I am sure that the more you play Stardew Valley the more you will hear about modding the game.
At first glance the first thoughts are: That’s cheating! You are not alone with that thought. In my opinion modding is a personal choice and tetters on that fine edge of what is perceived to be cheating.
Yes, it is cheating as the player that mods have added things to enhance their experience. Maybe cut corners with mods that eases the experience that the player may find tedious or even dread doing.
Is it really cheating? In my opinion like anything else it is a helper to my game playing. I have chosen expansions that are fantastic that I would not have played with the non-modded version. Mods that I have downloaded have replaced things that normally is done, such as watering crops, pets and fishing, just to name a few. Which has freed up time to focus on other tasks.
For me it is not cheating. I still have to grind away in other areas in order to complete certain things. Mods have enhanced my experience by leaps and bounds.
I would like to say that players should play the game non modded when they first start playing. This gives you the time to earn honestly your achievements. You will enjoy the gains much more, not to mention you will have learned so much that it outvalues the modding. I did not start modding until nearly 6 months ago. That is another story to tell! I had already achieved a lot of the goals on my own, so I started to think about modding. I am glad that I did. I was comfortable in my knowledge of the game and experience in levels.
Of course, even before modding there are always new things to find out about. It is amazing that you can play then out of nowhere something totally surprises you! Never a real dull moment.
Modding took my game to another level, it sometimes feels like I am starting a new game. Which in many cases it is a new game!
My biggest mistake when I started was lack of knowledge on what I was doing. You might say I jumped into a pool that was filled with cement and no water. Looking through all the mods available was mind boggling. I had no idea the number of mods were out there for Stardew Valley. I took the plunge. That was mistake #1 for me. I did not know what I was doing and did not research either. I began downloading. This was all on my first farm. I worked so hard on it over a year and a half only to have it broken due to my novice decisions.
I paid no heed to memory restrictions which is really important. I did not look at the requirements with seriousness. I thought you just download and go have fun. At first, it did not appear that I was doing anything wrong. But there were all kinds of wrong coming up. It was slow to surface. It was taking so long to load I could have walked around the block before it loaded completely. I knew then there was something drastically wrong. I started researching and researching. Finding out how to fix this. I deleted all the mods and started over. At the time I had downloaded 845 mods to my game. So, I deleted mods. After downloading, deleting and repeating this 3 times a sane person would just stop! Oh, not me I am no quitter!
After failed attempts and frequent dumb assery I realized I should take a look at why these things were happening. For one I did not have the PC with an abundance of memory, and the graphics card was not the best. Who would have thought? haha
The end result was my beloved first profile was just a blank black screen. When this happened, I nearly cried. Yes, you read that right. But it taught me a wonderful lesson, read, learn and use knowledge in modding.
I started a new profile. With this one I had learned by my mistakes. Well, sorta! I learned so much from googling and especially Reddit. If I had a question I looked it up.
I also made a new profile. I read about the how and why and knew it was what I should do. I also upgraded and purchased a gaming computer to play games on instead of my other computer. I taught myself how to read the logs, especially Smapi which is really vital to your game health. You can spot the problems reading the logs. That was a slow process for me as the logs are sooo long! Now I know how to read the logs it has helped me in so many areas. If there is a problem or something is broken, you can find it and then fix it.
It’s a learning curve. But you need to know your PC’s limitations in order to successfully add mods. If you do not have the memory the game will stutter, lag and even freeze. This is just one cause of the previous mentioned down falls.
Take your time in this adventure! By doing this you will have a much better experience.
Modding is a personal choice. Stop thinking about the cheating aspect and focus on the game and have fun with the mods.
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