Released in 2016, Stardew Valley has quickly become a benchmark in its very specific genre. This indie role-playing game, mixed with a farming simulation, puts you in charge of a dilapidated farm inherited from your grandfather, in the small village of Pelican Town. Start a new life and make friends with your neighbors, explore mines filled with monsters, or build a farming empire.
If you're new to the game, you can jump right in and you won't necessarily need the mods presented here. But if you're already familiar with the game, all these mods will allow you to relive the experience with lots of new featuresThe best way to enjoy the game is to play it in multiplayer with friends using a Stardew Valley serverEg.
These community-created mods can improve your gameplay experience, change its aesthetic appearance, add new characters, or even create entirely new cities.
Install Stardew Valley Mods
If you have never installed mods in a game and especially in Stardew Valley, I have prepared for you a short tutorial that I invite you to consult alongside this article.
The best Stardew Valley mods
Mods to improve gaming comfort
Although updated regularly, Stardew Valley still has some irritantsThe mods below improve your gaming experience by changing some aspects of the game that may be inconvenient or even painful.
Convenient Inventory
One of the most tedious aspects of many games is inventory management, and this is especially true in Stardew Valley. Every day, whether after harvesting crops, collecting rewards from the mines, or catching fresh fish, you'll have to empty your backpack and store your items in the chests on your farm.
A routine that can quickly become tiresome: open a chest, deposit objects, close the chest, open another chest, deposit objects, close the chest, open another chest... and so on.
This mod will allow you to put away all the objects at once bulky items from your backpack, while keeping the ones that matter…
Mod Tractor
Tractor Mod modernizes Pelican Town by allowing you to plow your fields and sow your crops using a tractor (and a tractor garage). This makes field work much more efficient.
Beyond the super cool aspect of having a tractor on your farm, you will save precious time to start each season when your farm is overrun with weeds, logs and stones that need to be cleared away before anything can be planted.
Activated Sprinklers
With this mod, sprinklers no longer just passively water your crops every morning: they become interactive and activatable on demand. You can now trigger watering manually at any time, whether to test your installations or to give your plants a little boost outside of the automatic morning watering. This is particularly useful at the start of the season when you are planting new plants.
Automatic Gates
If you have livestock in the game, you probably know that if you don't close your gates, your cows, chickens, and pigs will scatter all over your property. This means you have to open and close your gates every time they pass through, which quickly becomes tiresome.
With the mod Automatic Gates, no need to worry about your gates: they open and close automatically. Small mod, but very practical in your daily life as a farmer.
Better Ranching
If you've ever tried to milk an unready cow or forgotten to pet a hen, this mod is for you. Better Ranching adds an indicator above the animals ready to be groomed, sheared, or treated. No more unnecessary trips back and forth to the barn!
The developers of this mod also offer a similar version for villagers, with reminders to talk to them or give them a gift (Better Friendship).
Automate
Place a chest next to a machine (like a furnace or crystalarium), and it will automatically pull raw materials from the chest to run, then deposit processed items back into it once the job is done.
You can connect multiple machines to the same trunk to operate them together automatically.
In short, we are on the verge of transforming Stardew Valley into Factorio (the famous production automation game).
Furniture Adjustment
Decorating your farm is one of the small pleasures that punctuate life in Stardew Valley. But by default, the game doesn't allow for precise object placement. This mod allows you to move furniture pixel by pixel, allowing you to create an interior perfectly to your taste.
Aesthetic Mods
Stardew Valley has a retro art style all its own… kind of like a signature. But if you want to change the appearance of the game or have more options to customize your character, there are many mods dedicated to the cosmetic aspect.
DaisyNiko's Earthy Recolour
Stardew Valley's bright colors are charming, but a little too flashy for some. This mod applies a more natural palette, softer, and makes it easier to detect objects like berry bushes or worms wriggling in the ground.
Fashion Sense
It is possible to find stylish outfits in Pelican Town, but changing appearance remains laborious. With this mod you can easily change clothes, hairstyles, and create complete outfits.
Just buy one Pocket mirror at Pierre's and you will have access to a new customization interface. This mod also serves as the basis for many other cosmetic mods, such as Witchy Rustic Looks, Seasonal Hats, Lumisteria...
Elle's graphic packs
Among the modders very involved in the community, Elle offers numerous packs to improve different graphic aspects of the game:
- cuter animals
- improved buildings
- appearance of grass
- ...
These numerous packs are available here.
To use these packs, you must first install the mod Content Patcher.
Content Mods
Expansion mods add new stories, new characters, or even new locations to explore. If you've played the game extensively, content mods can sometimes significantly extend Stardew Valley's lifespan.
Stardew Valley Expanded
If you're looking for a single mod to jumpstart a new game, Stardew Valley Expanded is definitely a must-see. This gigantic expansion adds an impressive amount of content which fits perfectly into the base game.
This mod introduces 28 new original and complete NPCs, new farm layout options, 58 new locations integrated naturally through quest progression, hundreds of new events and dialogues, and much more. Released in 2019, this mod benefits regular updates to remain compatible with recent versions of the game.
This mod is so important to the Stardew Valley ecosystem that most mod creators strive to ensure compatibility with Stardew Valley Expanded.
Ridgeside Village
Ridgeside Village is another large-scale expansion, but it interferes less with the base game experience. Rather than directly integrating new locations into Pelican Town, this mod adds a separate town, accessible via a cable car near the bus stop.
Climb the mountain and discover a brand-new adventure, featuring 50 new NPCs (including 22 singles), unique regional festivals, and plenty of farms and shops to explore. Where the villagers of Pelican Town are always out and about, Ridgeside Village truly feels like a living space: a restaurant, a bakery, several outdoor stores, and even a clothing boutique where you can buy new outfits.
Since this is a different region, you will find fruits, fish, crops and monsters there that are completely different from those in the base game.
East Scarp
East Scarp introduced a new coastal district, east of Pelican Town. The village is home to unique NPCs, such as a new doctor, a lighthouse keeper, a slime breeder, and a children's book author—all with their own complex backstories if you take the time to get to know them.
The base mod is already a great addition to Stardew Valley, but what really makes it interesting is the long list of additional NPCs you can add to it as you see fit.
The database is managed by a dedicated team, but the community has expanded the project over the years with additional modules fantasy-themed, NPCs like a cryptozoologist, a shadowy man friend of Krobus, or even a member of the hat-selling mouse's family.
Adventurer's Guild Expanded
The Adventurers Guild is an interesting faction for players of Stardew Valley who prefer fighting monsters to cultivating their vegetable gardens. Unfortunately, in the base game, this guild lacks a bit of depth. There is a list of bounties to complete, some cool weapons to buy, but interactions with Marlon and Gil are limited. There is little story about the creatures that haunt the mines, and the end-game adventure content is rather light.
Adventurer's Guild Expanded expands on this aspect of the game. This mod adds a new quest line centered around the story of the monsters in the mines, introduces members of Marlon's family (including two characters you can romance), new locations filled with creatures to fight, and a slime companion you can welcome onto your farm.
A great expansion for those who want a little more action in their daily lives in Pelican City.
To conclude, Stardew Valley is already a very high-quality game in its original version and it has been enjoyed by thousands of players around the world. So, don't hesitate to give it a new lease of life by installing mods to revitalize your experience!
