After booting up Stardew Valley with mods installed, at first, gameplay was nearly the same. I still woke up, watered my oversized plots by hand (My fear of the mines means that I’ve only reached a meager level 30– with no iron in sight, I’m forced to water my crops by hand. It’s a big time sink, so I’m making progress day-by-day in hopes of optimizing my farm chores soon). Go fishing and foraging if it’s too late to mine Give any villagers I bump into random fruits and flowers in an uncoordinated attempt at friendship-building. Hope that I run into whoever I need to give that quest item to, or that I’ll remember closing time for Pierre’s and the other shops.
However, this time, something was different– after opening my map, I noticed villager icons hovering over their homes and different spots in the map. This was thanks to my my mod of choice– the NPC Map Locations mod.
Types of mods like these– those that provide information players would either have to learn firsthand or search online –venture into what many players might view as cheating. For me, it’s simply an individual choice of preferred playstyle rather than a moral dilemma, a viewpoint constructed with some of my early experiences with video games. My first exposure to games was watching walkthroughs on YouTube long before I owned any games of my own. And even after growing my collection, walkthroughs and wiki-searching remained an integral part of my experience. So I don’t feel the need restrain myself from looking up information on a game. These days, the majority of my playthroughs have had minimal wiki-consulting, but it doesn’t bother me to look up information if I want. In fact, since I have so little free time to dedicate to games, I’d rather not waste them agonizing over small details that are easily solved with a search through the wiki.
With Stardew Valley, the frustrations have been minimal, but mainly revolved around not being able to find villagers at opportune times (i.e. to fulfill quests and weekly talking and gift quotas). So the NPC Map Locations mod was a welcome addition, streamlining my process of interacting with the villagers, a perpetual struggle to fit in my schedule. It bridged the gap between gameplay itself and the gameplay-related activity of scrounging the wiki, the online space of the Stardew Valley Wiki and the local space of the Stardew Valley app on my laptop. While both spaces constitute my gameplay experience, the need to navigate between the two consistently breaks immersion; I must minimize Stardew to pull up a new Google Chrome tab or pause the world in my inventory to search up information on my phone. The NPC Map Locations mod erased the distance between my two modes of playing Stardew, creating a more immersive and streamlined experience. To further optimize gameplay, I want to seek out more mods like this, perhaps ones that shows current items stocked in stores so I wouldn’t have to visit the wiki or waste time running to the store to find out. And finally, supplementing these types of mods with content-adding ones to provide more ways for me to enjoy gameplay.
