Sooooooooooo I got into the world of Stardew mods

[conuly]

This was probably a mistake - that game is addictive enough already! But nevertheless, here I am playing a game with SVE and also Ridgeside Village running concurrently. (And a few quality of life mods that seemed urgently necessary - things that allow me to jog along faster, stuff like that.)

This has gotten me thinking about a few things.

1. Is there a mod that will autochoose the correct tool for me? Like, if I'm busy chopping up random wood on my farm, and there's a rock, is there a mod that will toggle between the axe and pickax so I don't have to? Presuming I have them both in my inventory, I mean. I don't need more than that - I just want something to choose "axe or pickax" for me so I don't need to open that menu.

2. I am used to spring onions growing consistently in a few patches on Spring Onion Island. And now they don't, which some googling tells me is a known change with SVE. I do not like this. I like things to be the way I want them to be, which so often is the way I'm used to them being. I do not need as many spring onions as in the base game. They don't even need to be on Spring Onion Island! I just want a mod, if there is one, that allows a small number of spring onions to consistently grow in a single designated patch in the spring.

3. Pelican Town is, canonically, a small town. Especially in the base game it has all the hallmarks of something rust belty - only one small general store in competition with what is essentially Dollar General but moreso, one major industry (the mine) that's now basically closed, a few outlying farms, not enough children to support a school. But it's my understanding that in real life, towns like that have a weirdly flipped demographic bell curve - very few young adults, lots of older-middle-aged to old people and their kids/grandkids who are too young to leave.

So why are there so few older NPCs? SVE does not seem to remedy this much - most NPCs appear to be young adults, like (presumably) your own character, or possibly middle aged adults. Even the farmers, which - haha, no, most farmers are Boomers, and this is a growing problem. (Though there is such a thing as too much realism. Most newbie farmers like our own main character end up leaving and going to something less backbreaking and more profitable.)

I'm just saying, there need to be more NPCs who are clearly 50+, because that's what you'd expect.

Comments

[viggorlijah]

The mods for Stardew made it a whole new game for me, it is delightful to see how other people approach it. My daughter in law is playing coral island now which she says is similar in vibe to Stardew.

[conuly]

My sister and I are so different in so many ways. I mentioned that I'd downloaded a lot of NPC mods - mods to expand their dialog so it's worthwhile to keep talking to them once they're already at 10 hearts, mods to add new NPCs, mods to allow you to see 10 and 14 heart events with people you aren't dating or anything - and apparently the NPCs and storyline is not the draw of this game for her. It's all about the grind.

LOL, actually, I knew that. When we play together, she's the one going to the mine or running the farm every day, and I'm running around talking to everybody and giving them daily gifts.

[dorchadas]

The last part reminds me of a review I read of Stardew Valley from someone who grew up on a farm, and how odd they found the idealized yearning for a job that is literally the worst job in human history, so bad that humans left farms in droves to go work in dangerous early industrial era mines and factories because it was better than subsistence tenant farming.

I think the reason for the plethora of young adults is entirely to provide relationship options for the main character, and having done that, there's less room to then make the demographics make sense without ballooning up the number of NPCs too much. This does make me wonder if any mods try to fix the demographics, or if the designer was working on different assumptions due to the cozy fantasy setting. From my own experience, Chiyoda had pretty reasonable demographics but it was also 10,000 people--the towns further up in the mountains had more problems, like how Geihoku's school closed in 2010 due to lack of students.

Finally, I thought it was hilarious that SVE (which I have installed but have never actually played) went out of their way to take spring onions off of "Spring Onion Island."

[conuly]

Farming is such a crap job that historians are rather at a lack to explain why humans ever decided to take it up in the first damn place. As near as I can tell, the best answer is "path dependency" - you start doing a little agriculture so you can have a reliable supply of luxuries, and before you know it you're locked in to something which is objectively worse in every measure over hunter-gathering.