Sverm

Chitin-born swarm kin. Armoured from birth and never slowed, venomous, at peace with every crawling thing - but blunt trauma and fire find the seams.

The Sverm is the mod's tenth race, and the one that answers "what if armour was a race instead of a set of items." You never dress — chest, legs and helmet are chitin, permanently, and worth the next biome's full set the moment you reach it. Past The Elder the race stops being only a body: it grows the Colony, a base-building and economy layer built entirely out of a nest, a bank of biomass, and a roster of insects that fight, farm and haul for you.

Base kit (tier 1)

All of the following are active from the moment you pick the race, and stay active for the rest of the run:

• Chitin Plating. Chest, legs and helmet are carapace and never come off. At every tier they are worth the full armour set of the biome ahead of you, at its best quality, weightless, and without the movement penalty armour costs everyone else. Cloak and trinket are the only two slots you can still fill with something you found.
• Toxin Immunity. Poison cannot touch you at all, from tier 1.
• Two weaknesses that come with the shell. You take +40% blunt damage and +40% fire damage — the price of an exoskeleton. Both are read off a single configurable number (SvermConfig.BluntWeakness / FireWeakness), and the fire half inverts entirely at the Fader tier — see Annealed Chitin below.
• Hive Pheromones. No invertebrate in the game will attack you — not leeches, ticks, deathsquitos, seekers, or bees. Bonemass is not an insect and does not care.
• Insect Metabolism. You eat everything anyone else eats. Honey and royal jelly are worth double to you. Alchemical blood is the one thing your stomach refuses.
• Chitin Claws. Your hands are the weapon, permanently. A bare-handed blow lands at a percentage of the claws' full weight (35% at tier 1, climbing with progression — see the table below), and the claws cannot be taken from you: draw a sword and they simply wait, sheathe it and they are back in your hands. Unlike the Aswid's or Fenrir's claws, there is no key to press and no timer — this pair never comes off.

Why the carapace never slows you down

This needs no special patch. In vanilla Valheim, the equipment slots that carry a movement penalty are exactly the chest, legs and helmet — the three slots the Sverm can never fill with anything else. Sealing them delivers the "never slowed" half of the race for free.

Progression

Boss	Unlock
Base	Chitin Plating · Toxin Immunity · Hive Pheromones · Insect Metabolism · Chitin Claws (35%) · leather-tier carapace
Eikthyr	Metabolic Surge — cheaper running/jumping, +15% jump · Ventral Pouches (+100 carry weight) · Claws 45% · bronze-tier carapace
The Elder	Grinding Mandibles — seeds are food · Sensory Antennae · Claws 55% · iron-tier carapace · the Colony unlocks
Bonemass	Venom Glands — poison added to every blow · Acid Hemolymph — poison dealt back to melee attackers · Claws 70% · wolf/Drake-tier carapace
Moder	Vestigial Wings — no fall damage · Claws 85% · padded-tier carapace
Yagluth	Ravager Strain (G) — become a Seeker Brute · Claws 95% · carapace-tier carapace
The Queen	Surrenal Glands — 10% larger, carapace value jumps · full wingspan (visual) · Claws 100% · flametal-tier carapace
Fader	Carapace Regeneration — passive self-heal · Annealed Chitin and Emberform — fire weakness inverts to resistance, claws catch fire

Controls

Key	Ability	Available from
G	Ravager Strain	Yagluth

Everything else — the carapace, the claws, the venom, the antennae, the fall-damage immunity — is passive. The Colony has no keys of its own; you interact with its buildings the same way you interact with any other station, by pressing E.

While in Ravager Strain

Input	Action
Left Mouse	Bite
Right Mouse	Ram, lunging a few metres forward
Middle Mouse	Ground slam, one claw then the other
G	Roar — a burst around you, 3 m, own 10-second cooldown

Attacks only fire while grounded, and never with the hammer, hoe or cultivator in hand. On a gamepad the same three attacks answer Attack, Block and Secondary Attack — see Gamepad and the radial menu.

Mechanics worth knowing

Chitin Plating and the carapace's value

What the carapace is worth is never written down as a flat number — it is priced live off three real vanilla items, read from ObjectDB at quality 4, the same three item slots a human would wear:

Tier	Reference set
Base	Leather chest, legs, helmet
Eikthyr	Bronze chest, legs, helmet
The Elder	Iron chest, legs, helmet
Bonemass	Wolf chest and legs, Drake helmet
Moder	Padded Cuirass, Greaves, Helmet
Yagluth	Carapace chest, legs, helmet
The Queen · Fader	Flametal chest, legs, helmet (+10 flat at Fader — there is no biome after the Ashlands to read a set from)

Because the number is read from the real items rather than copied once, a game patch that rebalances iron armour rebalances the Sverm's Elder-tier carapace along with it, automatically.

Hive Pheromones

The same no-hostility trick several other races have, scoped to invertebrates specifically: leeches, ticks, deathsquitos, seekers and bees never initiate against a Sverm, at any tier, with no unlock required. Bonemass — an ooze, not an insect — is explicitly exempted.

Chitin Claws

Tier	Damage
Base	35%
Eikthyr	45%
The Elder	55%
Bonemass	70%
Moder	85%
Yagluth	95%
The Queen	100% — the real Chitin Claws
Fader	100% + fire

The percentage is a fraction of a reference weapon's own quality-4 damage, read live off ObjectDB rather than hand-tuned — the same yardstick the timed claws on Aswid and Fenrir are measured against, so all three races hit for identical numbers at identical tiers. What differs is the damage type: the Sverm's claws land as slash, pierce and blunt in the reference weapon's own split; the Aswid's and Fenrir's timed claws collapse the whole total into slash.

The model is purely cosmetic — two claws bolted to the hand bones, visible even while you are holding a two-hander — and the damage is entirely separate, applied to whatever an unarmed blow would otherwise do. That split is what lets the claws be genuinely permanent without permanently occupying your weapon slot: pick up a sword and you swing the sword, but the claws are still sitting on your hands underneath it, doing nothing until your hands are empty again.

At Fader, Annealed Chitin adds fire on top of the physical total — see below.

The Colony (unlocked at The Elder)

Past tier 3, the Sverm is not only a body. Build a Brood Mound with the Hammer (40 Wood, 20 Resin — no crafting station needed) and it becomes the anchor of a whole economy layer. No more than two nests may stand within roughly 900 m of each other (two per square mile).

The nest wears two mouths:

• The Hive Stomach, at its foot — press E and it eats a whole stack out of your inventory. Food, wood and resin are all accepted; honey and royal jelly are refused, because they are medicine now, not fuel.
• The Hive Market, a separate bench you build with the Hammer within 10 m of a nest (10 Wood, 5 Resin) — press E and the vanilla trade window opens, spending that nest's own biomass bank instead of coins.

Digestion

What you feed the nest is not spendable the instant it goes in. It seeps from the feed into the nest's spendable bank at 5 biomass a second (configurable), continuously, whether or not anyone is standing there to watch it.

Growth

Stage	Tank capacity	Cost to reach it
Brood Mound	1,500	— (starting stage)
Gorged Hive	2,000	1,000
Nesting Spire	2,500	1,500
Hive Citadel	3,000	2,000

Each stage costs exactly the previous stage's full tankful and always leaves the bank close to empty — growing the nest and fielding an army are competing uses for the same biomass, never both at once. Each stage also opens the next rung of the troop roster and raises the egg cap.

Brood eggs and troops

The nest lays one egg every 20 seconds, up to a cap of 5 plus the current stage (6 at Brood Mound, up to 9 at Hive Citadel). A troop costs one egg and its own biomass price — the egg regrows on its own, the biomass does not.

Fixed in v1.5.1

Before v1.5.1 the nest laid no eggs while its owner stood near it, so every troop and the Blister Tick stayed greyed out in the Hive Market whatever the biomass. The Blister Tick's burst also had no effect until then.

Troop	Price	Unlocked at	Default cap
Brood	100	Brood Mound (stage 1)	8
Seeker	250	Gorged Hive (stage 2)	6
Soldier	500	Nesting Spire (stage 3)	3
Gjall	1,000	Hive Citadel (stage 4)	2

Troops are tamed creatures bound to the nest that hatched them: they follow when you ask, walk home when you release them, heal on their own over time, and drop nothing when they fall — a troop that farmed its own trophies would let the colony pay for itself. Surrenal Glands (800 biomass) and Hyperplasia (1,600 biomass), bought at the market, raise every troop hatched after the purchase to one star and then two — nothing already alive is retroactively upgraded.

A following troop keeps a place of its own, about 4 m behind you and fanned out from the others, and only walks back once it has drifted 3 m from it. So a squad stands still around you instead of shoving you. On a ship the places sit on a ring 5 m outside the hull, which keeps the troops from driving into it and spinning the boat. A troop more than 30 m from you stops following and goes home to its nest. That is v1.5.4; before it every troop aimed for the exact spot you stood on.

A troop Gjall's bile bombs spare you and your tames, and the ticks they hatch are tame and vanish after 45 seconds. Wild creatures still take the blast. Since v1.5.5; before that a bomb thrown at a turtle killed the player in the boat next to it.

Seeker Workers

Free labour, and always free — no egg, no biomass, and a replacement the moment one dies. The nest puts one out every 2 minutes from the Bonemass tier on, up to 3 alive by default, and they have one trade: they keep the forge.

Since v1.4.15 a worker carries the Bone Smith's brain, whole — the same chests, the same stations, the same 20 m circle, measured here from the nest's own edge rather than from a table. Put a Bone Fragment in a chest inside that circle and the workers carry ore and fuel out of it to the smelters, kilns, furnaces and mills standing around the nest, then bring what comes out back to the same chest.

• They mend what you built. Once every 5 seconds, one thing within 10 m.
• They defend the nest. Anything within 12 m stops the work; the fight itself is left to the game's own combat, and a worker goes back to whatever it was carrying afterwards. They fight inside the nest's own ground, 25 m, and drop a target that leaves it. A worker found more than 60 m from the nest is put back. Before v1.5.6 they chased across the map.
• Half a Seeker in size, health and bite. They take no orders and never follow.
• The nest's hover lists them, one line each, saying what that worker is doing right now — the same feedback channel the Bone Smith's table has.

The nest also eats out of the chests at its foot on its own, at a rate set by how many workers are alive, so a dead worker costs the forge a trip rather than the colony its food.

The farmer never happened

Configuration Manager still carries a Worker - Farmers cap, and beehives no longer hatch anything. Farming was tried and dropped; the entry stays so the line already sitting in players' .cfg files keeps meaning what it says. Every worker you will ever see is the forge kind.

Blister Tick

50 biomass buys a permanent slot. The number of slots is the lower of the configured cap (10 by default) and the nest's clutch at its stage, five plus the stage, because every tick spends an egg that does not come back. That is v1.5.6; ticks bought past it before then stay. It runs at whatever you're fighting and bursts; the nest grows a free replacement 30 seconds later. Its blast starts at a fallback figure and upgrades to match the elite blob's own explosion once the nest reaches its third stage.

Beehives

Place a vanilla beehive inside a nest's 10 m aura and the colony takes it over after 60 seconds standing there — twice the speed, three times the honey capacity, and after Yagluth, royal jelly instead of honey. A taken hive produces; it does not hatch anything. Press honey or royal jelly directly on one of your own insects to heal it (40 and 90 health respectively) rather than eating it yourself.

The aura only takes over so many hives at once (Beehives per Aura, configurable, default 10) — once full, a beehive placed inside it just waits its turn, and gets claimed automatically the next time a taken one is destroyed. Aura radius and how close two nests may stand are also configurable, under Sverm in Configuration Manager.

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

Vestigial Wings (Moder)

No ground is hard enough to hurt you, from Moder on. The dorsal spines that grow with this tier are cosmetic — a ribcage worn spine-up along your back — 0.315 m from Moder to The Queen and 0.56 m from The Queen on.

Off by default since v1.5.1

On a body wearing armour the crest came out through the chest and shoulder pieces instead of standing off the back, so it is hidden until it is placed properly. Enabled under [Sverm - Dorsal Spines] brings it back; the fall-damage immunity does not depend on it.

They used to sit on your face

Until v1.4.21 the crest was based at its mount bone and grown upward from there, which reached past the head once the larger size came in at the Queen tier. It is centred on the bone now, and the sizes came down 30% with the fix. If you still want to nudge it, Offset Y under [Sverm - Dorsal Spines] in Configuration Manager moves it live, and stays local to you like every other cosmetic setting.

Ravager Strain (G, Yagluth)

Become a Seeker Brute for 120 seconds, on a 300-second (5-minute) cooldown. It is the kit's one offensive button, and it doubles down on the race's own idea rather than trading it away: while the form holds, the carapace's armour value is multiplied by 2.

• The Brute's own attacks, with its real numbers read off its weapons rather than hand-tuned: a bite on Left Mouse, a ram on Right Mouse, a ground slam on Middle Mouse, and a roar on G — a burst around you rather than a forward swing, 3 m, on its own 10-second cooldown.
• Timed by the Brute's own animations since v1.5.11. Each attack hits at the moment the Seeker Brute's animation strikes, and you stand still until the animation ends: about 1.5 s for the bite, 2.5 s for the ram, 4 s for the slam. The ram carries you a few metres forward, as the real Brute's charge does. The slam brings down one claw and then the other, so it hits twice, and each claw digs into the ground where it lands, never inside a ward you have no access to. Turn the digging off with Sverm - Ravager Strain → Ground Slam Crater. The ram and the slam carry the Brute's chop and pickaxe damage, so they fell trees and break rocks.
• No flight and no escort. This is a brawling form, not an escape.
• Your carapace is never removed, so the doubled armour stacks on whatever biome tier you have reached.
• The form runs its full two minutes — G roars rather than reverting, so there is no early exit.

This replaced the Stinger Morph

Until v1.4.6 the Yagluth unlock was a deathsquito flight form that multiplied every point of damage you took by 2.5. Players found the glass-cannon trade too strong for what it cost, so it was swapped for the opposite shape — no flight, no fragility, armour instead. Duration and cooldown carried over unchanged. The swap was missing from that release's changelog, which is why this page said Stinger Morph for as long as it did.

Other players see the Brute, its attacks and its roar as of v1.4.21; before that the whole form was built only on the screen of the player using it, and everyone else saw a Sverm standing still for two minutes.

Annealed Chitin and Emberform (Fader)

Eight tiers of the shell's own weakness are burned out at the very end. The +40% fire damage that has followed you the whole run inverts into a flat resistance of the same size, and the claws start carrying fire on top of their physical total. Visually, the carapace goes black with a dim red heat glowing under it — the tint ramp that has been ageing from pale violet toward amber the whole climb finally goes past amber into this.

Carapace Regeneration (Fader)

A flat passive self-heal, 0.5 health a second, always on — no combat requirement, no cooldown.

Playing one

• The body alone is a competent tank-and-poke build from tier 1: full armour with no weight, no weakness to poison, and hands that are always a weapon even with your sword sheathed.
• Blunt and fire are your real threats for the whole climb, not just a stat line — plan encounters (Bonemass, anything wielding a mace, Surtlings) accordingly until Fader flips the fire half around.
• Don't build a nest and expect it to run itself immediately. Growth and army are the same currency; decide which one you're spending toward before you start feeding it.
• Farmers and haulers are free once you have a beehive or two under the aura — let them build your stockpile while you're off doing anything else.
• Ravager Strain is the opposite of an escape: doubled armour and the Brute's own swings are for the fight you have decided to stand in. Save it for something you intend to out-last, and remember it does not end early.