The whole reason why you moved to Stardew Valley in the first place was to escape your routine.
As it turns out, a farmer’s life is nothing if not routine. You must water the crops, take care of the animals, and manage Kegs and Preserves Jars…
It almost makes you want to… automate it.
Thanks to the magic of modding, it’s possible to turn your Stardew Valley ranch into the farm of the future. And the following mods will help make almost everything on your farm automated.
One of the main challenges of exploring the Mines, Skull Cavern, and the rest of the game’s “dungeons” is inventory management.
No matter how good you are at fighting, you’ll eventually run out of inventory space. This quickly becomes an annoying cycle where you must open your inventory and move things around several times per floor.
The Item Auto-Trasher mod helps by automating this process. It’ll dispose of certain items – say, Slime or Sap – to keep the space open for Geodes and ore.
You decide which items must be purged through the mod’s configuration file. It takes a moment to set up, but it’ll save you a lot more time down the line.
Having to hit a key every time you pass through a gate is fine when you only do that once or twice a day.
But if you’re big on organization and like to keep everything nice and fenced, we might be talking about dozens of gates needing to be opened and closed daily.
Luckily, automatic doors have been around since the early 1930s and are used on farms all the time. Just download the Automatic Gates mod, and someone in Pelican Town will hook you up.
Don’t you just hate it when you forget to open the barn or coop doors for your animals to graze and get some sun?
And nobody has time to close the doors when they’re running back home from The Mines at 1:30am, praying to the Junimo that they’ll make it home before passing out.
You could just leave them open all the time, but your animals would probably hate it. Instead, why don’t you try the Auto Animal Doors mod?
Set an opening and closing time on the config file, and the mod will do the rest.
The oldest kind of automation is having other people do the work for you.
In Stardew Valley, the Junimo Hut allows you to house a nature spirit to help you with farmwork – but they’re somewhat limited in their abilities.
If you want the farm to essentially run itself, try out Better Junimos.
This mod expands the Junimos’ abilities. Instead of just watering or harvesting some crops, they’ll be able to plant, fertilize, forage, and much more – all in a much wider range.
They’ll even work in the rain with little leaf umbrellas! It’s adorable if a little bit exploitative.
When it comes to machines and artisan equipment like Furnaces or Preserves Jars, the player’s role is that of a glorified conveyor belt.
You just pick stuff up from one place and put it in another – rinse and repeat.
So, what if all of this could be done automatically?
Automate works by turning chests into automatic distribution facilities. Just place a chest next to a machine; it’ll provide ingredients and store the finished product automatically.
You can even link several machines together to create complex production lines.
Everything from Kegs to Crystalariums is compatible!
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
