How to Install and Remove Mods in Stardew Valley

For the Stardew Valley player who's looking for an easy how-to on modding.

Since Stardew Valley doesn't have official mod support on Steam yet, installing and removing them can pose a challenge for some players. It's important to note before trying to alter your game experience, that you should back up your save progress and all your content files in the case that a mod doesn't work correctly or you want to return back to the normal game experience.

You can do this by copying your Saves and Content folders and placing them in a safe place. You can typically find these folders in these locations: C:\Users\insertusernamehere\AppData\Roaming\StardewValley\Saves and C:\Programs Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Stardew Valley\Content.

Do this every time before you install mods, just to be safe.

If you’re having trouble with installing and removing mods in Stardew Valley, we encourage you to try SDVMM, which is a Stardew Valley ModManager. It’s a community developed application that installs SMAPI (the Stardew Modding API that is required for certain mods), keeps SMAPI updated to the latest version, and assists with overall mod maintenance. It’s a great utility to use, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s still being updated, and only supports very basic features such as installing, deactivating, and deleting mods. Try SDVMM on nexusmods.com.

If you’re interested in maintaining mods on your own, the first thing you should do is figure out which mods you want to try. This is because mods may require different versions of SMAPI in order to work correctly. You can typically find mod requirements in the description and reading the description is very important since it will tell you everything you need to know in order to get the mod to work.

Let’s assume that all the mods you want to try require the latest version of the Stardew Modding API. If this is the case, you can find all versions of it on Github including the latest release. If you have a Windows PC, Download, extract the files and run install.exe. If you have a Mac or Linux, download, extract, open a terminal and run ‘mono install.exe’. The latest version of SMAPI does all the work for you including installing TrainerMod (something many mods also require). Once you’ve installed it, access your Stardew Valley Steam folder. The path typically resembles something close to this: C:\Programs Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Stardew Valley.

You’ll see a folder called Mods and an executable called StardewModdingAPI.exe. These will be important once you've installed the mod you want to use. Once you've downloaded the mod, extract its contents into the Mods folder. This will usually consist of an insertmodnamehere.dll and insertmodnamehereconfig.ini. Once you've done this, you should now be able to play the game with the mod. You can do this by clicking on StardewModdingAPI.exe. If you've done everything correctly, the game should now run with the mod applied.

Removing a mod is as simple as deleting all remnants of it from the Mods folder. If you're experiencing difficulties, just restore all your files using the backups suggested earlier. Hopefully this guide was helpful and answered any questions about installing and removing mods in Stardew Valley. Let's all hope that Steam Workshop support is coming soon.

 For more on Stardew Valley on Indie Obscura, discover how to find a prismatic shard, find out when Stardew Valley is coming to consoles, and free yourself from the shackles of marriage by learning how to get a divorce.

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