The quote found in the title of this blog post is taken from the Nexus Mods page for the “Stardew Valley Expanded” mod. The creator of this mod, FlashShifter, describes themself as a “modder hobbyist,” and their goal as to “give the player the magical feeling they had when they first played Stardew Valley.” Beneath the deceptively simple phrasing of this goal is a multitude of assumptions: first, that there is a “magical feeling” one gets while playing Stardew; second, that that feeling is fleeting and fades once the player becomes more familiar with the game; and third, that this feeling can be replicated or brought back to life by adding more content to the game. What is particularly interesting about the way that FlashShifter presents their own mod within these assumptions is their attempt to take on ConcernedApe’s original artistic intentions, the mod staying “as true to the source material as it can.” However, what does it mean to “stay true” to a text such as Stardew Valley, and does Stardew Valley Expanded accomplish this task?
To offer preliminary answers to these questions, I turn to two additional texts: the Stardew Valley Expanded Wiki and a YouTube video by SharkyGames that serves as a basic overview of some of the most obvious changes made to the game by the mod. The Stardew Valley Expanded Wiki seems to be in some ideological accord with the mod itself: its format and structure hews closely to the Stardew Valley Wiki, such as sectioning off content in categories for characters, items, and locations. Individual pages resemble their counterparts on the Stardew Valley Wiki as well–pages for new characters introduced by the mod are divided by their schedules, item preferences, and heart events, while new fish can be found in a large table that tells the reader their location, difficulty, and price.
The Stardew Valley Expanded Wiki also allows for easy access to the text of character interactions without having to engage in the time-consuming labor or building up relationships with them. As of March 2022 (as the mod is updated regularly with additional content), the Wiki displays six new marriage candidate NPCs and eight new non-marriage candidates, though some of these are characters who exist in the base game but can now be interacted with further and friended. For example, the wizard Magnus can now be married, and characters such as Gunther the museum curator, Morris the JojaMart manager, and Marlon of the Adventurer’s Guild are now giftable friends. While each of these new or expanded characters could be analyzed in depth both in isolation and in the context of the original game, I would like to turn particularly to Andy, one of several new farmers introduced to Pelican Town and its surroundings in the mod.
Andy is an entirely new NPC in Stardew Valley Expanded, and one of several in the mod who own their own farm, which introduces a dynamic that itself distinguishes the mod from the base game, where the player character is the only farmer. Andy is the owner of Fairhaven Farm, which is placed near the sewage drainage pipe at the southern end of the Cindersnap Forest. Despite the Wiki telling us that Andy has never married, he is not a marriage candidate, and several of his heart events involve conflict between Andy and other characters, most notably his two-heart event, in which he angrily responds to news from Mayor Lewis about a hike in property taxes. This preoccupation with taxes is further developed in later heart events as a response to a recent painful recession that drove out several of Andy’s closest friends prior to the start of the game, but regardless of his reasoning, Andy’s explicitly political concerns are a fascinating piece of original content. While one could argue that Stardew‘s base game itself does not shy away from content that could be considered politically relevant, particularly in reference to the tension between predatory-capitalist JojaMart and the rundown symbol of past rural prosperity that is the Community Center, it is nonetheless meaningful that FlashShifter chose to bring in a contemporary real-world political debate not reflected in the base game for their mod. An assumption is made that this conflict over property taxes has a place in ConcernedApe’s world as much as JojaMart or Kent’s struggles with wartime PTSD, as FlashShifter presents their own mod as being primarily an extension of that previous world. However, Andy’s storyline serves as an illustrative example of how this desire to simply extend the source text is somewhat reductive. While FlashShifter’s intention may not be to complicate or critique Stardew Valley as a text, the end result is that the political world of the Valley is complicated by the introduction of tax conflict, which has far-reaching implications for the political structure of the world of Stardew that remain out of sight.
However, I want to complicate my own reading of complication into Stardew Valley Expanded by turning to a video by YouTuber SharkyGames on the mod. Even the title of the video, “Stardew Valley Just Got A Whole Lot BIGGER & BETTER!? – Expanded Mod,” contains crucial interpretive work: Stardew Valley Expanded is enveloped into Stardew Valley itself, and it represents a progression of not only quantity of NPCs, locations, and assets, but of overall quality. SharkyGames’ video largely consists of the player character running around new areas of the map and briefly interacting with some of the new NPCs to give the viewer a sense of the most obvious of the additions, but the video ends with a sort of brief review on the part of SharkyGames, who describes the mod as “almost feel[ing] like a new game, like you’re playing Stardew Valley 2.” This comment from someone who has spent extensive time playing both the base game and exploring the additions made by the mod can perhaps point us in a useful direction for understanding what it means to “stay true to the source material” when modding a game and whether or not Stardew Valley Expanded accomplishes this goal. It is illustrative that SharkyGames describes the mod not as a separate entity from the game but as feeling like one, and even more impressively to them, feeling like a new game that could stand on its own from the original. For this player, the mod does not literally create a new game that can be sifted out from the text of Stardew Valley, which is perhaps a testament to its accuracy in replicating the look and feel of the original game, but it also adds enough to the game to be an exciting re-entry point for players who feel that they have exhausted its content. SharkyGames’ comment, then, suggests a resounding victory for FlashShifter’s stated goal, in spite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that the mod’s additions are fundamentally working on the original text in such a way that novel interpretations and readings can be made from it.
