I have always played Stardew Valley on my Nintendo Switch. I was fine in my obliviousness of the entirety of the game’s huge modding community. When we were asked to examine mods in Stardew Valley, however, I decided to borrow a copy of the game on steam, turned on my gaming computer that I haven’t gotten a single chance to use since I arrived at UChicago, and went onto Stardew Valley’s Nexus page searching for mods.
Faced with the barrage of the endless list of mods, I was dumbstruck. Not knowing what to try out first, I decided to rely on the vote of the masses and clicked the tab that says “POPULAR (ALL TIME).” Upon loading the page, I immediately looked at the most downloaded mods in this community and was curious to discover what they are and what made them stand out among the tens of thousands of user-created contents for Stardew Valley. Content Patcher and Stardew Valley API are not what I expected to be at the top of the leader board, and it is only at this point that I learned the relationship between the entirety of Stardew Valley modding community and these two simple tools.
4 million downloads each!
There are two types of mods in Stardew Valley, according to the omniscient and omnipotent Stardew Valley Wiki (Yes, I know I promised in my last post to try to not use it again, but alas here we are). The first type of mods work by replacing the game’s data files, which have the extension “.xnb”. The second type of mods, to my interest, is completely subsumed by the wiki under the category “SMAPI mods.” While XNB mods are difficult to manage and easily breaks with game updates, as they work by replacing original game files.
The Wiki has an entire list of reasons to why SMAPI is necessary for mods.
SMAPI, on the other hand, provides a framework for modding Stardew Valley serving as an API installed alongside the game’s executable files. It opens the modding community to a whole new possibility: using codes, instead of replacing XNB files, to create mods. It even checks for updates and errors for the player, making both the creation and use of mods considerably easier. Content Patcher, created by the same person (with the Nexus username Pathoschild), serves as an alternative to the XNB mods by loading XNB packs without altering the game’s files.
For me, it is fascinating to think how Pathoschild and his modding tools basically gave birth to a possibility space that would not be possible without SMAPI and Content Patcher. While SMAPI and Content Patcher are in no ways game content themselves, they are the intermediary that connects the vanilla content of Stardew Valley to a new possibility space that was not intended in the original game.
First, by allowing coding mods to work alongside Stardew Valley, SMAPI and Content Patcher superimposes a possibility space onto the original content of Stardew Valley, making everything in the game modifiable and invites the player to make this space for their own creativity, which can be expressed both in creating their own mods or by selecting and downloading specific mods that suit their creative and imaginative needs. While XNB mods are mostly limited in scale and are often only visual modifications, SMAPI and Content Patcher allows the birth of entirely new Pelican Town residents such as Shiko, new areas as in Stardew Valley Expanded and the Deep Woods, and even an entire new village of more than 50 residents.
This miraculous work would not be possible without SMAPI.
The meaning of SMAPI and Content Patcher as mods could be further complicated when one realizes that, for the millions of players that downloaded these tools, these two mods have essentially become a part of the game that is intangible yet quintessential to their play experience. It represents something that adds such fundamental possibilities to Stardew Valley that, to some people, is completely inseparable from Stardew Valley itself. It is a classic example of a mod so essential that it almost becomes a part of the player-text interaction of Stardew Valley.
SMAPI and Content Patcher are two of the very special mods that deserve attention, being so crucial and fundamental to the entirety of Stardew Valley modding community and, in a sense, having become an optional part of the game’s intangible modus operandi. It is also representative of an attempt by the player to antiprocedurally break out of the game’s initial possibility space designated by the designer to the player. Instead of conforming to the game, the player seeks to take control, to take the meaning-making into their own hands.
References:
“Modding:Player Guide/Getting Started.” Stardew Valley Wiki, Stardew Valley Wiki, 2 Mar. 2022, https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Modding:Player_Guide/Getting_Started.
“Modding:Using XNB Mods.” Stardew Valley Wiki, Stardew Valley Wiki, 7 Feb. 2022, https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Modding:Using_XNB_mods.
Pathoschild. “Pathoschild/SMAPI: The Modding API for Stardew Valley.” GitHub, 16 Jan. 2022, https://github.com/Pathoschild/SMAPI#:~:text=SMAPI%20rewrites%20mods’%20compiled%20code,the%20mod%20doesn’t%20break.
