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What are the best Stardew Valley mods? The mod scene has been thriving on PC despite having no official Steam Workshop support. Dedicated modders have been working to alter almost everything available in the game, from adding game-breaking cheats like god mode to texture overhauls that turn Stardew Valley into a pixelated fairytale.
Despite thousands of daily concurrent players enjoying the base indie game, Stardew Valley is getting on a bit, so we can’t blame you for wanting to shake things up. Thankfully, and predictably, the modding community is here to help bring other IPs to the valley, along with new maps and improvements to married life. We’ve compiled our favorite Stardew Valley mods that celebrate the creativity of the modding scene. Here are our top picks that provide visual overhauls, gameplay changes, and, yes, even some cheats, making one of the best PC games even better.
Best Stardew Valley mods list
New mods are constantly popping up, with the game’s popularity still high. If you somehow manage to get through all of these, we’ll keep digging up the best new mods, so check back for updates. And if this is your first time delving into the world of Stardew Valley mods, you’ll need to know how to install them, so skip to the bottom for a handy explainer.
These are the best Stardew Valley mods:
SF Daphne’s buildable ice cream truck
The nostalgic chimes of an ice cream truck are enough to have those in warmer climates sprinting from their desks and down the road for a sweet treat. So surely our Stardew Valley characters would also appreciate some iced desserts, right? With the adorable, pastel-colored Daphne’s buildable ice cream truck mod by Stardew Valley creator Abi Wabi, new NPC Daphne and her truck will be available for all your in-game iced-treat requirements. However, she’ll only visit your town if you download it from the mod page.
The Perks of Being Married
The Perks of Being Married mod adds a fun and useful new feature to the farming RPG – you can earn perks for getting married, which vary depending on who you enter into marital bliss with in-game. The mod’s list of perks is meaty, and it looks like you’ll have to choose carefully who you try to woo – each character will offer something pretty special and distinct of their own.
Holiday Sales
The Holiday Sales mod allows you to dictate shop opening times. While this is only useful if you’re already using other mods with other towns, it does allow you to solve a problem within those mods. You might find your shops are shut when there’s a festival elsewhere. Keep them open, even if that stops your shop owners from enjoying themselves.
Overgrown fairy buildings
If you want to bring a fantasy twist to Stardew Valley, this visual overhaul is a must-download. Ali’s Overgrown Fairy Buildings mod turns all buildings into cute pastel houses that look as if they are straight out of a children’s fairytale book, complete with striking flowers crawling up the sides of houses and giant mushroom trees that give the whole mod a very Alice in Wonderland feel.
Balanced Mining
The Balanced Mining mod, by o0MrPro, doesn’t change mining itself but does make it more worthwhile – by changing the value of the resources you find. Artifacts, minerals, and gems are all given a higher sell price when you emerge back above ground, providing more value to all that sweaty labor than just the satisfaction.
Expand Stardew Valley
FlashShifter created this mega-mod, which includes a plethora of free content. The Stardew Valley Expanded mod lists all the content available in the description section, explaining that the mod features “ten new map locations, 38 new character events, over 400 location messages, reimagined maps and festivals (all maps), remastered Immersive Farm 2, a new town map reflecting all changes, and many miscellaneous additions!”
Tractor mod
Planting seeds, watering crops, and collecting your bountiful crop is a lot of work. But Pathoschild’s Tractor mod makes every farmer’s life easier. To get the tractor, buy the tractor garage from Robin. When she’s done building it, hop on and get to work. The tractor is all your tools built into one. It can clear twigs and rocks, fertilize dirt, plant seeds, harvest crops, and water the ground. If you dive into the config menu of the mod, you can even use your tractor to kill monsters – mow them all down!
Pokémon retextures
If GameFreak and Nintendo won’t ever officially bring Pokémon to PC then you can be damn sure we’ll try to mod it into every game possible. There’s a massive post on the Stardew Valley forums for Pokémon-themed retextures in Stardew Valley, doing everything from reskinning your livestock into Mareep and Miltank to turning buildings into Pokémon Gyms and, uh, even turning villagers into Pokémon if you so desire. If this mod doesn’t quite cut it, there are games like Pokémon on PC for you to try instead.
Babies Take After Spouse
Having biological or adopted children with your spouse is a lovely feature in Stardew Valley. This babies and toddlers mod, Babies Take After Spouse, expands on the feature by adding more personalization. Instead of the generic palette, your child inherits features from your spouse, including hair and color styles. Just a quick note that this mod requires SMAPI and content patcher – scroll to the bottom of this list if you’re unsure what those are.
Loved Labels
Knowing which animals you have shown love to and which you haven’t on your farm is tough. There’s no indication of who you’ve missed out, leading to me double-checking that I’ve covered all my animals. It’s very important. But much as I love petting cute animals, my schedule is super tight, and with jinxiewinxie’s mod Loved Labels, I can see which animals you have shown love to that day with a little pop-up heart box. There’s no doubt you’ll find it a godsend.
NPC map locations
With everything possible to do in a single day in Stardew Valley, memorizing the daily routines of the game’s many characters can feel daunting, especially when many have routines that change depending on the season or weather. With the NPC map locations mod, you can view where each villager is at any time and fully customize it to your preferences, which is handy if you’re only looking for the location of a select few characters.
Spouse Rooms Redesigned
After you have tied the knot, your spouse will move into your farmhouse with you, bringing them a new room for their belongings and hobbies. Unfortunately, these rooms don’t feel entirely personal to each character and are instead filled with generic items.
The Spouse Rooms Redesigned mod overhauls each room to give them unique touches for each spouse. Elliot gets a desk and typewriter due to his occupation as an author, while Leah receives decorative paintings and art supplies to match her hobbies. It’s a small change that makes Stardew Valley feel much more homely. You’ll need to download this content patch.
Seasonal Japanese buildings
The Seasonal Japanese building mod replaces your property’s rustic farm buildings with Japanese-inspired ones. Each building has traditional sliding doors, wooden porches, Neko statues, and little paper lanterns to celebrate the spring and summer. This mod also turns the well into a Shishi-Odoshi, a bamboo-rocker water feature that brings a little zen to your farm.
Bath House Hot Spring
The bath house in Stardew Valley is a bit of an ugly duckling as it looks out of place against the rural vibes of the game. A purely aesthetic and indulgent mod, the Bath House Hot Spring mod replaces the bathhouse with an indoor hot spring, presenting a cute, tranquil experience more in line with the game’s rustic aesthetic.
Multiple Spouses
There are just so many cute characters in Stardew Valley; why can’t we date them all? Well, now we can with aedenthorn’s Multiple Spouses mod. Beyond the excitement of being able to date all the Stardew cuties, it’s also great to see a mod inclusive of non-monogamous relationships. This mod allows you to date and marry other characters when you’re already married and “alters jealousy-based group events to have a happy outcome.”
Simple Crop Label
It is easy to pick Stardew Valley up after a break, venture into your farm, and wonder what you have planted in the soil on earth. A small but useful overhaul, the Simple Crop Label mod adds an option for a name tab to appear over a crop once you hover over it with your mouse.
Range Display
Placing scarecrows and sprinklers perfectly on your farm isn’t easy. It’s frustrating to wake up to find your precious seedlings pinched by crows as the tile is out of range of your scarecrow – we have all been there. This Stardew Valley Range Display mod displays the effective range of all scarecrows, sprinklers, and bee houses you place on your farm, ensuring your crops are always well-watered and protected.
Easier Fishing
Fishing in Stardew Valley is a fickle hobby. The aquatic residents of the pond will not allow themselves to be caught without making you put some serious work into doing so. The Easier Fishing mod attempts to alleviate the frustration that comes with this minigame by making the fish movements smoother and, therefore, easier to track, and also makes the fish move up and down the meter less swiftly. If you find fishing in Stardew Valley annoying, this mod is an essential download.
Slower Fence Decay
Fences are an aesthetically pleasing piece of garden decoration, besides helping keep animals and certain crops contained in one part of your farm. The downside, however, is that they decay over time, with regular wooden fences only lasting 30 days before deteriorating. Slower Fence Decay doesn’t override that game’s feature, but it does make it less harsh on you, with fences lasting up to two or three times longer before they need replacing.
CJB Item Spawner
With great power comes great responsibility, so you will want to use this item spawner mod wisely, lest you wish to break all the balance in your game. This Stardew Valley Item Spawner mod allows you to conjure any item, at whatever quantity and quality, straight into your inventory. Using this mod can take you from rags to riches in no time, or you can put its creative potential to use and build your dream farm without enduring the dozens of hours it would take otherwise.
Chests Anywhere
With all those items in your inventory, you may wish to access your chests from anywhere. We have all felt the pain of being deep into a mining session only to realize your inventory is full of the item. Maybe you have been out trying to impress your favorite villager, and the gift you are looking to give them is back at home in one of your chests. Chests Anywhere, by CJBok and Pathoschild, allows you to access your chests, fridge, shipping bin, and Junimo huts from anywhere on the map, so no more pesky trips back to the farm to pick up or drop off items.
Stamina Regen
Stamina is a very limited resource in Stardew Valley, and with so much to pack into a day’s work – from farming to battling your way through the mines – it can feel like you have never got enough of it. The Stamina Regen mod can relieve such a setback, allowing you to regain one point of stamina every three seconds, making those mining expeditions a little more productive. Maker EvilPdor has also made valuable mods for controlling the weather and changing your character’s wake-up time.
All Crops, All Seasons
A mod that defies nature itself, this cheat allows you to grow and harvest any plant or crop regardless of the season and does not cause crops to decay when a season changes. Usually, each crop is restricted to being grown in a certain season, with no crops being able to be grown in winter without using a greenhouse. Still, with this All Crops All Seasons mod, you can grow all the strawberries in the autumn that your heart desires. Note that this mod does not change store inventory, so you must stock up on seeds each season to plant them later in the year.
Configurable Day Lengths
Sometimes, it can feel like everything is against you in Stardew Valley, even the clock. Part of Stardew Valley is learning how to manage your day effectively, choosing to finish a few tasks rather than stretching your time across many jobs. Rather than deal with that stress, this TimeSpeed mod allows you to adjust your time each day, doubling the day by default but allowing for customized lengths depending on how much you need.
Idle Pause
Speaking of the cruel sands of time, the Idle Pause mod is a helpful utility for the time-conscious. It automatically pauses when it detects more than a few seconds of idleness, bringing up the inventory to indicate when the in-game timer has stopped ticking. Finally, you can take bathroom breaks again.
Horse Whistle
Turns out it is surprisingly easy to misplace a horse, so thank god this Horse Whistle mod exists. Simple in design, this mod allows you to summon your horse, regardless of where you left it, by pressing ‘V’, with the horse teleporting to your location using what we can only assume to be genuine magic.
Immersive Family
While you can settle down and have a couple of kids in Stardew Valley, they don’t really do much once they’re here. With the Immersive Family mod, your children will interact with your spouse, and the villagers, and have their own activities.
Cheats, cheats, cheats
OK, we all know what you’re really here for. As the holy grail of Stardew Valley cheat mods, CJB cheats menu provides access to every cheat under the sun and then some. They range from an unlimited watering can to infinite health and stamina. You can freeze time, adjust your relationships with the villagers, and warp to any location on the map. This might be the closest we’ll get to Stardew Valley having a sandbox mode.
Schedule Viewer
A low-impact mod, Schedule Viewer shows you what the townsfolk are up to on any given day based on the current state of the world. It’s as if we’ve been keeping an in-depth diary of people’s comings and going. Not creepy at all, and definitely not something we do in real life…
How to install Stardew Valley mods
Stardew Valley does not have any Steam Workshop support, so getting mods working requires you to change the game’s internal files. Therefore, for peace of mind, we highly recommend backing up all your files – especially your save files – before downloading and installing any mods. Bear in mind that, as Stardew Valley is a game that still receives regular updates, a future update may break any existing mods you have installed.
There are two primary mod types in Stardew Valley: mods that replace existing XNB files in the content folder and mods that require the ‘Stardew Modding API’, or SMAPI for short, to install.
XNB Files
Most Stardew Valley mods make small changes to the game, such as altering visuals and reskinning assets. To install, you must replace the existing XNB file with a new, modified version.
Once you’ve downloaded your XNB mod file, which, for example, may be named ‘cat.XNB’, you must find the corresponding XNB file in the Stardew Valley content folder. By default, the Stardew Valley content folder is located here: C:/Steam/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley/Content.
There are several subfolders in the content folder, with most of the important assets, including animals and villagers, having their own, making them easy to find. With our new ‘cat.XNB’ file, go into the ‘Animals’ subfolder and replace the existing ‘cat.xnb’ file with our new modded file, which will appear in-game next time it is booted.
As a reminder, we recommend keeping any unmodded files backed up should you ever wish to uninstall a mod.
SMAPI
For mods that make larger changes to the game, such as altering events, SMAPI is required for installation. It is an open-source piece of software that is maintained by the Stardew Valley modding community that allows for the installation of DLL files SMAPI can also help to manage your files by checking when your mods have received a new update, as well as rewrite any installed mods when an official Stardew Valley update changes any part of the game that affects your mods. Once you have installed SMAPI, all you have to do is place your files into the SMAPI mod folder, and you should be ready.
Content patcher
Content Patcher is a mod for SMAPI that allows you to download content packs, which can change the game’s visuals or assets like XNB mods, but without requiring you to alter the XNB files manually. This is a much more reliable way of installing mods than replacing XNB files, as they can be automatically updated, installed, and uninstalled through SMAPI. Most XNB file mods have content pack equivalents.
Stardew Valley Mod Manager
If you like to keep your mods neat and organized, modder Akago has created the most up-to-date Stardew Valley Mod Manager. This allows you to keep track of all your mods and manage SMAPI. Its best feature allows you to turn mods on or off without deleting the files, which is helpful if you, like us, are incredibly indecisive or have half a dozen different grass mods you want to try.
Now that we’ve sown the seeds for expanding your Stardew Valley mods experience. Get back in and nurture that farm, or look for more mods at the Stardew Valley CurseForge game mods hub. If you weren’t already plowing enough time into the farming game as it was, these best Stardew Valley mods would keep you coming back. Love it so much that you’re considering a real-life change of career? We asked a Californian farmer how realistic Stardew Valley is. Finally, if you want something similar, we have recommendations for games like Stardew Valley for you to give a go.
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