There are already several lists for recommended mods for Stardew Valley. This one focuses on:
- Compatibility with Stardew Valley 1.5.4
- Compatibility with Splitscreen and proper Controller support
- Stay as close to vanilla experience as possible while enhancing it
- Internationalization support
You need to be familiar with Stardew Valley Modding. I can recommend this guide: Annosz's Stardew Valley modding guide (this list is based on Annosz' guide)
I'm using the following symbols:
- ❤️: A mod that improves the vanilla experience and so good it should be part of the base game
- 💚: A good mod which deserves to be in your game
- 💛: This mod has it's drawbacks (most likely not compatible with a better mod or slightly unbalanced), and you should decide whether you want to cope with these or not
- 💔 I'm against installing this mod (most likely it's unbalanced, ruines immersion or crashes the game)
The Mod Update Menu extends the Main Menu of the game with an extra window where you can find informations about your mods. It warns you if any of them has available updates (or if your SMAPI is not up-to-date), which is very useful - this way you can prevent errors caused by incompatible versions. It even shows the download link, so you can instantly go to the Nexus and download the new version.
The only problem is that it only knows Nexus mods. This means you should always download your mods from here - but there are always some mods you find on the forums (for example Content Patcher replacements) which show up as errors. Apart from this, they only mean a minor inconvinience: they will simply be left out of version checkings, and have a very annoying red color in the menu.
There are a few mods that do not change the gameplay, but extend modding possibilities (for example enhance SMAPI), and are required by other mods. This means you have to install these before you can use the mods depending on them.
Of course you can choose to only install one if you want to use any mods that requires it, but I think it's easier to just intall them now. They do not change the game by any means, and they are required in mods that are present in this guide, so you can spare some debugging and headache if you just do it now.
- ❤️ PyTK - Platonymous Toolkit: Required by a lot of other mods, eg. Climates of Ferngill and Mermaid Island
- ❤️ Json Assets: Required by a lot of other mods, eg. Poppi's Kawaii Valley and Line Sprinklers
- ❤️ Farm Type Manager: Required by a moderate ammount of other mods, eg. Better Quarry Redux and Stardew Valley Expanded
- ❤️ Producer Framework Mod: Required by a moderate ammount of other mods, eg. Coffee Maker
- ❤️ SpaceCore: Required by a few other mods, eg. Cooking Skill and Artisan Valley
- ❤️ Stardust Core: Required by a few other mods, eg. Happy Birthday
- ❤️ Stardew Hack: Required by a few other mods, eg. Bigger Backpack and Yet Another Harvest With Scythe Mod
Regarding Graphic mods, personally for a first playthrough I would like to enjoy as much vanilla pixel art as possible. As such, this list here is quite small.
- 💚 Elle's Grass Replacement: Adds beautiful grass to the game, which is configurable from the config file.
- ❤️ Elle's Seasonal Vanilla Buildings: Adds snow to the rooftop in winter, some palette changes and other stuff. The vanilla buildings in this game look so out of place in winter, you really would want to have this mod installed.
- Alternatively 💚 Elle's Seasonal Buildings: These replacement buildings look really good. But as stated in the beginning, the focus here is to stay as close to vanilla pixel art as possible. Would totally recommend for a second playthrough though.
- ❤️ Seasonal Cute Characters: Adds at least 4 separate outfits for every character, with other costumes such as wedding dresses, festival clothings or raincoats. This is unique and tailor-made (heh) for every character to match their personality, making the game more colorful and immersive. But the awesomeness does not stop here, because this mod also includes new portraits for every one of the clothes. These pictures are made with the original art style, and are perfectly integrated into the Stardew Valley feeling. However, it makes you unable to install any other character portrait mod, so if you want anime portraits or anything else, do not use this one.
- 💛 Ui Info Suite 2: Hands down one of the most useful mods in Stardew Valley. It adds indicators for various things: current luck, Queen of Sauce, bithdays, harvestable animal products, placable item ranges, NPC locations and other... None of these make the game too easy or ruin the fun, theye are selected very carefully and really make playing more comfortable. Normally a must-have, however as of the time of writing, it does not have controller support.
Notice that be installing Ui Info Suite the following mods became redundant (and can cause error):
- 💛 CJB Show Item Sell Price: Shows sell price on items.
- 💛 NPC Map Locations: Shows NPC map locations (installing over UI Info Suite will display everything twice, and looks very bad).
- 💛 Range Display: Range display for sprinklers, scarecrows, bee houses, and junimo huts.
- 💛 Simple Crop Label: Display the type of crop on mouse over - useful to see it when its still in seed state.
- 💛 Better Ranching: Shows harvestable animal product and love needed warnings on animals.
- 💛 Experience Bars: It is not the same to UI Info suite, as this shows the experiance bars constantly on the screen - but as the design isn't good and the bars are quite annoying, I don't recommend it.
- 💛 Lookup Anything: If you like it, go for it, but I think it's kind of an overkill. It is kind of an ingame Wikipedia, but the informations shown in other mods are enough for this, no need to install this one too.
- ❤️ Gift Taste Helper: A helpful mod thet shows the loved gift for each person in the calendar and in the Villagers menu (not inluding universally loved gifts). If you feel like it's a cheat, you can modify the game's configuration to only show gifts that your character already knows if the person loves it, so you will have the opportunity to figure them out yourself.
- ❤️ Better Artisan Good Icons: Really immersive addition to the game. With this, you can immediately see what kind of artistan goods you have in your inventory.
- ❤️ Fruit Trees with Signs (For pictures check the old Nexus page): Not exactly an UI mod but gives a little sign to your fruit trees that show which type of fruit they produce. Most useful in sapling phase, as trees almost all loke the same that time.
- ❤️ Skip Intro: Well, yeah, sorry ConcernedApe, but starting the game is just long.
- Convinience mods:
- ❤️ Yet Another Harvest With Scythe Mod: This mods lets you harvest any plant using you scythe, which makes your farming much faster. I never had fun while I harvested bigger fields, with hundreds of cauliflower or pumpkin ripened at the same time, so I don't feel this mod unimmersive or cheaty.
- ❤️ Convenient Chests: Perfect mod, which offers two must have features: quick store items in a nearby chest where it is already present with Q and using items from nearby chests for crafting (without the need to directly put it in your inventory). These features get rid of 99% of frustrating item searching and storage management related flipping out.
- ❤️ Bigger Backpack: Adds a forth row in you backpack which can be bought at Pierre's the same way as the other two.
- ❤️ No Fence Decay: Fences do not get broken, which I think was a very annoying thing in the base game.
- ❤️ Horse Whistle: Press the V button, and your horse will teleport to you, giving you the ability to make your way faster through the town. Must have mod.
- ❤️ AutoGate (For pictures check the old Nexus page): Adds cool purchusable features to the fridge (be sure to access it from the right side). This mod opens and closes gates on the fences where you get near them. A huge time/annoyance saver for every farmer!
- ❤️ Artifact System Fixed (For pictures check the old Nexus page): If you look at the mods description you can see numerous reasons why the artifact system needs a fix. For now, let it be enough that a random guy thought that it is not fair and some artifacts are ridiculously hard to get, and I agree with him, so I recommend you to install this.
- 💛 Increased Artifact Spots: Even with Artifact System Fixed it is really hard to restore the museums full collection, and it depends mostly on luck. This is why I like to 'alter' this luck a bit, and have more artifact spots. But be careful! This mode gives waay too much artifact spots by default, so i suggest you to immediately edit the config.json for a more moderate setting (like 15 and false).
- 💚 No Soil Decay Redux: I really disliked when I dug up all my garden on the last day of a season just to see that on the next day I have to start it again if I want to plant any crops because they magically disappeared overnight. However this mod has a lot of issues: somethimes fertilizers still get removed (just the soil remains) and on the beggining of a new season sprinklers also only water the "supposedly remaining" tilled ground. It's also annoying that if you dig an artifact spot anywhere in town, that hole also remains there. So only install this mod, if you will hate tilling more than cleaning up digspots after yourself.
- Making the game more detailed:
- ❤️ Dragon's Advancing Sprinklers (Content Patcher): A real must have: you can now create higher level springlers with recipies using the lover levels. From now on the starting basic sprinklers won't go to waste!
- 💔 Note that Advancing Sprinklers is broken.
- ❤️ Better Panning: Without any doubt, panning is the most useless Community Center reward. As the mod asks: "How many of you finish the fish tank and then place the copper pan into a chest to never be seen again?": so it adds better rewards (similar to a treasure chest) and improves placing for panning spots so you can actually reach them.
- ❤️ Better Quarry Redux: Without any doubt, the quarry is the second most useless Community Center reward. But this mods improves the ore and geode chances in the quarry so it won't be like a quarter as effective as actually going to the mines.
- ❤️ Winter Grass: Makes grass grow in the winter too, so you don't have to rely on Marne for hay.
- ❤️ Cacti Hurt You: A fun little mod that makes you lose a minimal heath when you bumb into a cactus.
- 💔 Happy Birthday: lets you pick a date when all characters give you gift and compliments based on their heart level. A must-have immersive addition to the base game. However, as of version 2.2.1, it does not work for split screen and for me at least it caused a game crash during save.
- 💔 Chests Anywhere: This mod is usually too much for what I call 'ideal game experience': accessing every chest from anywhere ruins the game, so if you want to use it that way, I change my rating to 💔. But if used well, this mod has a lot to offer: I already talked about a good use at the Chest Label System mod, which is broken, but van be replaced by this. It is also useful with Automate, as it has options to exclude a chest from autmating it's content by machines.
- 💔 Automate: Automating every process on the farm makes your life so easy that it can even considered a cheat, but I just like the fact that I don't have to stand next to my furnace to make that 10 copper bar so much i don't even care about that. The main idea behind this mod is that machines can take out ingredients from the chests around them and place ready products in them, but it has a lot of usages, so I recommend checking out it's page before installing. Also, be careful, because it is not fun if your misplaced Charcoal Kilt converts all of your wood into coal... (actually, the next mod helpes with this problem).
- 💔 DeepWoods Adds a new well-designed, mine-like part to the forest. It is a good addition to the game, has a nice balance and difficulty, and a ton of interesting encounters and events. It is compatible with a lot of other mods. However, it crashed for me several times on save when playing split screen. As of version 1.9.6 beta, I do not recommend installing it.
- 💔 Part of the Community: This mod introduces a lot new ways to improve friendship with villagers. For example, talking to someone will boost the relationship with those who witness it, or giving a gift also raises heart level with it's family members. There are some complains that this mod can make friendship too easy, but truth to be told, for me it was the least favourite part of the game when I had to run around the village and give everyone gifts to make them like me. This mod makes this process more reasonable, and if you find it too much of a cheat you can still modify the friendship increasement from the different actions in the config file.
- 💔 Cooking Skill: Adds skill for cooking as the 6th available skill in the game, which is a welcomed addition. Cooked items will also have quality ratings from now, which mainly dpends on your skill.