You can make many upgrades to your farm as you progress through the seasons in Stardew Valley, but few things get me more excited than building a cellar.
Robin can create a spacious underground cellar below your farmhouse for the modicum price of 100,000g. It’s accessed via the kitchen and displays a traditional appearance reminiscent of musky, cobweb-filled cellars in fantasy RPGs.
It’s not just for fun, though.
The cellar is a great storage space, and – most importantly – it’s the only place where you can place casks to age items like wine, cheese, and mead.
If you’re already running some mods in your Stardew Valley, you have no excuse not to upgrade your casks and cellar. Let me point you in the right direction.
The cask’s sprite in Stardew Valley is awfully similar to the Preserves Jar.
On the one hand, this makes the game look coherent, and they look nice stacked next to one another.
On the other hand, you’re left wishing for a little more variety.
You can switch things up a bit with the Shorter Casks mod, which cuts the size of the cask’s sprite by around 30%. The result is a short and stout vessel with its own personality.
The process of aging wine or cheese requires particular atmospheric conditions.
You can’t just leave a bottle of wine or a wheel of cheese out on the balcony and expect it to do anything but spoil immediately.
That’s why, historically, aging was always done in caves and underground cellars – just like in Stardew Valley.
Still, sometimes, you don’t need your games to be that realistic. If you want to age cheese or wine in your bedroom, who is “mother nature” to stop you?
This mod makes casks work just fine regardless of where you place them.
The Deluxe Barn is a fantastic investment for any farm focusing on animal husbandry.
It can house cows, ostriches, and goats like the Big Barn, but also sheep and pigs. These are some of the most profitable barn animals in the game, and they’ll pay back the investment in no time.
If that still isn’t sufficient, consider the Deluxe Barn with Cellar mod.
It adds two underground floors measuring roughly the same as the barn. One is meant for placing casks for aging, like a regular cellar, while the other works like a greenhouse.
Many consider the space under their houses – usually a basement – as another livable space rather than a place for storage or aging.
Depending on how you decorate it, a basement can be anything. A game room, a library, a gym… It’s up to you and your creativity.
The Deluxe Wooden Cellar mod encourages exploring the possibilities by adding over double the storage space, a greenhouse, a small bath, and a lounge area to your cellar.
It also redecorates to make the cellar look cozier and less like a castle’s oubliette.
Now that you have so much more space in your cellar, you need to find a way to use it.
My suggestions would be to take your farm to the next level and set up a massive wine and cheese aging operation.
Imagine it: hundreds of casks working day and night to produce specialty items, shipped all over the country for massive profit. This will finally put Pelican Town on the map.
Thanks to the Robin Sells Casks mod, you can get your hands on hundreds of casks faster. Can you imagine how many splinters you’d get stuck in your fingers crafting so many casks yourself?
Perhaps you don’t need a cellar the size of your entire overground farm. Bigger isn’t always better, after all.
Consider Pebble’s Cellar if you want to keep things simple when renewing your cellar’s appearance.
This mod doesn’t change the size of the cellar, but it gives the space an extreme makeover with a gorgeous carpet and relaxing lavender wallpaper so you can sit down and fully relax.
There’s nothing like the peace and quiet of your private underground chill room.
Like caves, cellars have a stable inner atmosphere unaffected by external conditions. This is what makes them ideal for aging.
So, why don’t we throw it all away by making the cellar change with the seasons?
This mod gives the cellar a visual makeover with every passing season. The main change happens on the ground, which can sport three different grass colors or a bed of snow.
It’s peculiar for an underground area, but that’s not enough reason to keep me away from this gorgeous cellar.
Most SV mods try to give you more cellar space by expanding the single vanilla cellar.
Buildable Cellar Redux takes a different approach.
Instead of making the cellar bigger, it lets you build extra dedicated cellar buildings around your farm like you would a coop or a barn.
The mod adds four distinct cellars with unique looks and different facilities you might find helpful.
There’s a typical cellar, a cellar with a greenhouse, and an extra-large cellar. My favorite, the “spa” cellar, offers an indoor pool with a Roman bath vibe to regain your stamina.
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.
