The new content patch for Stardew Valley has added a lot to the base game, but also disrupted the game’s significant mod scene. Now that things have had a few days to calm down, here are some of the most useful mods we’ve found for Stardew that work for version 1.6 of the game.
The Best Fan-Created Mods for Stardew Valley 1.6
Stardew Valley turned 8 years old last February. Over the course of those eight years, it’s developed a large and eccentric mod scene that affects almost every individual aspect of the game. If there’s any one thing that annoys you about Stardew Valley’s mechanics, somebody has modded it to be significantly less so. Mods are one of the big reasons why fans of the game will recommend that you play it on PC.
Here are several mods for Stardew Valley that I’ve tested with the new patch, and which I thought were particularly interesting or useful.
1: Automate
One of the elements of Stardew Valley that’s aged the worst is how production machines can only craft one item at a time. If you’re trying to smelt metal bars, press truffles into oil, or smoke fish, the only way to do so in big batches is to make multiple devices. When compared to newer farming games like Palworld, it can be a real drag.
Automate changes that by letting you mix a little Factorio into your Stardew Valley. The simplest way to use it is to set up your production machines right next to an in-game chest full of materials. Automate will automatically pull materials from the chest, use them to create items, and deposit the items back into the same chest. All you have to do is clean out the chest once it’s done.
Automate has a few other bells and whistles, like letting you use a line of ground tiles as an ersatz connector, but the base version fixes one of my biggest problems with Stardew Valley. If you’re going to mod your game at all, start with Automate. It should be baked into the retail version by now.
2: Bigger Backpack
By the mid-game, 36 inventory slots fill up fast. Bigger Backpack alleviates some of that by adding the option to buy a 4th backpack upgrade from Pierre for 50,000g.
It’ll be a while before you can afford it on a new game, but Bigger Backpack adds some QOL to Stardew without feeling like a straight-up cheat. It's simple, but there's no reason not to install it if you're already messing with mods.
Note: if you quit your modded game with a Bigger Backpack, then launch it again without mods, you still have the Bigger Backpack, but can only access it via your quick-select (LB/RB on controller). Don't freak out if it looks like you've lost all your tools.
3: Convenient Inventory
There are a lot of features in Convenient Inventory that I can’t imagine I’d ever need, and at least one of them, the ability to tag items as “favorites,” doesn’t seem to work consistently.
That being said, you spend a lot of time in Stardew Valley on decluttering your inventory, especially after dungeon runs or big harvests. If you’ve ever had to spend a solid few minutes trying to remember your own filing system after a trip to the Mines, Convenient Inventory does most of that for you in one button press.
You can even set up a network of chests on adjacent squares and, with one button, sort everything in your inventory into every adjacent chest at once. Even if you never crack into its more advanced features, that makes Convenient Inventory well worth your time.
4: Free Love
This is the mod that famously allowed one Stardew player to marry over 60 characters at once. Free Love removes the one-spouse cap, so you can fill your farmhouse with every bachelor or bachelorette in Pelican Town, along with as many children as you think you can stand.
That’s its marquee feature, but Free Love features a full suite of options that allow you to tweak the details of marriage and relationships in Stardew. If you’re a returning player who wants to get married almost as soon as you get off the bus, or you’d like to divorce your character’s current spouse without all the weird punitive hassle from the base game, Free Love can set that up for you.
Note: at time of writing, Free Love hasn’t been “officially” updated for patch 1.6, but I found a fixed version on a fan forum that works well enough. A full release via NexusMods is reportedly in the works.
5: Longer Days
In Stardew time, 10 minutes is 7 seconds in the real world, so a dawn-to-dusk, 6 AM to 2 AM workday is 14 minutes long. Considering Stardew’s reputation as one of the great “cozy” games, it’s strange how you’re almost always racing the clock.
If that bugs you, Longer Days is for you. This mod lets you adjust the rate at which real time corresponds to Stardew time, so each game day can be up to six times longer. Longer Days also features optional toggles that can accelerate the clock and/or restore your Energy whenever your character sits down.
This doesn’t sound like much on paper, but it really changes Stardew’s overall pace and power curves when an in-game day lasts over an hour. You can accomplish virtually everything you’d want to do, from farming to friendship grinds to dungeon exploration, and still have time to kill. With Longer Days, I can actually leave the Mines, empty out my inventory, and have time left to go back and get a few floors further in.
Longer Days also doesn’t seem to affect the internal timer on your machines, which accelerates the pace at which you can churn out artisan goods. My Preserve Jars were finishing their production cycle up to twice a day, so I ended up with piles of Jelly and Pickles to sell. It turns out time really is money.
If you’re looking to make your Stardew Valley experience extra cozy by removing its time crunch, or if you just want to carve out some schedule space for minor chores like redecoration, Longer Days is a good place to start. It hasn’t been officially updated for 1.6 yet, but still works fine on my PC.
6: Lookup Anything
One of the mildly annoying things about Stardew Valley is how much of it takes place “under the hood.” Many of its systems run off math that you aren’t allowed to see, such as befriending villagers, crop growth cycles, or your own experience grind.
Lookup Anything changes that by adding a detailed inspection menu to anything that’s underneath your cursor when you press F1. This includes your character, villagers, farm animals, machines, crops, fences, or any other static object in the game world. The menu will tell you everything you ordinarily aren’t permitted to know at a glance, such as sale value, durability, likes, dislikes, or how far you’ve got to go before your next heart or skill level.
That being said, much of what Lookup Anything can tell you is determined by its own internal list, rather than datamining it on the spot from the game's files. For example, it's been my experience that a lot of what it can tell you about fish is a little wonky, especially in conjunction with any player-created content packs you might have installed. Take much of what Lookup Anything tells you about items with a grain of salt.
For new players, you can set this to automatically record anything new that you learn about a character; for returning players, you can turn this into an in-game one-button reference FAQ. Lookup Anything does demystify a lot of Stardew Valley, so I’d argue you don’t want to use it on a first run, but for all its jank, it’s a big quality-of-life bonus for returning players.
7: Stardew Valley Expanded
If you want an idea of how much impact Stardew Valley Expanded has had on the base game, its author announced on March 19 that they were involved in the production of Patch 1.6. At this point, I wonder how much longer it’ll be before parts of Expanded show up in the unpatched version of Stardew, because a few of them arguably should.
Expanded is a massive add-on pack for Stardew that adds a substantial amount of content to the game, including new buildings, maps, characters, recipes, story beats, fish, and crops. It also fleshes out a few under-explored parts of Stardew, such as letting you officially join the Adventurer’s Guild, and gives several one-note characters like Morris and Marlon their own storylines. If you’re looking for an excuse to replay Stardew Valley, Expanded is arguably better for the purpose than Patch 1.6 was, as it changes and refines quite a lot about the baseline experience. To be fair, there are parts of it that feel like fanfiction, but not egregiously so.
While SVE is rapidly approaching the fan-project breaking point where it should probably change all the names and become its own original work – the 2.0 update will take you to a wholly new environment, Castle Village, where you’re forced to start almost from scratch – it remains one of the big must-see mods in Stardew Valley. It’s not simply additive, but transformative.
