alias_sqbr: the symbol pi on a pretty background (Default)
alias_sqbr ([personal profile] alias_sqbr) wrote2022-08-19 06:58 am

A big pile of Stardew Valley mods

So I recently got SUPER INTO making Stardew Valley mods, and finally finished the last of the ones I super duper wanted to have made.

Here's all the mods I've made so far. They basically divide into three sets:
1) Colour changes which make the user interface, plants etc blue and purple.
2) Mods to make the monsters and mines more cute and the local animals more weird/monstrous.
3) Gender changing characters, androgynous art, and editing dialogue to be less heteronormative etc.


It's been a fun challenge, and the community is very active and helpful. There's a bustling and friendly mod creator channel on the main Stardew Valley discord, and some really nice free to use assets to edit from. There's a bunch of well maintained and documented mod tools to make it really easy to make straightforward changes, replacing sprites or lines of dialogue without changing the structure of the game is about as easy as writing simple html. And in the process of testing my mods I poked at other people's mods and some of those are super fun!

Modding Index on the wiki is a great place to start if you're interested in installing or creating mods yourself.

When I first got into Stardew Valley I was playing the GOG version on the Mac and some of these tools didn't exist yet, at least not for that version, so modding ended up being a bit too troublesome. But now there's more tools and I own the Steam version, so it's a lot easier.

I did get a couple of unpleasant/transphobic comments at first on my androgynous art mod, which didn't feel great. But I hid/reported them and all the other comments since then have been positive.

Pixel art is hard, though. Even just editing other people's art to remove facial hair etc is really stretching my abilities. But I'm getting better! I briefly dipped my toe into actually programming a mod to make significant changes to the game's structure, it was much harder and turned out not to be necessary for the thing I wanted to do but I might poke it again one day.
got_quiet: Loki giving a thumbs up (yes)

[personal profile] got_quiet 2022-08-20 01:20 am (UTC)(link)
Very cool mods! Pixel art is a lot more labor intensive than it looks, for sure, but I love the idea of swapping colors around for funsies.