#fishing in sdv is one of my favorite things and i know that's weird of me given how many people mod that immediately when they play

[remyfire]

If there's one thing about me, it's that if you put fishing in a video game, I'm gonna go absolutely bonkers with delight over it.

[faejilly]

So a couple people have actually enabled me re: yelling about and trying to organize my thoughts on my assorted SDV mods, so let's see how it goes? idk

First, for anyone reading this who has not done the SDV modding thing yet, you need SMAPI, Content Patcher, and Generic Mod Config Menu, and some of the mods I use have other utility mod requirements but I don't want to go clicking through every one to double check and really, they're very good at making them obvious on Nexus if you follow any of my links, and I'll be happy to answer any questions on this absurdly long and rambling thing that failed entirely to just be a list.

Sorry?

Big/Overview & Game-Wide Mods

As mentioned before, my preferred recolor is Vibrant Pastoral, but there are several out there, most of them are pretty compatible with other mods and have been updated for 1.6 if they're still on Nexus at all, and I have no real horse in this race in terms of suggesting mine in particular, I just like it. (Options for bushes and water and grass, oh my! It's really very pretty, did I say that already?)

Diverse Stardew Valley

So you can just use this as a seasonal outfit mod (they'll dress for rain and snow, the LI squad has pajamas, there's varied beachwear, etc.) and there are some fun 'global' options that put mermaid pendants on portraits of married people (including your spouse and several rival hearts/additional NPC options as well if you play with any of those mods), and make the Flower Queen more dynamic, and you can absolutely leave it at that and leave all the characters at "vanilla" if you want. (Or with very minor tweaking to make sprites and character portraits match, that kind of thing.)

BUT, they have various different options for ethnicity/religion/disability/etc. for pretty much everyone in town and Krobus has cute little accessories he wears and Maru & Sebastian look so good and they're my favorite nerds, so! (They both have a couple options but I like these. I do also usually give Sebastian piercings, but I didn't have a good shot of that in the same style as Maru's preview there, and it looked weird having a different sort of image.)

Also I chose variants where both Haley & Kent are HoH and I imagine them both together somewhere turning off their hearing aids and ignoring all the awful loud Hearing Folks In Town, because they're both actually kind of terrible at Being Friendly (if for different reasons) and it makes me happy to know they've got company when they don't want To People.

Also Linus can have a service dog! Her name is Marigold! She's such a good girl!

UI Info Suite 2

IT SHOWS YOU EVERYTHING! Range displays for sprinklers and scarecrows and bee houses and mushroom logs and mossy seeds and and and... There's hover text on machines & crops & tappers; icons over animals that need petting or item collecting; calendar & help wanted board in your player menu; reminder icons under the HUD-clock for b-days, trader visits, tools, weather, queen of sauce, luck level; plus inventory icons on hover for museum/shipping/bundle collections; and you can turn any of it on or off whenever you want.

NPC Map Locations

There's supposed to be a map function in ⬆️ but it doesn't work as well imo.

CJB Cheats Menu & CJB Item Spawner

These are full on "cheating" if you care about OG game balance or whatever, but if you're aiming for an achievement that isn't fun for you, or hate the casino but want the damn rarecrow or top hat, or you're trying to get All Eight Frog Egg Trinket Colors for your froggie-sanctuary-loving-spouse, (just me?), or just want to force something to grow or a machine to finish or for friendship decay to disappear, these will do it. Go wild. Make time stop in dungeons so you can make it to floor 100 in a day! Catch your fish perfectly! Give yourself a fish you forgot to catch last season! Kill things in one hit! Warp anywhere any time! Give yourself all the loot you need! (Or clothes you want!) Pause while decorating until everything's PERFECT! Make your ridiculous OP farm fun again as you force your way to perfection!

Or whatever.

I legit have to uninstall these sometimes because I hit them up too much and get invested in an end goal rather than enjoying playing? But I have used both of them, they're great, especially if your brain is even slightly less dysfunctional than mine is at the moment.

Forage Fantasy

So the blurb for this makes you think it's just about tappers & mushrooms (which I enjoy a lot, so that's very good!) but ALSO the Survival Burger is still an early level forage recipe that can now be either crafted or cooked out of seasonal forage so you can 1: make it immediately and have food before you have a kitchen or money, especially if you've had good luck trash diving for bread, (otherwise you do have to buy bread from Gus but at least it's cheaper) and 2: there are four different recipes since the ingredients are seasonal but they're still all survival burgers and stack nicely in your inventory or fridge and idk that's delightful for me. (Also if you cook it you make two and if you craft it you make one which is such a well-done little balance thing.)

Also it has an option to make fiddlehead fern a regular forage item so there are four summer forage items for the community bundle & seed recipe, which makes everything balance nicely in my brain and I like it so much.

OmniTool

Have you ever been hitting rocks in the mine and then scroll the wrong way or hit the wrong button and try to hit the Something that is attacking you with ore, or your fishing rod, or something else useless? (Do you, like me, hate that all your tools that might be handy take up almost an entire row of your backpack slots even though you have Chests Anywhere and can just move things so it doesn't matter?) This thing lets you combine the ones you want, then auto senses the tile you're clicking on and picks the right tool out of your stack. (You can adjust which tools it works with and which click it's looking for in the config, too.)

It does not understand that I need the pickaxe for moving certain decorations or clearing out dig spots so they don't show up on my farm computer as empty tilled soil, and I don't put my fishing rod in there because then it sometimes tries to fish when I'm panning & vice versa, and you have to click *next* to trees you want to scythe for moss or else it will hit them with the axe, and I know all these things and still hit the wrong thing all the time? AND YET, it's still pretty neat! And I hit monsters on purpose way more often! And my toolbar looks so clean and open. 😅

Which leads us nicely into:

I HATE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

(My very favorite inventory mod ever was 'Less Annoying Flowers' which was not updated for 1.6. Someone else loved it and made a 'Custom Flower Colors' which lets you pick the colors instead of just choosing from some defaults, but since that's literally all it does it is smaller in scope than the rest of these and I put it at the end in my random tweaks list.)

Chests Anywhere

You can access all of them from anywhere with a touch of a button! Or possibly you can limit that to the ones in your area. You can make them inaccessible in dungeons if you want for the proper crawl feel; very versatile in terms of how much inventory you want to deal with and when and where.

Convenient Inventory

Auto-stack! (Distance can be global if you have Chests Anywhere!) Mark something your favorite so you can't stack/drop/ship/trash it by accident! It will let you pick up everything except one of an inventory item too, so you don't have to figure out a count but still have something to auto-stack back to.

Workbench Helper

Does for crafting what mini-fridges did for cooking, basically, as this lets you pull from chests that aren't touching the workbench. You can set it to require that the chests chain to touch the workbench, pick a specific distance, or set it to anything in the area/room you put the workbench in.

Big Fridges

Exactly what it says on the tin. Your initial fridges in both the Farmhouse and Ginger Island kitchen have 70 spaces. (Much like a Big Chest vs a Regular Chest.) You can buy more Big Fridges from Robin and place them on top of a mini-fridge if you already have them (again like the big chests) so you don't have to manually move inventory around.

And it's got a color picker, so my blue and white fridges match my floor there in the corner! I'm love them! Even if I'm too lazy to get a daytime screenshot so they show up better.

ON FINDING THE STORY

So I don't actually have any real expansion mods, I can easily take an entire in-game day just wandering around my farm checking on my trees and ponds and critters, with maybe a quick visit up the mountain or through the forest or over to the saloon to say hi to people, so I don't think I could manage more maps or people or whatever without always feeling like I was neglecting something else?

But I do like getting the most out of what's there already.

So I have Event Lookup to make sure I mostly don't miss heart events, and Platonic Relationships so no one thinks I'm going out with them but I can still get them to 10 Hearts and my relationship screen looks nice. (This one doesn't edit the 8 or 10 heart scenes, it just lets you see them, so be aware that they'll be romantic for the length of the cutscene. To avoid that you need Platonic Partners and Friendships, too.)

I then keep going with Fourteen Heart Events For All because a lot of those are actually very community rather than romance focused so I think they just mostly edited them to trigger outside the farmhouse and some other minor tweaks? And everyone deserves to get a nice dinner from Harvey and go to Haley's cakewalk and cheer on Elliot's book tour, and yk I should probably not list all twelve of them that'll get really long? (SAM & VINCENT THO. So adorable.) It has an optional alternate Alex 14-heart event, which works very well with Sports Room Event Overhaul so what used to be Alex's 14-heart event becomes explicitly more of a group-at-the-tavern thing, which is just so nice y'all. So nice.

And finally, Cooperative Egg Hunt so I don't feel bad about stealing eggs from little kids (and Abigail).

There's a very long list of dialogue & NPC mini-expansion mods that I've checked out that claim they work together well, and are reasonably compatible with DSV, and look like they'd add to that community vibe that makes SDV fun for me, (a couple of which I tried pre-1.6 a few years ago and liked even), but I got pretty far in this game before I dove back into using mods beyond the big three of DSV, UI Suite, and Chests Anywhere, so I think they'll wait for the next save and maybe another post if I'm feeling ambitious.

ANIMALS & ARTISAN GOODS

There are so many awesome animal add-on mods (I find them more interesting than just the crop ones, especially since they've mostly all got really well done animal noises which are delightful) but I'm not using any this time! (It's so weird?) Partly because I did in fact try Frog Friends and they were adorable and I loved the ribbits in the farm background noises, but there are fourteen of them which meant my grass got eaten so fast and I needed the Terrarium so as not to take up more than one whole coop just with frogs and I dunno, it didn't vibe with the rest of my farm, plus a lot of the animal mods legit give me too much stuff it makes me twitchy? I could just trash the excess loot, but idk, brains are weird y'all. tone it down for me, mod makers, I'm a weirdo 😅😅😅

I do have a couple of adjustments that I do like however.

Animal Multiproduce (yes, this gives me more stuff in direct contradiction to my previous post. no it does not trigger the twitchy however so WHATEVER, I LIKE IT. basically it just means you don't lose out on base animal product on the day rabbits or ducks give you their special animal product)

Autonomals (animals move more & further from their coops/barns because they don't freeze when you leave the farm)

Better Honey Mead (Specialty honey turns into specialty mead)

Better Truffles (Icons so you can find them in the grass! Also pigs can dig in the grass so blanket your animal yard in greenery to keep everyone else happy and still get truffles)

Blue Eggs and Golden Mayo (BLUE EGGS FROM BLUE CHICKENS Y'ALL. They make blue mayonnaise and will hatch more blue chickens, it's great. Also ostrich mayo instead of ostrich eggs making lots of normal mayo, much like the duck mayo situation. I have not gotten to golden chickens, but they're supposed to work like the blue ones)

Like a Duck to Water THEY SWIM! It's Great! (You will have to block off the pond or give up on fencing them in tho.)

Milkable Sheep Milk alternates with wool. Very straightforward.

Now I just need to learn how to mod and give goats a secondary product so they balance out with all my other barn critters? I mean they can irl be combed out for fiber a la mohair or whatever, but that makes them basically just sheep again. Maybe they find wild seeds or trash or something, since they eat all the junk that isn't grass, too? oh no, now I'm thinking about it too much, #help

And while I'm not using it right now, I can absolutely recommend Animal Squeeze Through if you need more room in your barn or just want to put ostriches in your coop with the other birds because birds.

Sebastian-Specific-And-Other-Mini-Tangents:

Sebastian's Garage

His bike on his spouse patio is no longer just sitting in the weather. That's it. It's lovely. It has like three different roof color options & seasonal variation too.

Lively Frog Sanctuary

I'm just gonna post the before and after pic from the mod page:

see?

(as a side note, I do wish his Solarian table was proper furniture you could put somewhere else in the house, instead of just being replaced by his terrarium. I think I saw a mod that moved it to the Community Center but I can't remember which one? gosh, now I'm gonna have to try and find it again)

Playable Piano

So I was always a little sad that Sebastian seemed invested in playing the keyboard in like, two scenes & dialogue lines in reaction to Sam, but doesn't actually have a piano, unlike Abigail and her drums, so I got him one and also a mod so I can play it.

Guess which one I got? 😅😅😅

(it takes so much coal to get there y'all. so much.)

Add Berry Seasons to Calendar adds a reminder for shell season in the summer, too!

Crop Transplant Mod

Decoration gone wrong or clicked the wrong square or just changed your mind? MOVE YOUR SEEDS OR CROPS OR TEA PLANTS (or even trees if you want to set it up like that in the config) with your garden pot.

Move Greenhouse Plot

The unrepaired greenhouse can be moved at Robin's just like any of your farm buildings. Very nice for getting set up how you like the first year.

Mx. Qi; technically this is New Mx. Qi since the original hadn't been updated for 1.6, but whatever.

Healthy Blobfish because he looks so much happier

Skull Cavern Elevator

I don't think this needs a blurb? You can set the spacing for where it shows up and charge a toll if you want to adjust how easy this makes skull diving. This is vital enough I probably should have mentioned it sooner, but it's also just one of the little tweaks ones, so whatever.

Seasonal Colored Seeds

Literally just changes the bag colors but it is a good aesthetic if you sort your chests by season, and it is easier to skim for whichever thing you're looking for if you just shove all your seeds together somewhere like I do.

Custom Flower Colors*

Makes all your flowers only one color! (Or you can pick a range from a default or choose your own, up to six per flower type, but I do this to save my chest-of-flowers from overflowing so I stick with ONE COLOR.)

*Alternatively, if you want to modify other farming mechanics (including improved Giant Crops rate, which I have never gotten before this save so I feel you) Farming Made Easy Suite includes flower colors amongst everything else. I haven't used that one, but I have previously used the Fishing and Combat Suites by the same person, and those are excellent.

Buy Tea Set At Winter Star just because I wanted it 😂Also it balances well with several other Winter Star mods that I used to use, some of which work better with things that haven't been updated to 1.6 so I decided not to figure out which ones I still wanted this time around.

Watering Grants XP and Crops Can Wither (what? I like consequences in small doses and also I need that sweet farming XP in Spring 1, what can I say.)

And finally! This has no effect on anything at all in any meaningful way because nothing bad happens if you don't do it, but I absolutely have Auto Fill Pet Bowl installed so they're just. Always nice and full of water.

I can absolutely do a post about the dialogue/NPC-expansion or farming/ranching mods I have previously used and/or am trying to organize for my next save, if anyone is interested in my weird rambling? lmk 💚