Valheim Economy and Item Delivery
A currency and shop on Valheim, with nothing for you or your players to install: prefab item ids, items dropped at the buyer's feet, and chat-based account linking.
Nothing for you to install
Valheim has no RCON, no Telnet and no API of its own, so GameGrid ships its own interface: the GameGrid Bridge, a small server-side plugin. It is installed automatically every time your Valheim server starts, on new and existing servers alike.
There is nothing for you to click and nothing for your players to install. There is no Mods tab on the Valheim Game Tools page for this reason. If the bridge is not there yet, the panel says which of a short list of reasons it is, and every one of them is resolved by the next server start.
If your server has never been started since it was created, start it once. That is the only prerequisite.
The bridge is server-side, so it is crossplay-safe: Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Game Pass players all get the same behaviour and none of them installs anything.
General setup is in Setting Up Your Server Economy. This article covers what is specific to Valheim.
Item ids are prefab names
Economy → Shop → Scan Game Items asks the running server what items it actually has, and falls back to the item index on disk when the server is stopped.
The id under each item name is the prefab name — Wood, SwordIron, Coins. That is the id the shop stores and the id delivery uses.
Scan with the server running. A stopped server is read from the shipped item index, which knows nothing about mods you have installed. A running server's own list includes them and confirms every id.
Re-scan after installing or removing a mod, and after a game update. A hand-kept list goes stale on the first content patch, silently, and every purchase after that fails once the customer has already paid.
How delivery works
When a player buys something, the bridge finds them in the world and drops the items on the ground next to them, slightly above and beside so they land and settle rather than clipping through the floor. The player sees them appear.
This is an ordinary server-side spawn, the same thing the server does every time a creature drops loot. It is not a cheat command: there is no devcommands, no cheat flag, no extra mod, and nothing on the client. That is what makes it crossplay-safe.
A large quantity arrives as several stacks, each up to the item's own maximum stack size, scattered around the player rather than piled on one point. A single delivery takes a quantity between 1 and 1000, and is refused if it would need more than 200 stacks.
The player has to be connected — Valheim can only receive an item at a player's position. A purchase made while they are offline is held and delivered when they next join; the platform keeps trying for 24 hours.
Because the items land on the ground, tell your players to buy somewhere they can pick things up. An item bought while standing in water or over a drop behaves exactly as any dropped item would.
Delivery states, retries and refunds are covered in Purchases, Delivery and Refunds.
Relogging does not break delivery
Valheim identifies a connected player with a number that is minted fresh every time they connect. A link stored against that number stops matching the moment the player relogs.
GameGrid handles that: when the stored id no longer names anybody connected, the bridge finds the player by character name instead and the platform quietly records the id they have now.
You should not have to do anything about this. If a player's deliveries do fail repeatedly right after relogging, remove their link from Economy → Links and have them run /link again.
Account linking, and the one-player problem
A player runs /link in your Discord server, gets a seven-character code by direct message, and types !link CODE in Valheim's chat within ten minutes. The bridge sees the message inside the server process — Valheim writes no chat to disk at all, so there is no log to read and nothing else could see it.
The whole chat message must be !link then the code and nothing else. Capitals do not matter.
Valheim does not broadcast chat. It sends each message to the *other* players on the server, so with only one player online nothing is transmitted at all — there is no message for anything to see, and !link cannot work.
GameGrid works around this with Capture Chat With One Player Online, in Settings under the Game Tools category, on by default. It adds one clearly-named entry, "GameGrid (chat relay)", to the in-game player list so a lone player's message has a recipient. It holds no position, is never drawn on any map, and steps aside as soon as a second player connects.
If you turn that setting off, accept that chat capture and in-game linking then need two players online.
You can always link a player by hand from Economy → Links → + Add Manually. Full detail: Linking Discord Accounts to In-Game Players.
The link code is not the join code
Two different codes exist on a Valheim server and they are easy to confuse.
The join code is six digits and it is how players connect to a crossplay server — everyone, on any platform, because a crossplay server does not listen on its own game port. It changes on every restart.
The link code is seven characters and it is what /link issues for connecting a Discord account to a character.
Typing one where the other belongs does nothing at all, which is exactly what makes it confusing. If a player says linking is not working, check which code they were given.
Auto-earn on Valheim
Five of the seven rewards pay on Valheim: playtime, the death penalty, event participation, daily login and Discord activity.
Playtime is paid per whole hour, measured from the join and leave events the bridge plugin reports. A 90-minute session pays one hour and carries the remaining 30 minutes forward.
The death penalty is taken when the game tells the server that a character is gone. The bridge plugin reads that signal from the game itself rather than from a log line about it, so it does not depend on how your server logs. A player with less in their wallet than the penalty is taken to zero and never below it — the platform does not put a player in debt.
Event participation pays every linked player who was still online at the moment a raid ended or a boss died. It is not paid when a raid starts: a raid you logged off during is not a raid you took part in. Both are things that happen to the world rather than to a player — the game records that a boss died and records nothing about who was fighting it — so everyone present is paid rather than nobody.
Daily login is claimed by the player with /daily in Discord; Discord activity pays per message in your linked channel. Neither needs anything from the game.
No kill bonus and no level milestone. Valheim has no character level a server can report at all — progression is skill and equipment, held in a character file the player owns. An ordinary kill is resolved on the player's own machine and never tells the server who did it, and the kill counter the game keeps is in that same player-owned file. Boss kills are the exception the server does see, and they pay through event participation rather than as a kill bonus, for the reason above: the evidence names the boss, never the killer.
Those two are not shown in your Auto-Earn settings, and /economy-earn refuses them with the reason rather than storing a number that could never pay.
To reward a specific player for a boss kill or for progression, use /award — by hand, or from your own tooling through the Customer API.
See Per-game economy support and Wallets, Awards and Auto-Earn.
Chat bridge
/chat-link #channel mirrors your server's in-game chat into a Discord channel and broadcasts that channel's messages to everyone playing. Both directions go through the same bridge as everything else here.
The one-player behaviour above applies to the bridge too: with a single player online and the chat relay setting turned off, nothing reaches Discord.
A message from Discord appears in game as [Discord] <name>: <message>.
See Discord Chat Bridge.
Sharing an economy across servers
Two Valheim servers can share one economy so players keep one balance and one shop across both. It is on the Economy Overview tab.
A Valheim server cannot share an economy with 7 Days to Die, Minecraft or Palworld — item ids and delivery do not carry across games, and the panel will not offer the mismatched ones.