearth, and for cooking-station fuel.

One press still adds one item, exactly like vanilla — nothing is automated.

Food and mead stay manual on purpose. A cooking station takes a dozen different dishes and a fermenter one mead base at a time, so pulling from a chest would mean the mod choosing your dinner.

Putting things away

Get home, open any chest near your storage and press Stack (or hold E on a chest). Every item goes somewhere sensible:

• To the chest it already lives in. It doesn’t matter which chest you opened, as long as the right one is nearby.
• Next to its relatives, if it’s new. A new ore joins your other metals rather than a random box.
• Into an empty chest, if nothing similar exists yet. That chest becomes its home from then on.
• Sharing a chest, if you’re out of empty ones. A chest holding one kind of thing takes on a second, related kind — meat with plants, stone with wood.
• Into one catch-all chest for odds and ends, so stray materials don’t each claim a box.

Anything with nowhere to go stays with you, and the on-screen message says how many. Every chest that received items gets its half-stacks merged and its contents sorted.

Tidying a messy chest

Every base has that one chest where hides, Surtling Cores and random loot got dumped “just for now”. Open it and click Tidy — the small three-bar icon left of Place stacks.

Tidy works out what the chest is mostly for, say metals, then sends everything else to its proper chest, an empty chest, a shared chest, or the catch-all. Anything with nowhere to go stays put.

It also works in reverse: press Tidy on your metals chest and bars scattered in the wood chest or the catch-all come home. If a group got split across two chests, it’s merged into whichever holds the most.

Keeping a slot out of it

Sometimes you want to hang on to a stack of wood, or keep a few Surtling Cores handy, and Stack keeps putting them away. Open your inventory and middle-click the slot. A small pin appears in its corner, and from then on Stack skips that slot. Middle-click again to clear it.

The mark is on the slot, not the item, so a reserved slot stays reserved whatever you drop in it, and your marks are saved with your character.

Grabbing materials for a build

Building from chests only works within range. For that outpost across the meadow, select the piece on your hammer and Ctrl + left click. The piece’s materials come out of the nearest chests into your inventory, and the click doesn’t place anything. Each press adds enough for one more piece on top of what you already carry, so five presses means five walls’ worth. The on-screen message says what was pulled and what the chests were short of.

What stays with you

Stacking everything would leave you defenceless the moment you head out, so these never move: food, meads and potions (ingredients like berries and honey still get put away), arrows, bolts and bait, weapons, armor, shields, tools and trinkets, and your hotbar plus anything equipped.

It also leaves alone the Obliterator, gravestones, dungeon loot chests, a chest someone else has open, and any chest you couldn’t open yourself.

The one multiplayer caveat: if you and a friend use the same chest in the same split second, one of you can lose what you moved. Unlikely, but possible.

Settings

After the first launch, settings live in BepInEx\config\NearbyChests.cfg. The ones worth knowing:

Item groups

“Similar” comes from a group list: metals, hides, wood, stone, seeds, raw ingredients, plants, cooked food, valuables, trophies, and everything else by biome (Black Forest, Mountains and Swamp, Plains and Ocean, Mistlands, Ashlands, Deep North — thin biomes are paired, since neither Swamp nor Ocean has enough distinct materials for its own chest).

Don’t like where something lands? The list is a plain text file at BepInEx\config\NearbyChests.groups.txt, one line per group. Edits apply the next time you stack, and deleting the file restores the defaults. Details on GitHub.

Wrapping up

Valheim 1.0 is the best the game has ever been, but base logistics are still on you. Nearby Chests takes that part: craft from your chests, feed your smelters from them, grab what you need for a build, and put it all away with a button.

It’s free and open source on GitHub — bugs and “this item belongs in a different group” issues both welcome. Skål!