Gamepad and the radial menu
Races of Valheim was built on a keyboard, and for a long time a controller could not reach half of it. Three releases fixed that: v1.4.14 gave the transformed forms their attacks, v1.4.15 added the radial menu and Skadi's flight, and v1.4.20 stopped the Cold Spell firing every time a gamepad player placed a building piece.
Why abilities are not on a button
There is no spare button. Every physical pad button is bound by vanilla in all four layouts; the only chords the game leaves alone are two in the Classic layout, and one of those is already the transformed forms' attack. Rather than fight the game's own bindings, race abilities go through the menu vanilla built for exactly this problem.
The radial menu
Open it the way you always do — hold the right stick, or press the radial key on a keyboard — and there is a group named after your race, with one entry per form and ability:
| Race | Entries |
|---|---|
| Aswid | Bat Form · Mist Form · Eclipse · Tame · Devour |
| Dvergar | Runic Ping · Runic Overcharge |
| Fenrir | Wolf Form · Fenrir Form · Cultist Form · Howl |
| Skadi | Drake Form · Moder Form · Fader Form |
| Sverm | Ravager Strain |
| Trenta | Purple Rain · Homecoming Portal · Muspell Form |
| Trol | True Form · Throw Rock · Grab Log |
| Any race with claws | Grow Claws |
An entry does not call into the race directly — it presses the key you have bound. That is the whole design: unlocks, cooldowns, day/night rules and the messages that come with them behave exactly as they do from the keyboard, and a rebound key is followed with no extra work. Trol's True Form past Fader is a toggle from the radial for the same reason.
Form attacks
Each form attack answers the pad button vanilla pairs with the same mouse button, following whichever layout you picked in the game's settings:
| Mouse | Pad |
|---|---|
| Left click | Attack |
| Right click | Block |
| Middle click | Secondary Attack |
This covers the Fenrir forms, Skadi's three dragons, the Sverm's Ravager Strain and the Trenta's Muspell. The keyboard side stays rebindable; the pad buttons are fixed, because they are read through vanilla's own layout rather than bound again by the mod.
Skadi's flight
Drake and Moder flight read only the mouse and keyboard until v1.4.15, so a pad player could neither take off nor steer once airborne.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Block | Take off · land · cancel a landing |
| Left stick forward | Power forward and climb |
| Left stick back | Beat backwards along your aim |
| Run | Sprint |
| Right stick | Steer — flight follows the camera, same as the mouse |
The left stick is a threshold rather than a throttle: flight knows powered forward, reverse, or neither. Pushing forward wins over back, so a stick mashed diagonally will not leave you hovering.
Valheim's September 2026 hotfix changed how the game reads the left stick, and the drake was
still asking for it the old way — every airborne frame threw a MissingMethodException and the
drake could not fly at all. Fixed in v1.4.18, which works against both versions of the
game.
The Cold Spell on a pad
The spell sits on the secondary attack button, which the pad also uses to remove pieces (Classic) or place them (Alt 2). Two rules keep that from casting a spell every time you build:
- It never casts while you hold the hammer, hoe or cultivator. This applies on the keyboard too, where middle mouse is Remove.
- On a pad it casts bare-handed only. With a weapon, shield, torch or tool in hand, the button goes back to that item's own secondary attack, as it does in vanilla. Bare-handed, the spell casts without the unarmed kick.
Keyboard players are unaffected: the Cold Spell key works as it always has, and is still rebindable.
Keybinds stay yours
Keybinds are one of the few settings the mod never syncs from the server — see Multiplayer. Whatever you bind on your own machine is what the radial menu presses.