NOTE: This blog post contains some mild spoilers related to the Stardew Valley “endgame”, if you can call it that.
One of my favorite details in the world of Stardew Valley is the presence of junimos. You might know them as those funny little creatures who live in the community center and grant you rewards in exchange for filling out community bundles. Lore-wise, junimos are most similar to the folklore of gnomes or house fairies: they are happy to serve any human who leaves out food or gifts for them. Gameplay-wise, they are significantly more industrious. junimos build bridges, clear landslides, and even harvest crops for you once you build tiny homes for them.
In the base game, once the Community Center bundles are entirely filled, the junimos restore the building for human use and disappear. While the narrative of Stardew tries to indicate that we– the player– are setting the junimos free, as evidenced by the sorrow of the post-game Lost Jumino, it still feels as if we are kicking them out of a home they have had for years. (Furthermore, if we are setting them free by taking them from the Community Center, then what are we doing when we recruit junimos to little huts on our farm to convince them to harvest our crops? Are junimos being held hostage in our world by these huts?) In the end, junimos are never able to benefit from their own labor. They don’t get to use any of the amenities they built on our command, and they don’t get to eat any of the crops they harvest for us. We don’t even know if the junimos actually benefitted from the bundles we donated, or if they just used those materials in order to perform their magic restorations.
So far, the only solution I’ve found to this moral quandary… is an incredibly simple mod.
“Junimo Woods“, a mod designed by Nexus Mod user Draylon, has only one goal. As it states in its description, it adds junimos to the Secret Woods area in the game. There are only two settings– the player can choose for this mod to be active in all seasons, or only during summer. There are also a few other small tweaks to the Secret Woods, adding more slimes and ferns to the area. Overall, though, the mod has very little material impact on the game. The modder themselves states that they made this in only a few hours based on a prompt in a Discord server.
The modded junimos in the Secret Woods don’t interact with you or the world in any way. They simply bounce around atop the trees, having fun and doing their own thing. They’re more of a re-skin of the Secret Woods than a real gameplay element. The player cannot benefit from their existence except by admiring their aesthetic qualities. So why in the world would I think they solve anything?
But here’s the thing: the lack of interactivity is the point.
These junimos exist completely independent of humans. They are simply natural creatures, living their own lives. This mod allows junimos the freedom they don’t have in the base game. As a result, it enables the other junimos to be free, as well; if the Community Center junimos or farm junimos could be free in the woods, then it must be their choice to stay and assist humans. Or, perhaps, all of those groups of junimos are one and the same, and we can rest assured that our magical companions have some free time to dance about.
The deceptive simplicity of this mod adds to the lore and magic of the Stardew world in a very cute, pleasant way. I wish junimos existed in more aspects of the original game, but this mod helps soothe some of my thoughts on the matter. Plus, it makes the hunt for hardwood just a little more exciting.
