Modding Stardew Valley to make it feel like Animal Crossing

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Modding Stardew Valley to make it feel like Animal CrossingApples are awesome though?

Apples are awesome though?

I am not myself anAnimal Crossingfan (or a “Crossie”, as I believe they like to be called), but I know the game is big news at the moment, because approximately the entire rest of the RPS staff have been going on about it. They’re all at it, and it’s like people talking in a secret language I don’t understand. Someone please buy and send me a Switch.

The closest I think I get to playing Animal Crossing is playingStardew Valley. This isn’t a bad trade off, becauseStardew Valleyis very good, and appears on lots of our bestest best lists (likebest RPGs,best management games, andbest co-op games). But in the spirit of inquiry, I have been investigating mods which make Stardew Valley feel more like Animal Crossing. Spoilers: you can’t do anything very drastic. I’m not about to reveal a total conversion mod, here. But you can make a couple of small but significant changes.

Part of my process involved finding out what Animal Crossing is actually like, so I tried researching amongst my colleagues, but got stuck for a long time on understanding the hierarchy of fruit in the game. What fruit you get to start with is apparently as monstrously important as it is totally meaningless.

Anyway, from what I gather, Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing already have a lot of overlap in that both games involve farming, repetitive chores, and lovebombing people with produce until they’re your friends. Both games fulfil approximately the same mighty need. One big difference, however, is that time in Animal Crossing is measured out according to an accurate 24 hour clock, so if it’s 11:20 am in real life, that’s what time it is in your AC town, and it’ll take 10 actual minutes until it’s 11:30. In Stardew Valley, meanwhile, a day is about 17 minutes, and you can only stay up until 2am anyway.

Unfortunately, the mod that whacked the AC music into Stardew Valley got axed for using Nintendo music, but you can use this coolAnimal Crossing Music pluginfor Chrome to get essentially the same effect. It plays the appropriate music for the right time of day, and Graham and Katharine both rave about it all the time. You just need to turn off the Stardew Valley music and have this bad boy playing in the background.

It’s worth noting that, while there aren’tloadsof any stripe, there are other small mods that don’t use SMAPI, but add a bit of AC flair to your game. If you’re into custom furniture, there’s a whole setthemed around the New Leaf Mermaid series.This popular onechanges the little worms to be found in Stardew Valley into the Animal Crossing digspot marker. And if you feel like it, you canchange all the ducks in the game into Scoot. I haven’t tested these ones, so I can’t say for sure they won’t make your PC explode, but they’re cute ideas.