I’ve always been a big fan of Harvest Moon. And when Stardew Valley came out in 2016 I was instantly hooked.
The lovingly crafted experience, clearly inspired by the best parts of HM and an idealized dream of quitting your nine to five job to tend a farm in the countryside was, and still is, one of the best things to happen to gaming in the past 10 years.
That said, after three years of playing it I’ve grown accustomed to the sprites, to the sounds, and the daily grind of building a farm from the ground up.
Yes, not even ConcernedApe’s constant updates were able to keep my countryside life from becoming a chore.
Thankfully a thriving modding community was born around the game, taking one man’s personal project and turning it into a crowd-driven, living and breathing work of art.
To celebrate the many hours we’ve all poured into the game and help new players find the perfect mods to make their own “ideal” version of Stardew Valley, I’ve put together what I believe are the absolute best mods out there.
Although Stardew Valley has some really interesting and endearing marriage candidates, both male and female, I’ve always thought a lot more could be done with the process of dating them.
Modder Pencilstab over at NexusMods agrees, apparently, and their way of improving this key aspect of a rural life simulator was to have your sweetheart send you letters throughout the year.
These can include presents, hints at how to trigger their heart events, and even check up on you after said events.
I mean, it’s just cold not to write after a night of romance, isn’t it?
Birthdays are a very important part of everyday life for the community in Pelican Town, which is why they’re posted every season on the town’s news board and celebrated with gifts.
However considering you’re essentially reviving the town little by little, it’s very rude that yours is completely ignored.
Now, thanks to the Happy Birthday mod it’ll be posted on the news board like every other one. And nobody will ever forget again (probably).
Expect tons of gifts from both your parents and the villagers, and if you’re liked-enough, even a party!
So, you want the look and feel of the Winter season but don’t want all your hard-earned hay stores to be depleted quite as fast? I’ve got just the mod for that.
Thanks to author CatCattyCat, grass will now survive the arrival of winter instead of withering and dying.
It’s great for those of us who ranch way too much, and a lifesaver if by chance you forgot to stock up on hay the last day of Fall.
Just keep in mind that the mod won’t make grass grow during winter, as that would probably be too much of an advantage.
Also from CatCattyCat comes No Fence Decay, a mod whose name says it all.
I’ve always found it both annoying and frankly non-immersive that fences made out of good wood and even stone will deteriorate to the point of collapse in just a few months.
With this mod this won’t happen again, as decay over time is deactivated.
This mod is key if you’re one of those people that like to keep everything fenced for aesthetic purposes, as checking the Stardew Valley equivalent of the Great Wall of China every day for holes to plug is not my idea of fun.
Stardew Valley lacks a wide array of small, quality-of-life improvements that’d streamline a lot of the gameplay and keep you from having to google every single thing.
I understand it has to do with ConcernedApe trying to recreate the feel of playing one of the older Harvest Moon games, but to be honest, some of these things just don’t make sense in 2020.
With help from this mod by TheMusketeer, you can now add a simple tooltip when running your cursor over a crop that identifies it, even if it’s just a seed on the ground.
No more waiting until it bears fruit to remember what the hell it was you planted!
And what better way to enjoy your newly enhanced water than by going on a fishing trip?
If you’re one of those people who finds the fishing system in Stardew Valley too slow and twitchy to enjoy, this mod by Mmanlapat may be something to consider.
It reduces how much the green bar moves as fish struggle to get away from your hook, in turn making it considerably easier to catch the denizens of the sea.
While there are many fishing expansions around, this is what you’re looking for if you just want a simpler fishing experience.
Having an elevator feels like an essential part of exploring a dungeon or mine in Stardew Valley, especially one as far away from home as the Skull Cavern.
I understand ConcernedApe probably didn’t add one in for both immersion and difficulty purposes, but once you’ve played through the game or the cavern once, it stops making sense quickly.
This simply-named mod by Bifibi is a long due fix that’ll add an elevator next to the entrance and every staircase.
It functions just like the one in the mines, updating itself every five floors, and it looks exactly the same due to re-purposed sprites.
If you lose contact with a friend for a month or two, do you grow irreparably apart? Do they forget you and the times you’ve shared? The ties that bind you?
I don’t think so.
Then, why should it be any different in Stardew Valley?
If anything, a rural setting like Pelican Town should make friendships much less volatile.
Thanks to IsaacSDev, you can now remove friendship decay over time from the game.
You’ll still lose friendship points if they catch you going through the trash and such things, of course, but at least you won’t have to worry about meeting every single villager at least once a week.
Sure, you can install a Stardew Valley companion app on your phone or just visit the SV wiki every time you want to know something, but quite honestly, that just takes you out of the experience and can often make the game feel dragged out.
Thanks to Lookup Anything by modder Pathoschild, you can now find out everything about an item or object in the world, including villagers, by hovering your cursor over them and pressing F1.
The information pages include everything from sell prices to whether you need an item for a quest or a Community Center bundle. Nifty and convenient!
Sometimes, even in the original Harvest Moon games, crops that need to be harvested with the scythe feel like a sort of gimmick, or simply a troublesome kind of product.
Modder Mmanlapat has ingeniously solved this issue – turning the scythe into an all-purpose harvesting tool that’ll allow you to pick up all kinds of crops easily and faster than the classic, manual technique allows.
As a bonus, this also grants you XP in farming, so you won’t be losing anything by installing this mod.
If you’re a Youtube creator or simply someone wanting to have a bit of absurdist fun, you’re going to need cheats.
Especially in a game as much about patience and hard work as Stardew Valley!
This mod by prolific modder CJBOK is pretty straightforward, adding a menu that allows you to spawn items, grant yourself infinite health and stamina, become faster or simply freeze time while you accomplish some task.
It’ll definitely ruin the Stardew Valley experience to play the game this way, but it has its uses, and it’s easier to operate than, say, console commands in Skyrim.
You may think that sprinklers are good enough as it is, but what are mods for but fixing things that aren’t necessarily broken?
Better Sprinklers by OrSpeeder does just that, allowing you to both configure the shape of the squares sprinkled and slowly improve the sprinklers by spending resources.
This mod will also show you the area covered by both sprinklers and scarecrows when setting them down, which is a feature useful enough to warrant its own mod, and you’re getting both for the price of one (which is a couple of minutes of your time).
As several polls and reddit discussions show, there’s a considerable overlap between gamer and anime-watcher populations.
Stardew Valley specifically, given its focus on characters and relationships with them, is also a magnet for waifu/husbando-hunters all around.
Creator Bunnihime is keenly aware of that, which is why they’ve developed several mods to replace the portraits from NPCs to anime-style versions that are, generally, much more appealing than those cooked-up by ConcernedApe.
This one will do so for all non-romanceable citizens of Pelican Town and beyond.
Of course, there’s also a more developed version of the Anime Portraits mod focused on marriage candidates, helping you fall in love with whomever you choose to spend your digital life with just a little bit easier.
There are also different variants for most characters that tweak small things such as colors or accessories, made to suit your tastes more accurately.
Just be aware that, after you install this mod, your interests may… shift, a little.
In the vanilla game, I wouldn’t so much as look at Haley, but with this mod… well, let’s just say I may have to build a darkroom at the farm.
Depending on how many Harvest Moon games you’ve played before discovering Stardew Valley, you may find ranching either extremely easy or annoyingly hard.
This mod by Urbanyeti is aimed more at the latter, but is generally an enhancement of the ranching system, adding an indicator telling you which animals need love, milking or shearing.
It also prevents failed attempts at accomplishing any of these things.
While several mods allow you to warp around or spawn items in your inventory, there’s little in the way of actively changing the environment around you.
Farm Type Manager allows you to spawn different objects such as boulders or trees, as well as customize several features of the different farm types to best suit your playstyle and preferences.
It’s the tool you need to build your dream farm, and you don’t even have to upgrade it at Clint’s.
As an added note, this mod is necessary for several content packs available in the Nexus. So you’ll gain a lot by installing it as soon as you start modding.
One of the most creative mods for the industrious type of player is Automate, by Pathoschild, which allows you to create automatic production lines consisting of machines and chests.
It works by allowing machines to take base items such as raw ore or crops from a chest, and then depositing the product back into the chest before beginning the cycle anew.
It’s a bit reminiscent of complex redstone machines in Minecraft, and that’s a good thing in my book.
It won’t only make you feel like you’re playing Factorio, but also save you a lot of time.
This mod by CJBOK is one of those where you read the name and you already know what there is to know.
It’ll simplify your life and save you trips to the General Store by adding a tooltip that tells you the price of any one of your items if you run your cursor over them.
Among its best features in comparison with other similar options is how it not only shows you the individual price of each item, but the total price of any stack.
Frankly, ConcernedApe was very conservative when it comes to sharing information with the player.
It’s all part of the experience of being disconnected, of having to make the walk to town to hear the news, and of being subject to an uncertain world.
Well, until you install this mod, that is.
UI Info Suite by Cdaragorn opens up the gates of knowledge, letting you know what luck you’re going to have every day, access Help Wanted quests right from your menu, and EXP acquisition with every activity you perform.
It also includes other useful info like whether animals need attention, and how much a crop will take to grow once it’s planted.
There are a great many SV recolors available in the Nexus, but there’s no reason not to choose the best one.
Just a New Map Recolor visually overhauls every season by adding different tree types in a lot of different colors. Grass also changes in hue throughout the year, and there are many more such details.
One of my favorite parts about this mod is that creator Eemie includes several different versions of the mod that go from slightly altered looks to complete overhaul, allowing you to choose the intensity of the change.
We already covered a mod to make fishing easier, but what if you want it to be a more prominent aspect of the game? What if you want to be the very best angler that ever was?
Thanks to NexusMods user TehPers, now you can!
This complete rework of the fishing system has a strong focus on achieving perfect catches. Do that several times in a row, and the quality of your fish will improve with each catch, up to Iridium-level!
And don’t worry, fish are a bit easier to catch, so you don’t have to be a fishing ninja to pull off some perfect catches!
That said, hats will most definitely be a thing of the past once you see our next entry.
While customizing options have expanded greatly throughout the years, there are never enough hairstyles for a character creation enthusiast!
I mean, you’re going to be looking at your character for a long, long time, so why not make them the best they can be?
Thanks to creator Pencistab, you’ll have plenty more options in terms of hairdos for your farmer, and some of the vanilla ones are also improved to make their features more visible.
An overly-complex hairstyle with lots of curls may not be the most immersive thing for a hard worker such as yourself, but if you can get over that, there’s no excuse not to look your best.
I don’t quite recommend getting an item spawner for a newbie player, as simply having the possibility can be enough to ruin the experience completely, but advanced farmers and content creators definitely need this in their mod arsenal.
This mod lets you acquire any amount of any item in any quality of your choosing with just a couple of clicks from an easy-to-navigate UI.
It’s perfect for experiments and other kinds of creative play!
Inventory management is a staple challenge of all kinds of RPGs and farming games alike, so it’s no surprise it takes on such an important role in Stardew Valley.
That said, it starts getting old once you’ve played the game a couple of times and want to have a more streamlined time with it.
With Chests Anywhere by Pathoschild, you won’t ever have to worry about it as long as you have free storage space somewhere in the world.
Chests, Junimo Huts, and even your fridge are readily available from anywhere on the map by simply going into your inventory. You can also ship your items from this menu!
Overall it’s a very seamless and comfortable mod for those of us with limited free time.
Having to painstakingly google what gifts everyone likes in a game like Stardew Valley or its inspiration, Harvest Moon, is something we all accept as a fact of life.
That said, few things break your momentum in this game as having to pause it to pull out your phone to check the companion app or a Wiki.
Now, thanks to modder Tstaples, you’ll never have to do it again. Just hover over anyone’s sprite or place in the Social Tab to know what they like to get, making your day-to-day socializing much easier.
It even has a “progression mode” where you’ll have to fill in the blanks by trying different gifts.
It’s the way the game should be from the start, and this mod is a must.
I’ve always struggled to understand what was so hard about making artisan goods such as jelly or juice look different depending on what they’re made of.
It’s annoying having to hover the cursor over everything to tell exactly what’s going on inside!
With this mod by CatCattyCat, this small issue will be a thing of the past. Artisan goods now have colorful and diverse icons that even include small depictions of the base ingredient on the top left corner for easier perusing.
There’s no excuse not to install this mod right now.
Why don’t you have a bathroom in your house? On that note, why doesn’t anyone in town?
If you also find that the communal baths are the only bathrooms in Stardew Valley immersion-breaking, then this mod by DevilBro is exactly what you need.
Having to commit to a single look for a playthrough that may very well take months depending on your schedule can be a bit daunting for some of us.
With this mod by KabigonFirst, you’ll be able to alter your entire appearance at any time you like by using the dresser in the farm or going to the Wizard’s Shrine.
Whether you do this once a season or every day is entirely up to you.
If you’re getting a mod that adds more customization options, this is key to maximizing enjoyment.
No, this isn’t a mod about a bohemian homebrew beer resurgence in Pelican Town.
Experience Bars by SpaceChase0 simply adds bars depicting your experience levels in every skill to your UI so you can see your progress and properly plan ahead without having to wait for the day to end.
It’s very helpful when you’re trying to level specific things as efficiently as possible, be it to reach some building recipe ASAP or whatever reason.
One of my personal favorites on this list is this English Victorian look to both buildings and flora in Stardew Valley.
Not only does it turn Pelican Town into the setting of a Charles Dickens novel, but it also changes to suit the in-game seasons, providing an immersive experience that makes the passing of time evident and visually meaningful.
It’s a bit of a complicated install but it’s worth every minute.
And if you want to double down on that seasonal goodness, consider getting everyone in Pelican Town and beyond a whole new set of clothes for every season of the game.
Anything that gives the changing of seasons more impact is a great mod in my book, and this one even gives the villagers clothes for rainy days.
At last, your loved ones won’t freeze in Winter or catch the flu under the rain!
Plus, Emily looks downright gorgeous in every one of her little pixelated outfits.
A total fan-favorite and very ubiquitous mod is the addition of a tractor to bring your farming business to the 1900’s.
After installing, go to Robin’s workshop and ask her to build a Tractor Garage for you.
Once it’s done you’ll find this very useful vehicle ready to go. Just equip a tool and watch the surrounding tiles get cleaned, plowed, and watered in a matter of seconds.
The further we get into the list, the more impact each of the mods has on the overall feel of the game.
Karmylla’s Immersive Maps is one of those mods that’ll give you a whole new experience if you’ve already grown bored of the same old Pelican Town after many playthroughs.
It modifies several locales and adds others, such as a barn belonging to Shane, Maru’s Basement, and a darkroom for Haley.
It even adds events about each of the new areas, with over 150 lines of dialogue for both scripted events and normal banter with the villagers.
Waifu/Husbando-enthusiasts rejoice, for the most aesthetically pleasing anime-style character portraits are one click away.
This mod by creator Ohodavi will replace the boring old character portraits from the vanilla game with updated, beautiful faces worthy of a Kyoto Animation series.
For me this is one of the first mods anyone should install, and I never play the game without it.
The most amazing mods are generally those that take the vanilla game as the groundwork to build something new, full of content to explore and providing a different experience.
Modder FlashShifter has been hard at work for a long time adding new areas, quests, NPCs, and storylines to this farming simulator, and it’s a lot to take in.
The mod also tweaks previously existing things to provide a better experience, such as moving the Adventurer’s Guild to town and giving them a proper seat rather than a shoddy old cabin in a forgotten corner of the world.
Reimagined festivals, an improved farm map, over 100 new character events… It’s just too much to cover in so little space.
And the best part?
It feels seamless as if the game was meant to be this way.
Truly a great experience that feels like a “Special Edition” rather than a humble mod.
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.
