Aswid

Fierce night stalker. Strong and resilient, transforms into a bat.

The Aswid is the mod's vampire, and the race with the most moving parts. It has its own food system, its own magic economy, a day/night rhythm that doubles half its stat sheet after dark, and half a dozen separate ability keys by the endgame.

Base kit (tier 1)

Benedictus et Afflictus — the Aswid's passive suite, all of it active from tier 1:

Stat	Per tier	At night
Armour	+1	×2
Damage	+2	×2
Movement speed	+1%	×2
Jump height	+1%	×2
Lifesteal on physical damage	+2% (up to 14%)	×2

Plus:

• Undead vigor — infinite stamina, exactly like the Skeleton.
• No fall damage.
• Blood Magic Mastery — blood magic items cost no eitr at all. You pay their health cost and nothing else.
• Blood Magic XP rises at double rate.
• Vae Victis — physical kills automatically consume edible enemies, feeding you and granting Blood Magic XP.
• Vampiric Aura — a passive draining aura around you, always on in every form. See below.

Progression

Boss	Unlock
Base	Benedictus et Afflictus · infinite stamina · no fall damage · free blood magic · Vae Victis · Vampiric Aura
Eikthyr	Bat Form (G, night only) · Tame (U) — boars
The Elder	Bat Form usable day and night
Moder	Freezing Blood — immunity to Freezing and Poison · Superhuman Senses — marks untamed creatures within 100 m · Tame — wolves
Yagluth	Eclipse (J) · Dominate (native interact key) · Tame — lox
The Queen	Weight of Shadows (H) — mist form
Fader	Asmund — abyss-black hair and beard, +10% height, flat +30 physical damage · Tame — asksvin

Claws of the Beast (K) is a base passive, available from tier 1 like everything else in this section — there is no boss gate on the ability itself. What scales with your tier is the damage the claws hit for once grown. See below.

Controls

Key	Ability	Available from
G	Bat Form	Eikthyr (night only until The Elder)
H	Weight of Shadows — mist form	The Queen
J	Eclipse	Yagluth
U	Tame the creature under your cursor	Eikthyr (which species depends on your tier)
I	Toggle the Vampiric Aura and auto-Devour together	Base
K	Grow Claws of the Beast for a limited time	Base
Interact (native E)	Dominate a hovered non-tameable, non-boss enemy	Yagluth

I is a single combined toggle — see The Vampiric Aura below for why it covers Devour as well. K is shared with the Fenrir's own claws and bound once, in RaceClawsConfig, rather than in AswidConfig.

Mechanics worth knowing

Blood magic without eitr

This is the race's defining trick. Blood magic items normally cost eitr and health; as an Aswid they cost only health. Combined with doubled Blood Magic XP and the lifesteal passive, blood magic goes from a niche late-game school to your primary weapon from very early on.

Claws of the Beast (K)

Press K and blackened claws grow in place of a weapon for 120 seconds by default (both the key and the duration are configurable in RaceClawsConfig, shared with the Fenrir's own claws). They retract on their own — unequipped and removed from your inventory outright — the instant the timer runs out, so nothing sits in a slot between casts. Pressing K again mid-window doesn't stack, it just restarts the timer.

Tier	Damage
Base	35%
Eikthyr	45%
The Elder	55%
Bonemass	70%
Moder	85%
Yagluth	95%
The Queen · Fader	100%

The percentage is of a full-grown pair's weight, all of it landing as slash, and it climbs with every boss you defeat — the same table the Fenrir's claws and the Sverm's permanent ones are measured against, so all three races hit for identical numbers at identical tiers.

• The damage bonus only applies while the claws are actually the thing in your hand. Draw a sword during the window and you're fighting with the sword; sheathe it and the claws come right back, because holstering anything else while the skill is running hands them back to you automatically.
• The claws cannot be dropped, traded, or picked up with the mouse while grown.
• In Bat or Mist form you have no hands to hold them with — the claws sit out the transformation and pick back up where they left off once you revert, if the window hasn't expired.

Why a real item and not a cosmetic

An earlier version bolted the claw model straight onto the hand bones. That breaks the moment the game rebuilds equipment visuals, which happens on every equip. A real item in a real inventory slot has nothing to lose — which is the whole reason this is an actual (indestructible, untradeable) weapon rather than a visual trick, at the cost of occupying your right hand while it's out.

The Vampiric Aura

This is passive — no key to hold, no block, no form requirement. It drains automatically from tier 1 onward, in your normal body just as much as in Bat or Mist form.

Damage	1 per tick, plus up to +5 from your Blood Magic skill at level 100
Tick rate	4 times per second
Radius	3 m by day · 6 m at night, centred on you
Healing	Heals you for the full damage dealt
Form multiplier	×0.5 in human form · ×1 as a Bat · ×2 as Mist

Blood Magic carries most of the aura's damage: at skill 0 it is barely a tickle, at 100 it is six times that. Levelling the skill — which you do at double rate — is the aura's real scaling. Because it is always on, staying human still drains (at half strength); transforming isn't required, just a damage multiplier.

Execution: non-boss enemies that drop to or below 20% health inside the aura are killed outright and devoured automatically, bypassing the normal devour cooldown.

It cannot tell a trader from a monster

The aura sweeps every living thing in range and does not check whether the target sells things. Walk up to Haldor, Hildir, or any faction merchant with the aura running and it drains them like anything else — at a high enough Blood Magic skill, fast enough to kill outright. Press I before you approach a trader to shop safely, and again on your way out.

Since v1.4.19 the aura does skip one group: your own kin. Swamp undead are at peace with an Aswid, and an always-on aura that ticked on them would have started a grudge on your behalf, over and over.

I toggles the aura and Devour-on-kill together, as one switch — there is no way to turn off only one of them. Auto-Devour used to have its own separate, unbound-by-default key; the two were merged onto I because the aura's own automatic execute-and-devour (above) already ties the two behaviours together in practice.

Eating

The Aswid does not cook. It consumes the lifeforce of what it kills.

• Physical kills auto-devour edible enemies. Turned off (along with the Vampiric Aura) with the shared I toggle — see The Vampiric Aura.
• Undead and inorganic creatures — skeletons, draugr, golems, charred, morgen — are not edible.
• The Greydwarf family is prey: Greylings, Greydwarves, Brutes and Shamans all count. Wood is back on the menu. They are worth 20, 25, 30 and 60 health respectively, the Brute for a full 30 minutes and the rest for 20.
• Surtlings and Bears are edible too.
• Valheim 1.0's creatures, since v1.5.3. Seals (adult and pup), the frozen Greydwarf and the frozen Shaman give the stats of Seal Meat Soup. The Elaking and the Elaking Lantern give a Cooked Asksvin Tail. Moose and its calf give Cooked Moose Meat. The Barka, both Jotun Warriors and the Deep North Goblin follow the scaled rule below, the Goblin for 20 minutes like every Fuling. Fixed values: the Jotun Witch 120 health for 60 minutes, the Elaking Mole and the Deep North Dvergr 100 for 30, every earlier Dvergr (mages and the Ashlands one included) 90 for 25.
• Humanoid prey — Cultists, Fenrings and Fulings — nourishes you for a full 20 minutes, far longer than anything else.
• Other food values are scaled from each creature's health, so a lox is worth far more than a neck: half its health, up to 150, for twice the health in seconds, up to 50 minutes. Health regeneration scales with how nourishing the prey was, rather than being the same trickle from everything.
• You get a 4th stomach slot, usable exclusively for Aswid prey.
• If all your slots are full, devouring an enemy you are already digesting silently refreshes that buff instead of failing. Until v1.4.19 that refresh destroyed the slot it was meant to renew, and only once the food was under half — which is exactly when it starts flashing. It now renews the slot the way any vanilla food does, nourishment included.
• Devour is per body. It used to run on a five-second timer shared by every corpse in the world, so clearing a group with the claws or the aura fed you once and let the rest die unnoticed. Since v1.4.19 you drink from every body in a pack, and a refused meal says so instead of failing silently.
• Your food survives death. Dying does not empty your stomach, so a corpse run does not cost you everything you had eaten. Bukeperries still clear your food normally when you want the slots back.

Dominate (native interact key, Yagluth)

Every non-boss, non-tameable creature with an AI silently carries a dormant thrall component from the moment it spawns. At the Yagluth tier, interacting with one of them (the same key you use to open doors and chests) enslaves it for 60 seconds, on a 15-minute cooldown. The thrall fights alongside you and drops its normal loot on death; if it is edible, it is auto-devoured the moment it dies, at any tier. Interact again on an already- enslaved thrall to toggle it between following you and staying put.

Tame (U, tiered)

Look at an untamed creature and press U to tame it outright, no feeding required. Which species answers depends on your progression tier:

Boss	Tameable
Eikthyr	Boar
Moder	Wolf
Yagluth	Lox
Fader	Asksvin

Superhuman Senses (Moder)

A passive that kicks in automatically at the Moder tier: every untamed creature within 100 m gets swept every second and marked with a small green light, visible through walls and fog.

Eclipse (J, Yagluth)

Casts an eclipse: a roughly 2-second cast, then the sky runs through dusk in about four seconds, and it stays night for 60 seconds. Your night bonuses switch on partway through the dusk, as the sky crosses into night. Dawn comes back the same gradual way.

Before v1.5.0 the ability failed right after its announcement: no night, no bonuses, no cooldown, and every later press ignored until you restarted the game.

• Daytime only — pressing J at night does nothing.
• 15-minute cooldown, reported on screen if you press it early.
• The effect is local to you. It turns on all your night bonuses — doubled passives, doubled aura radius, night-gated forms — on demand, in the middle of the day.

Bat Form (G, Eikthyr)

The bat is flight, and until The Elder it answers at night only. That gate had never once been in effect before v1.4.12 — the progression table said so and nothing read the flag — so a bat in daylight after Eikthyr alone was normal for a long time. It is enforced now, with a message rather than a silent refusal, and a night-only bat caught by the sunrise is put back into its body instead of flying on until dusk. Killing The Elder lifts the restriction for good.

Flight Speed under Aswid - Bat Form in Configuration Manager is a multiplier on the game's own flight speed, 1 to 3. It scales movement the game has already worked out, so the acceleration, the ease-off and the standstill at zero input all feel the same — only the ground covered changes. Holding the run key still doubles it on top. It is local to your own bat, like every other cosmetic-or-personal setting.

The bat is a real body now

Valheim has exactly one flight, and it is the debug-fly flag — which vanilla reads as this player is not really here. Six methods act on it: the AI's sight and hearing checks both refuse a debug-flying player on their first line, the hunt-the-nearest-player fallback throws them away, sleeping monsters will not wake for one, and both damage entry points drop every hit. So for most of the mod's life a bat could glide through a draugr camp untouched and could not be killed if it tried.

Since v1.4.12 the flag is overridden in exactly the places that decide aggro and damage, and nowhere else. Dying as a bat is possible, and the form is taken down properly on death rather than leaving you floating on respawn. Two toggles under Aswid - Bat Form bring the old ghost back if you preferred it: Monsters Notice The Bat and The Bat Can Be Hurt, both on by default.

The same release fixed what everyone else saw: debug fly has a local half the flying player's own physics reads and a networked half every other client reads, and only the first was ever written. A bat used to fly on its own screen while walking, falling and swimming on everybody else's.

Weight of Shadows (H, The Queen)

You dissolve into mist.

Immune to	Blunt, slash, pierce, and poison damage. No fall damage.
Aura	Deals double damage (the mist form multiplier)
Cannot	Attack, run, or jump
Ends	At sunrise, automatically

It is a survival and drain tool, not an offensive one — you trade all your weapons for immunity and a stronger aura.

Day and night

Half the Aswid's kit keys off the clock. The mod announces the transition with a thematic message when day flips to night and back — "what a horrible night to have a curse".

Stations

Blood Refinery

A half-scale, red-tinted clone of the vanilla Eitr Refinery, built at the Hammer for 1 Blood Core, 20 Stone, 10 Bronze. No crafting station needed — only the Blood Core, bought for 500 coin from the Draugr faction merchant, has to be in your inventory before the piece appears in the menu.

The refinery runs two tanks, filled by pressing its switches with the right item in hand:

Tank	Capacity	Filled by
Blood	50	Any raw flesh
Bone	20	Bone Fragments (1), Charred Bone (2), Charred Skull (3), Withered Bone (3), the three Asksvin carrion pieces (2–3 each), Elaking Hair Bundle (20)

Every 20 seconds, if the refinery holds at least 5 blood and 2 bone, it spends 5 blood + 2 bone and produces 1 Blood Essence. Removing the piece returns bone as Bone Fragments; banked blood is lost.

Blood Essence (60 food, 60 stamina, 40-minute burn) is edible only by an Aswid — anyone else gets "Living blood curdles in a living throat." Five of them turn into one Superior Blood Essence (80 food) at a Mead Ketill.

Blood Potions

Brewed at the Fermenter, not the refinery, from the two essences above:

Mead base	Recipe	Yields	Effect
Blood Potion	3 Blood Essence, 5 Blueberries, 5 Yellow Mushroom	5× Blood Potion	Heals 5% max HP over 8s, refills all 3 food slots with Blood Essence
Superior Blood Potion	3 Superior Blood Essence, 5 Sap, 5 Cloudberry	5× Superior Blood Potion	Heals 10% max HP over 8s, refills food slots with Superior Blood Essence

Both bases ferment 4× faster than a normal mead. Past Fader, drinking either potion also tops off the Aswid's 4th food slot.

See Stations for every race's chain side by side.