In 2017, community modder Pathoschild created a popular Stardew Valley mod named “Automate”, which has become an essential tool for producing sustainable income within the simulator game that many experienced Stardew Valley players like myself can no longer play without. As of my writing on March 4th, 2021, the mod has been endorsed 35,636 and downloaded by 543,760 unique parties. The download page was last updated just 5 days ago, and a cursory look through the author’s logs shows that they have been continuously updating and releasing new versions of their project at least once a month in recent years. With over 2,455 community posts reporting bugs, asking for help, and expressing appreciation for the author’s work, the Automate mod has built a robust community of its own and substantially shaped the gameplay experiences of many Stardew Valley fans.
Aptly tagged for “performance optimization” on NexusMods.com, the Automate mod facilitates the automatic transfer of materials between chests and machines on the farm where this act is usually manual by default. For instance, if a player places a chest and a keg next to one another, she can simply load as many fruits and vegetables into the chest as she wants, effectively queuing them for processing in the keg; as the wines and beers finish processing in the keg, the Automate mod stacks them back into the chest, and another round of processing begins seamlessly. Through many rounds of expansions, the mod has become compatible with nearly every machine by the loosest definitions within the game.
The Automate mod adds immense efficiency to production processes in Stardew Valley: in an un-modded game, players can usually only load one item into a machine at a time, and they have to check back frequently to manually remove the individual output, and so on. The time lost to the manual movement of items, the frequent travels back to the farm, and machine idle time can all add up to significantly constrain output.
Through a historical lens, the Automate seems to simulate an industrial revolution right on your farm. You quickly learn that you can design highly profitable assembly lines for products that require multiple processes and efficient use of time: for instance, you can take advantage of the Automate mod with use of both a crystalarium and a furnace, and you can continuously replicate quartz out of essentially nothing while also refining it in only one step. The analogy is also well-understood by the community, which often refers to these arrangements as “factories” and build them out to large scales of rows and rows of machines running endlessly, reminiscent of the imagery of corporate dystopia. In a bonus feature, the author also allowed chests and machines to be connected with a path, effectively resolving spatial limitations with the use of a “conveyor belt”.
By tweaking game mechanics, the Automate mod certainly impacts the gameplay experience for those who use it, but it is interesting to interrogate the extent to which it does so. For instance, I felt like the Automate mod made Stardew Valley tend slightly toward the accumulation focus of neoliberal aesthetics as production became more prolific more easily. However, the goals in Stardew Valley do not necessarily align with this emphasis, as it is not entirely salient that more money and more output result in more rewards for the player (in Pelican Town, at least). Due to the absence of online competitions or scoreboards, the glory of making the most money also loses its regular luster. If anything, the mod introduces new ways of engaging with the game that liberate you from tedious tasks that never quite met the intended purpose of teaching you to appreciate nature and got old quickly (as if nature is about harvesting crops in one click!), while opening new doors for strategizing or innovating more creatively in the game.
On the other hand, the community’s discourse around the Automate mod—primarily in the ways in which it is equated to factory processes—reveals privileged cultural understandings and idealizations of the manufacturing industry. Notably, the creation of “Automate factories” does not also bring about the myriad issues and byproducts that are commonly tied to real factories in the world today, such as unethical labor practices and environmental impacts. Stardew Valley’s audience is most likely primarily comprised of people who disproportionately benefit from the cheap outputs of factories in the world today without bearing their burdens, so it is not unusual that their understandings of factories are overwhelmingly positive and one-dimensional, focused on only the element of technology and productivity.
