Introduction

A game can only go for so long with its premise, be it a single-player game or a party game, the repetition will always get to players. Some players stave off the repetition by challenging themselves or trying an alternate path that they haven’t done before, most of which are inimitable by the common person who doesn’t need to have an expert’s grasp on the subject but just needs to have some experience with the game.

Though there is a much simpler way to prevent boredom, which is modding the game, I say simpler in a very loose term as sometimes you may need to have a computer science degree just to run mods in the games that you want to mod, cough cough Persona cough cough. Though most of the time modding is as simple as just downloading a program that does most of the work for you and you just have to download the mods that you want it to run!

The roots of game modding could be traced back to the early days of gaming, with players trying out different ways of modifying the game’s code to change how the game is played, add new content, or make the game easier or harder for that extra replayability. While it’s probably hard to say exactly which game was the first to have mods, I’d say that “Doom” was one of the first games to have a dedicated modding community, with players creating new levels, weapons, and even total conversions that turned the game into something completely different.

The popularity of modding in the early 2010s could be traced back to one of, if not the most important game of the time, “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”, a game marking a significant turning point in the popularity and accessibility of modding by having its own Creation Kit and being integrated to the Steam Workshop, simplifying the process of finding, installing and managing the mods the players could download.

Skyrim may have been the first game to allow players to create their mods, but many others followed in its footsteps. Games like Minecraft and Terraria achieved similar levels of depth and popularity with their modding scenes, and they’re still going strong today. Although I would prefer to write about a more provincial game with a straightforward premise.

To borrow the words of farmer Dave Brandt, “It ain’t much but it’s honest work.”

Stardew Valley was created and is still being maintained by Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe. A very talented developer who single-handedly created the game. It was originally created as a modern fan-made alternative to the Story of Seasons series. The game resonated with many people as it offered an endless array of activities and addressed issues that many people, particularly the younger generation, face, such as mental health challenges, the sinking feeling of isolation, and a lack of direction when trying to find one’s purpose.

Although the modding community for the game started out small, Barone was and still is supportive of people modding his game, as stated in some of his tweets. In update 1.6 and subsequent updates, the game code had fundamental changes to help modders modify the game much more easily and to give the modders more parts of the game to modify to their liking.

Types of Mods

There is a whole menagerie of mods that Stardew Valley modders offer, starting from simple Quality of Life mods like having your soil not decay after a while to being able to customize your sprinklers to be able to water as wide an area as one wants while increasing it’s cost to upgrade to balance it out.  Stardew Valley mods today are much more diverse, but I want to highlight the ones I genuinely found nice for what they’re worth.

• Gameplay modifications – the simplest ones in the list, being new crops, animals, and/or items.
  1. I highly suggest downloading Cornucopia – More Crops and Cornucopia – More Flowers as they continue the spirit of one of my favorite Stardew Mods, Project Populate JsonAssets or PPJA.
  2. Another one that I want to highlight would be The Love of Cooking as it not only reworks a more forgotten part of Stardew’s mechanic but also adds more crops into the game to give it more replayability.

• Visual enhancements – Moreover the texture packs and reshade mods that the community offers, since staring at the same graphics, no matter how timeless it can be, can get tiring sometimes.
  1. The visuals I usually play in would be the Back to Nature ReShade by misterwu as it’s less straining to the eyes with longer gaming sessions.
  2. However, a more popular option is DaisyNiko’s Earthy Recolour where it achieves the same result but with more of a different palette.

• Quality of life improvements – As I mentioned before, these could be UI changes or automation to the tasks in the game.
  1. If you want to be more of a passive player and appear just every once in a while but still get points with people as you appear and disappear into the farm, I would suggest the Part of the Community mod by bmarquismarkail.
  2. If you’re also clumsy like me when trying to sell your crops for the night and accidentally sell your prismatic shard because it was right next to the strawberries and blue jazz, might I interest you in a Better Shipping Bin by MindMeltMax in this trying time?

• Content expansions – The biggest and always highlighted mods in Stardew for having new areas NPCs and quests, everything one might need.
  1. The most popular is Stardew Valley Expanded by FlashShifter, almost feeling like a whole rework of Stardew Valley with how it changes and adds to almost every mechanic in the game.
  2. Coming in a close second would be Ridgeside Village by Rafseazz, being as chock full of content with Expanded but with a focus on being outside the Stardew Valley area.

Potential Risks and Considerations

Though adding and playing mods is fun on its own, you still have to somewhat be careful about what could happen if you don’t check where you download the mod you want, the only sources that most people trust would be Nexus Mods and Smapi’s Mod Compatibility List. Though there don’t seem to be any reports of popular mods suddenly being added with a virus, it’s still better to be safe and download mods from these reputable sites. Viruses aren’t the biggest thing to worry about but they can be the most dangerous, and for that reason, I had to start this off with that.

The more common issues people may face when downloading and installing mods is that there might be compatibility issues between one another, an old example of this would be having both Walk Through Trellis and Passable Crops active and their logic colliding and somewhat bugging out, making the character be stuck inside the crop until it broke. However, with Version 1.6 out, I believe that compatibility issues would now be rarer with how the code changed.

Another problem, more common with those who play on older hardware, is that the game may run more slowly or that it can have times where it will crash more often than it would run normally, when that happens, I either suggest returning to vanilla to let your computer’s system relax for a bit or to uninstall and delete the mods that might be the reason why the hardware may be giving out.

Although it’s also still important to back up your save files before and after adding any mod as sometimes, very rarely, they won’t play nice after a while and break your whole save after a crash, forcing you to start anew and run from the valley authorities to Stardew Hills instead.

Conclusion

Games can only go on for so long before people get bored of them, but an active and prolific modding community can extend a game’s lifespan for decades to come even after the original developer/s moves on. Modding is a gift for not only the players who get to mod the game but also the original developers as it shows how the community is still active and maintaining what made the game fun originally but now with their twists.

I wholeheartedly would love those who read this to try and mod Stardew Valley even if they haven’t played vanilla yet. I understand that it may ruin the appeal of the game to some if you start modded and not Vanilla but sometimes you just have to go against the grain and try something like that. Being able to customize how you wanna see and play the game may be the opposite of how it’s meant to be experienced but that’s what being human is sometimes, you have to do the things that no one would expect you to do. I would highly suggest interacting and exploring the modding community much more as they have much more experience in this than I do but this was my experience playing Stardew Valley Modded.