How to Download and Play Mods for Stardew Valley (2022)

While hugely popular farming RPG Stardew Valley is well-known for featuring immense content, players looking for even more variety can download mods to do more activities. Many players already feel well-served with all the content in Stardew Valley, spending hundreds and hundreds of hours in the game, farming seasonal crops, falling in love with Stardew Valley’s many romanceable NPCs, and exploring every corner of the game’s expansive world. However, mods have become popular with those looking for more.

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Stardew Valley has a thriving modding scene that has produced thousands of mods varying from mildly humorous design changes based on odd memes to full-content expansions. PC players have long been using mods to add new content and quality-of-life adjustments to make the game even better than its already incredible evergreen base version.

Related: Massive Stardew Valley Mod Aims To Add Magical City, Dungeon Crawling

However, as Stardew Valley doesn’t officially support mods, the community has found ways to get mods working. Modding can seem tricky at first, but the below methods will show players how to start downloading and installing mods for Stardew Valley on PC. With mods installed, players can begin enjoying user-developed content such as the Stardew Valley Expanded mod that adds adorable new NPCs.

Stardew Valley: How to Download and Install Mods

The first step to modding Stardew Valley is to backup game files; by modding Stardew Valley, players may run the risk of encountering technical issues such as save files being corrupted. Once everything is backed up, players should install the Stardew Modding API (SMAPI), Stardew Valley’s unofficial mod loader. While a few mods don’t require SMAPI, it’s highly recommended as most mods depend on it to work properly.

• Step 1: First, ensure Stardew Valley has run at least once.
• Step 2: Download SMAPI, which appears as a zipped folder.
• Step 3: Unzip the folder, which contains several files, each for a different operating system.
• Step 4: Double-click the Install on Windows file and follow the instructions in the window. Ensure that the installer has the correct file path to their main Stardew Valley game folder.
• Step 5: Copy the entire code from the installer that starts with “ and ends in “%command%” (including quotation marks).
• Step 6: Open Steam, right-click on Stardew Valley and choose Properties.
• Step 7: Navigate to the General tab, paste the code into the textbox under Launch Options and click OK. This will allow Stardew Valley to run mods while also keeping Steam features enabled.

SMAPI is highly reputable, and its creator, modder Pathoschild, was one of the modders collaborating with ConcernedApe on Stardew Valley patches to add more mod support to the game. When installed, SMAPI creates a special “Mods” folder in the player’s Stardew Valley files. Players can then pick from the mods available on NexusMods, where the Stardew Valley modding community makes its main home. Most mods can be installed by downloading zipped mod folders, extracting their files, and simply moving the unzipped folders into the “Mods” folder. These mods should automatically be playable, and that’s all players need to do. However, some mods may require others to run or are incompatible with others; players should keep an eye out for installation instructions from modders themselves.

As ConcernedApe has said, Stardew Valley’s 1.5 update might be its last, now may be a great time for players who aren’t yet ready to leave their farms to explore some of the many great community-developed creations for Stardew Valley.

Next: Stardew Valley Adventurer’s Guild Mod Is Big Enough To Be a Sequel

Stardew Valley is now available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.