Stardew Valley Mods

Code/downloads

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See and download all my mods here: https://www.nexusmods.com/users/44734342?tab=user+files

Overview

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Stardew Valley (SDV) is a popular video game where you get to grow crops, raise animals, befriend villagers, fight against monsters, and uncover the secrets of the valley.

After a few in game years of play, there were things I wanted to tweak to enjoy it more - e.g. stop fences from eroding so I didn’t need to replace them or add better item management so my inventory would be less cluttered.

Fan made changes to video games is calling modding. SDV has an incredibly active modding scene with incredible tooling - I jumped right in!

Modding

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Over the course of 5 years (May 2017 to October 2022) I created 29 different mods for SDV based on things I wanted to see in the game.

Some fun stats:

• As of April 2023, my mods have been downloaded 4.1 million times.
• At the peak of my work, my mods were within the top 25 of all time (and one still is!) and I was the 3rd most prolific C# mod developer.
• Similar functionality that 3 of my mods provided was added to the base game.

A few favorite mods:

• Better Artisan Good Icons displays a different/sprite icon for goods made from other goods, e.g. to distinguish apple jelly from rhubarb jelly. It makes seeing which items you have in your inventory way easier.
• Mod Update Menu displays a list of installed mods, whether any have updates, and where to get the updates from in game. It makes managing modded installs easier.
• Range Display displays the range of sprinklers (so you know which crops will be watered), and other items. This is the very first idea I had - the one that started it all!
• Pong replaces the entirity of SDV with pong (the classic arcade game) - you can’t play SDV anymore with it installed. This was one of my favorite jokes.

You can find links to all of them at the top of this page.

Beyond making mods, I also made a few contributions to SMAPI (the mod loader for SDV) - including log parser improvements and other website changes.

This was a ton of work. Adding features, fixing bugs, triaging bug reports, diving through logs, decompiling and figuring out the game code - it was my main hobby at the time. It also was really great.

Discord

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During my SDV mod era, I was also very active in the SDV discord server modding channels, providing help to other people making mods and asking questions myself.

Eventually, the server admins recognized my contributions, and asked me to join their team. I became the second server admin ever tasked with keeping the modding channels a safe, collaborative, and wholesome place. I also participated in general server moderation. I did this for a few years.

It was an incredible joy to see people posting about which mods they were using and how they loved them and to see my mods on their lists.

I also helped out with Discord bot creation for the server, making large improvements to mod mail management for the admins and adding features like free game announcements for everyone else.

The end of an era

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Eventually, my interest in the game waned. I started having less time to play. After 5 years I had played everything there was to play in the game. The game also lost a lot of it’s magic after I saw the internals of how everything worked - so I stopped playing.

I also started having less time to develop. 29 mods was a lot of mods to keep updated and working across continual game + mod loader updates - so I stopped maintaining them.

After many significant updates, about a third of my mods stopped working - but community members provided unofficial updates to keep them compatible. With another massive update on the horizon (1.6), it’s not clear how much longer they’ll keep working.

I also started having less time to moderate, and was less and less active on the discord server - so I hung up my hat green paint and went back to being orange.

Overall, it was an incredible 5 years. I had a lot of fun learning, writing a lot of code, and making friends in the community.