Summons¶

Summoning staves and their thralls, the eitr they hold, how long they live, how strong they are, and what your stats for minions do.

Numbers are the defaults of the Normal difficulty; servers can change them. Every formula here is checked against the mod's code with each patch.

Summoning staves¶

Minions: a summoning staff calls a thrall in front of you that follows you and fights for you. A cast costs stamina only; the thrall holds eitr while it lives (below).

Each cast calls one thrall. There's no limit on how many stand at once: only your free eitr limits them.

Each staff quality above 1 gives its thralls +25% health and makes them hold +15% more eitr.

Held eitr¶

Eitr a summon holds comes off your maximum eitr while it lives, and eitr above the new maximum is lost.

The divisor is at least 0.1: +100% reservation efficiency halves what a summon holds, −20% makes it hold 25% more. The hold ends when the summon dies or its lifetime ends, and comes back if you log in with your summons still alive.

A summoning staff can't call a thrall unless you have that much eitr free. Valheim's own staves can't be cast at all then.

Lifetime and withering¶

Summons live for a while and wither as they go: their health can't stay above the share of their lifetime they have left.

When the lifetime ends, the summon leaves. Its time runs on the world's clock, so it keeps passing while you're away.

Deathless Host: your summons have no lifetime: they don't wither and live until they're killed. If you lose it, the ones still alive get a fresh lifetime from that moment.

Summon strength¶

Summons don't take a creature's usual scaling: no stars, tamed share, Monster Power or Blight Mist.

The biome is the staff's (in the tables here), with its factor from the biome table, softened by the difficulty preset; health and damage both use the health column. The global enemy offense and defense settings apply too. Health is also × (1 + your minion health increases) and +25% per staff quality above 1. Summon power is only for Valheim's staves (below).

Valheim's summoning staves¶

The server setting Vanilla summoning staves (off by default) decides how Dead Raiser, Staff of the Wild, Trollstav and Spirit Caller work.

Off: a cast costs no eitr or health, there's no summon limit, and staff quality no longer changes the summons. Each summon holds eitr, lives and withers like a thrall, and is scaled as a summon of the staff's biome:

On: they work as in Valheim, with eitr and health per cast, a summon limit by staff quality, and summons that stay.

Your stats for minions¶

Your stats for minions reach your summons, and some of them your pets:

• damage: × (1 + minion damage increases), at most +100% in all (pets add tamed damage increases)
• health: × (1 + minion health increases)
• damage they take: × (1 + minion damage taken), between 40% and 500%
• ailments on them (burning, poison, frost, shock) last × (1 − minion ailment resistance), at most 90% shorter

Summons the mod manages also get:

• their fire, frost, lightning, poison and spirit damage taken cut by minion resistance, at most 75%
• minion armour against hits
• attack speed × (1 + minion attack speed), at least 30%; movement speed × (1 + minion movement speed), at least 20%
• a shield of minion shield size, which takes damage first and recharges 20% of itself per second after 3 s without a hit
• critical strikes: minion crit chance as a chance, for × (1.5 + minion crit damage)
• they look for enemies within 10 m × (1 + minion aggression)

Shared Rune: for 3 s after you block, your rune shield takes 30% of the damage to your minions.

Last Service: damage that would take a minion below 1 health comes off your rune shield instead.

Both protect pets too, and only while your rune shield lasts.

Unstable Minions: the first time a summon drops below 35% health from a hit, it explodes for 33% of its maximum health as fire damage, × (1 + its damage increases), to enemies within 3 m, and dies.

Data from Path of Valheiman 5.2.0, extracted 2026-10-21.