Even though Stardew Valley didn’t have an official Steam Workshop back at the time, the modding community has been hard at work ever since the game’s initial launch back in 2016. If you were to look online, you’ll find plenty of mods for stardew valley. You can do pretty much anything, from adjusting the game balance to things such as making Robin dateable, and eventually able to be married.
You can look on, both on the official forum, as well as the Stardew Valley Nexus Mods page. However, there are quite a lot of them, and sifting through all to find the ones you like, work well, and don’t have a lot of bugs can be a difficult task.
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To help with that, we’ve got a list of the best Stardew Valley mods for you. We made sure to include some variety, from fun gameplay mods to visual and aesthetic ones. All of them will get you something different, depending on what you want from the game.
How to Install Stardew Valley mods
Before we get into the mods, you should know about installing them. Most of the mods actually just modify the game’s XNB files, meaning you download a modified XNB and replace the corresponding one in the game’s ‘Content’ folder. If this is the case, make a back-up of the original. This will help if and when you want to remove the mod.
The other option is the Stardew Modding API or SMAPI Mods. This is an API made by the community, which allows for use of DLL mods. This is a bit more complex than just replacing the XNB files, but you can make changes that go much deeper into the game.
Content Patcher is another SMAPI mod, which will allow you to download content packs. These packs change the game’s assets or visuals, similarly to an XNB mod, but they won’t require that you manually mess with the NXBs. You can update, install and uninstall mods through the Stardew Modding API, and most of the XNB file mods you’ll come across actually have content pack equivalents.
Last but not least, we have Yuuki’s Stardew Valley ModManager or SDVMM. Yuuki is a well-known modder, and the SVDMM tool will allow you to install and update SMAPI. It will also let you keep track of all the mods you’ve installed, and you can easily activate or deactivate specific mods. This gives you a lot of flexibility with mods. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at a few must-have smapi mods.
Best Stardew Valley Mods {Graphics, Visual, Texture }
Many people actually like the gameplay as it is, and only want to make modifications to the visuals. Here are a few mods to do so.
Yoda Wizard
The Yoda Wizard is a very popular stardew valley mod, especially for fans of the Star Wars series. Yoda is one of the main characters and you can now get it in Stardew Valley. It replaces the Wizard character, so you’re basically visiting Yoda whenever you go to visit the Wizard. Even though the portrait may be a bit blurry, the pixel sprite is actually really accurate. The best thing? It’s not just the looks, because he’ll also be speaking just like Yoda. Not much of a difference between a Jedi and a Wizard anyway, right?
Download Yoda Wizard
Admit it, the swords from level 1 through level 26 aren’t much to look at. They aren’t interesting at all, so why not replace them? If you’re a Star Wars fan, you could replace them with these lightsabers. They may not glow, but they’ll get the job done. For the first six levels, there are different colors. The next six will repeat the colors and add cross pieces near the handle, similar to Kylo Ren’s sword. Combine this with our next stardew valley mod, and you’re slowly turning your game into a variant of Star Wars. Download Lightsaber Swords Okay, this is the last Star Wars related mod, we promise. It’s from the same developer that made the previous two mods, and this one is easily as good as them, if not even better. It will change your dog, or your cat, into BB-8, the adorable robot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We love this one for one simple reason – it’s difficult to make a robot that’s basically two spheres, out of small squares. This is, quite honestly, one of the best things to ever get modded in Stardew Valley. Download The BB-8 dog or cat We’re starting things off with a fun one, known as the Robin Romance Mod. If you were to install it, you’ll be able to date Robin and eventually marry her. This is achieved by making Robin a custom NPC, and the mod comes in a few flavors. The main version has Robin divorced. Veronica, her sister, replaces her at the carpentry shop. Veronica doesn’t do a lot, but if she is a problem for you, there’s an alternative in the optional download. In the alternative, you’re just adding Robin as above, but without Veronica. In this case, you’ll still have the normal Robin, and the dateable Robin’s birthday is shifted by a day. If you want to just have a bit of fun with the game, the Robin Romance stardew valley mod is a great place to start. Download The Robin Romance Mod Having a horse to get around in the game was a great idea. However, why limit yourself to a horse, when you can ride something else? A horse is old fashioned. Why not switch things up and ride a tractor around your farm? There’s a dose of humor here since you still have to put the tractor to sleep in that stable you actually built for a horse. But when you realize you have a somewhat luxurious way of getting from point A to point B, who cares? Seeing as the modder behind it had to make it from scratch, this is an excellent and quite hilarious stardew valley mod. Download Tractor horse One of the goals of the game is to establish relationships with Pelican Town’s citizens. However, based on a variety of factors, the relationships’ status may fluctuate wildly. It depends on what kind of conversations you initiate. It depends on what kind of gift you gave them, as well as when you gave them the gift and what quality is it. All of these things are very time consuming, which understandably, can make your whole game boring. The Social Editor Menu aims to solve all of this. Basically, it gives you a list of every non-player character. In that list is how many relationship points you have with each of these characters. This takes most of the guesswork out of the game, and lets you know what to do with more or less each character. Download The Social Editor Menu Stardew Valley is something you’ll be playing for a long while. As you progress, you’ll start to notice the soundtrack and all of its “dead spots”. Eventually, you’ll find that the soundtrack is simply dull, and you will be tempted to simply mute the game and play something in the background. But that’s not a smart idea. Stardew Valley relies on important audio cues more often than you think, and that way you’ll miss them. More Music is the solution you’ve been looking for. It basically adds more tracks to the game. Sources are Undertale and other similar games, which means that some of the sound effects that are looping in the soundtrack may be replaced with other music or sounds. If you’re getting bored of all that, though, this shouldn’t be much of a problem. Download More Music Even though the game itself is well made and pretty interesting to play, there’s no shortage of people who complain about how hard it is to catch a fish. You may spend upwards of half an hour before you get your first fish because the minigame itself is actually really unpredictable. The key mapping also makes it a fairly big pain in the wrist, which only makes things harder. As the name itself suggests, Easier Fishing will solve this issue. You get three choices, and you can use any of the files depending on how easy you want to make things. You can either make fishing 25%, 50%, or 75% easier than it is in the game without any mods. It will reduce the amount of movement of the fish in the activity window, making catching one significantly easier than it would be otherwise. Download Easier Fishing When you’re playing Stardew Valley, Pelican Town’s mines are a great place to find all the gemstones and ores you need. However, to get to them, you’ll need to go through enemies and monsters. This wouldn’t be so tricky if it wasn’t for the extremely primitive combat system that you have at your disposal. If you want to make this a bit easier for you, Enemy Health Bars can help. For starters, as its name suggests, it adds a marker to each enemy that allows you to see how many hit points that specific enemy has left. This may sound like a simple change, but it will help you get through the mines’ many levels. There are a few things about Enemy Health Bars that make it very interesting. To begin with, it’s not a cheat. If you want to see precise, accurate information, you’ll have to have more combat skills or kill more of a certain enemy type. Also, enemies that rely on the player not noticing them, such as shadow enemies, or enemies that rely on shadows in any way, must be hit at least once in order to see their health bar. The color scheme is configurable, and you can also see the health’s numeric value. Each enemy, according to their power or size, has a bigger or smaller health bar, which is an interesting addition. The mod can properly handle 1.05 zoom, and each bar’s position is hand-selected, which means that it should be in the exact right place for most of the enemies. All in all, it’s quite an impressive stardew valley mod that will help you quite a bit if you can take advantage of it well. Download Enemy Health Bars Stardew Valley’s character list is extensive, and many of them are actually fairly cute. However, you can’t date them all, at least not at the same time. Well, bwdy’s Polygamy mod aims to change that. It’s a mod that allows you to have non-monogamous relationships with multiple partners, even to the level of marrying multiple partners. You’ll have a primary spouse every day. Once you’re done with your first wedding, Piere allows you to get more Mermaid Pendants. If you do meet all the requirements, any additional NPCs will accept the pendant and bouquet items and the “already married” dialogue won’t be triggered. Now, note that there are still some issues with the schedules. For example, your spouses may not want to follow the vanilla schedules. That’s why the modder until this is fixed, has assigned the spouses a ‘wander’ AI. You can also have a poly divorce. It does cost 50,000g, and instead of at midnight, it will occur instantly. This is something you should be careful about. The mod will also fix some of the quirks or crashes when you’re marrying non-dateable NPCs and will allow you to make them dateable using SMAPI. There are also quite a few useful commands, and you can see them by typing “polygamy” in the SMAPI console. Download Polygamy If you have played Stardew Valley before, you know how awful the walking speed is. You are literally walking for the entirety of time and still cover no distance at all. It can get frustrating but the movement speed mod makes the experience a lot better. If you are trying to explore more locations on the map but the slow speed is prohibiting that, this mod should come in handy. Aside from helping your character move faster, this mod helps improve the charging time of the hoe and the watering can as well. Download Movement Speed. The backdrop of Stardew Valley has several eligible candidates for marriage and relationships but everything is bland and boring. To spice things up, there is the Love Letters mod wherein the characters can have their sweethearts deliver them love letters multiple times throughout the year. Some of the letters often come with events and presents that you normally wouldn’t expect otherwise. Download Love Letters. For the players who want to feel the beauty and cosiness of winter without actually sacrificing their hay reserves, Winter Grass is just the mod you need. This mod enables the grass to withstand the chill rush of winter without causing them to wither away. It comes in handy for the players both in terms of the aesthetics and the usefulness it brings along, especially if you have forgotten to stock up on your hay. Download Winter Grass.Lightsaber Swords
The BB-8 dog or cat
The Robin Romance Mod
Tractor horse
The Social Editor Menu
More Music
Easier Fishing
Enemy Health Bars
Polygamy
Movement Speed
Love Letters
Winter Grass
NPC Map Locations
Have you been trying to locate the NPCs in the Stardew Valley? If you have, you likely know how frustrating the process is. Not only do they come up in their own time and varying schedules, locating them around on such a large map is equally frustrating. This NPC Map Locations help the players spot the exact location of the citizens across on the map, making it easier for them to find them and deliver their presents to them. It also helps enrich the relationships among the citizens.
Download NPC Map Locations.
No Fence Decay
The fencing around in Stardew Valley, despite what they are made of, is always at a heightened risk of getting decayed every now and then, which can be extremely frustrating, to say the least. The No Fence Decay mod permanently prohibits the risks of decaying of the fence, keeping it looking shiny and brand new throughout. This mod is specifically designed and developed for the players who have proper fencing around their homes, not just for security but aesthetic purposes too.
Download No Fence Decay.
Gift Taste Helper
This mod is for the players with a bad memory who have a hard time recollecting which NPC loves what in the game. If you have a tendency to forget what you could get as an ideal gift for other citizens, Gift Taste Helper mod can pretty much help you with that. With over 20 NPCs, keeping everyone’s likings in mind can be difficult. Don’t worry though, this mod should align with the game’s calendar setting and help you keep a record of the past gifts and the preferences of the NPCs so you can get them the right items as gifts.
Download Gift Taste Helper.
Skull Cavern Elevator
Stardew Valley is filled with mines and dungeons that the players might have to explore every now and then. But, some of the places, especially the one at Skull Cavern is quite tough to reach and explore. This is where the Skull Cavern Elevator mod comes in handy. It upgrades itself every five floors, enabling you to have easy access to areas that you normally otherwise wouldn’t.
Download Skull Cavern Elevator.
Save Anywhere
Stardew Valley comes with a single day cycle which the players have to complete in order to successfully put an end to a day and move onto the next task. The game is only saved when the player sleeps on their bed. While sometimes the nap wouldn’t seem like a long wait, there are times when you don’t have the patience and fast-forward things without any stopper. The Save Anywhere mod helps you save any file in the game using a remappable button without needing you to hit your back on the bed.
Download Save Anywhere.
Lookup Anything
The Stardew Valley is all about building and nurturing better relationships. And, Lookup Anything is just the mod that you need for that. This mod helps the players find every last detail about an item or a citizen on the map. After downloading the mod, all you have to do is hover the cursor over the item or the villager and press F1 and that should give you all the necessary information that you likely need to know.
Download Lookup Anything.
CJB Cheats Menu
Much like every other video game that you come across, even Stardew Valley needs a few cheat tricks as well. The CJB Cheats Menu mod is just here to help the players with that. It includes a list of cheats ranging from granting yourself infinite health to freezing a certain part of the time when you successfully finish a task. It makes the game a lot more fun and interactive, enabling you to make the most out of the task.
Download CJB Cheats Menu.
Conclusion
With the list above, we hope to have given you quite a few options for modding various aspects of Stardew Valley. From changing up some of the characters, to actually making the game easier and more fun to play, you can do just about anything with it.
Now, whether you just want to add a touch of Star Wars, or make your fishing experience more tolerable, installing these mods shouldn’t be too difficult. We did make sure to include some installation help as well, and you should be able to easily find your way around that. Each stardew valley mod also has specific installation instructions as well, so that’s even more help.
All that’s left for you is to take a look at the mods, and see which one(s) you’d like to take a look at. The SMAPI and SDVMM will let you install it, take a look at it, and uninstall it if you don’t like it, in a simple way. Happy modding!
