The best mods for Stardew Valley and how to download them

Stardew Valley is almost the perfect indie game. The no-pressure style of gameplay, the charming art and music, the personable villagers, and the endlessly diverting tasks allow players to immerse themselves into one of the most relaxing gaming atmospheres ever made. However, there’s always room for improvement in any game and that’s where mods come in.

To perfectly tailor the ideal Stardew Valley experience, players can turn to the seemingly endless list of mods that are available for the almost 10-year-old game. These mods can completely transform Pelican Town into something unrecognizable, especially when other franchises like Pokémon or Baldur’s Gate are mixed in, but the following list focuses on enhancing the core Stardew Valley experience without too many major alterations.

How to install Stardew Valley mods

Mods for Stardew Valley will only work on the PC version of the game, so console or mobile players are left out of the fun, which could make a convincing case for the perks of PC gaming. For PC players, the way to install Stardew Valley mods is as follows:

• Install SMAPI, the mod loader for Stardew Valley.
• Find the mod on Nexusmods.
• Download the mod to your PC.
• Unzip it into the Mods folder in your game folder (finding this can vary depending on the operating system and you may have to create one).
  • Every downloaded mod needs its own sub-folder, so make sure those are organized if you have multiple mods
• Enjoy!

Best Stardew Valley mods

Stardew Valley Expanded

The king of all Stardew Valley mods, Stardew Valley Expanded (SVE) is a huge expansion that expands on practically every of the base game, from crops and farms to festivals and quests. SVE adds 58 new locations, 28 extra NPCs, 278 character events, 3 new map types for the player’s farm, and even 43 extra fish. Each addition tries to stay true to the feel of the game, so veteran players can experience more of what they loved in the original.

This mod can be overwhelming for new players, and even the creator of SVE highly recommends playing through vanilla Stardew Valley before diving into the expanded version.

Automate

Simple, straightforward, and one of the most helpful mods for Stardew Valley. Automate does exactly like its name suggests by automating any machine. By placing a chest next to a machine, like a furnace or cheese maker, and filling it with the necessary supplies, the automate mod will automatically push ingredients to process in the machine and pull out finished products.

Since so much of Stardew Valley is about managing time and project management, having the automate mod take care of processing artisan goods or ores in the background without constant intervention by the player can make the game so much more relaxing.

Autopetter

Similar to automate, the Autopetter mod takes care of daily chores to free up players time. This mod’s focus is on livestock, as the autopetter will pet every animal on the farm, including however many pets the player has adopted, every day to ensure they’re happy. While part of the fun of Stardew Valley might come from interacting with animals, it can become a hectic chore when the farm is full of identical cows, chickens, and sheep that all require individual attention.

Tractor Mod

The tractor mod is a major and incredibly handy change to the farming lifestyle. Rather than clear land for crops by hand every single season, the Tractor mod allows players to purchase their very own tractor (by building a tractor garage with Robin) and ride it around the farm.

By selecting a tool, the tractor will complete the same function at scale. Holding the axe will clear twigs, the hoe will till the land, and the scythe will harvest crops while also clearing weeds. There’s a whole host of ways to use the tractor to make farming more time efficient, which can be especially useful in the busier summer and fall seasons.

Simple Crop Label

For those players who enjoy a giant farm (and likely have the tractor mod ready to go), the Simple Crop Label mod is a lifesaver. This mod allows players to simply hover their cursor over a crop and learn what it is and how many days it has until ripe. When farming at scale or starting the game up after a long break, being able to catch up with what’s growing and when it needs to be harvested simply makes life easier.

Wandering Spouses

For anyone that has gotten to the final stages of romance in Stardew Valley, it’s well-known that marriage sucks a little bit of life out of whichever NPC the player tied the knot with. Once married, the NPC will rarely leave the farmhouse, which can be especially depressing for characters that spoke at length about yearning for adventure and not wanting to be stuck (like Abigail or Sebastian). While they can enter town for some normal activities, seeing them linger around the house for seasons on end is a sad sight.

The Wandering Spouse mod alleviates this problem by allowing spouses to walk around the farm (without breaking anything in their path!) and comment to the player on what they’ve seen, like animals or specific crops. This small detail makes a huge difference in making married NPCs feel more alive and part of the farming life.

Skull Cavern Elevator

One of the most challenging areas of the game are the Skull Caverns. The scarier version of The Mines, the Skull Caverns don’t include the convenience of an elevator which allows players to enter whichever level they unlocked last.

The Skull Cavern Elevator mod is a simple one, as it just adds the elevator from the Mines to the Skull Cavern, making that achievement much easier for players less-equipped to deal with the challenge of reaching the bottom in a single day.

Predict Reaction to Gifts

Like the wandering spouse mod, the gift prediction mod makes life among the residents of Pelican Town just a little bit easier. With the Predict Reaction to Gift mod installed, players can hold any item and walk up to an NPC to see what sort of reaction they’d have if it was gifted to them. The reactions come in the form of a heart, music note, smile, tear, and black squiggle to indicate how liked (or disliked) the potential gift is. 

Since gift giving is so important in Stardew Valley for cultivating friendships and unlocking secrets, being able to avoid giving a bad gift is a great way to subtly enhance the game. For any players that feel like this is cheating, the mod has another modifier that allows it to only work on gifts that have already been gifted.

Ultimate Storage System

There’s nothing worse than losing something in Stardew Valley. Since the game encourages hoarding items throughout the years – especially with so many seasonally exclusive items – it’s incredibly easy to misplace a single item in the vast halls of a storage shed. That’s where the Ultimate Storage System mod comes in to save the day. This mod allows players to access every chest (and fridge) on their farm from a single central terminal. Once purchased (for 100,000 gold from the Dwarf), players can simply access the terminal and search up any item by name.

This mod can also be used to instantly craft and cook any recipes from whatever ingredients are available in storage, which really expedites the whole crafting process for day to day activities.

NPC Map Locations

There are a lot of characters in Stardew Valley. With all the competing schedules, variations due to weather or special events, and changes from season to season, keeping track of any one NPC is a complete headache. While players could always turn to the wiki to find out where their target likely is, the NPC Map Locations mod removes that obstacle entirely by showing where each NPC is on the map at all times. 

Being able to instantly find any NPC is a genuine time saver both in-game and in real life, especially since memorizing every villagers schedule is not a task every player is up to.