With over 1.8 million unique downloads, the mod has its own thriving community
DevinDevin Hedegaard first noticed Stardew Valley in 2017. “I had recently graduated college and moved back home with my parents to find a job,” he explains. “My brother was playing some farming pixel game on his PlayStation 4.”
Six years later, Hedegaard is better known as FlashShifter, the creator of the wildly popular mod Stardew Valley Expanded. Expanded revitalized the game for many who had already put hundreds of hours into their farms and communities, with dozens of new characters, including six new marriage candidates; changes to the map, including a whole new continent to explore; and countless additions to events, crops, fish, furniture, and more. With over 1.8 million unique downloads on Nexus Mods, it is by far the most popular Stardew content mod.
It all started with Hedegaard devoting that much time to the game. He noticed it again while browsing the Nintendo eShop after seeing his brother play. He knew it was similar to Harvest Moon, a series he enjoyed, and it wasn’t too pricey. “So I decided, why not try it out?” he says. “Little did I know that it would be the equivalent of Alice falling down that rabbit hole.” “I wasn’t done yet. I wanted more,” he says. So he went to Nexus Mods, where he found an abundance of mods, and finished the game again, but this time with many mods installed. Even so, it wasn’t enough. “I still wanted more, but there wasn’t anything left,” he says. “So I started teaching myself how to make my mod.”
Hedegaard had earned a degree in accounting. He had no prior experience with the numerous skills required to create Stardew Valley Expanded. “I taught myself how to code, how to script, how to do data arrays, how to do pixel art,” he says, not to mention how to troubleshoot and connect with the community that grew up around the mod, which he never expected to become so popular.
Understandably, not all of these abilities appeared at the same time. After “roughly five months or half a year” of development, the first version of the mod was released in 2019 after “roughly five months or half a year” of teaching himself online and asking for advice in Stardew modding Discord channels when he got stuck. More than 30 new character events, three new map locations, changes to some areas of Pelican Town, and a new farm map were added.
Hedegaard now describes it as “very bare bones,” but the Stardew Valley community seemed to disagree at the time. “I got like 4,000 or 5,000 downloads in one day,” Hedegaard says. “Out of the blue, it blew up.” Although Stardew already had a thriving modding community, Expanded was the first major expansion mod, and players looking for more content for one of their favorite games jumped at the chance he offered, even if it wasn’t yet what it would become.
According to Hedegaard, he had no intention of constantly updating Expanded after its initial release, that came as a result of the overwhelming positive response from fans. For others, however, 1.0 already appeared to be a solid foundation upon which to build. “I feel like a lot of the buildings and a lot of the changes to the map that are still in the mod now were there, but there just wasn’t much purpose to them back then,” says Nathan Hardaker, better known as owner and moderator n8wes on the Expanded Discord server.
“But even then […] it really revitalized my love for the game,” said Hardaker. “I had already played Stardew Valley a lot. I had played through it a bunch of times. [Expanded] gave me more reason [to keep playing] with different things I could do.”
A key goal for Hedegaard, both during development and in the early release, has been to capture the feeling Hardaker describes. “Something I hear a lot from the community is that Stardew Valley Expanded blends in very well with the vanilla [unmodded] world,” he says. “And that was my goal all along. You should be able to encounter something and if you haven’t played vanilla Stardew Valley in a long time […] I want you to question yourself, like, Was that always in the game?”
This was exactly my experience with the mod, despite the fact that I hadn’t played Stardew in a long time. Some elements, such as a vineyard, community garden, and unknown NPCs, were clearly new additions. On Expanded’s Nexus Mods page, Hedegaard states that his goal is “give the player the magical feeling they had when they first played Stardew Valley,” and stumbling across these felt like the same kind of delightful surprise provided by a first-time playthrough of the base game.
However, other aspects made me doubt my memory. Expanded, for example, fleshes out the Joja route, giving the capitalist corporation threatening Pelican Town a stronger sense of presence. But running into Joja manager Morris on a regular basis perplexed me — I thought I recognized him, but not very well. Was he a brand-new addition? Hedegaard simply took the existing character and gave him a routine that brings him into town on a regular basis, relationships with the villagers, and even events for befriending him if you’re interested.
The mod, like vanilla Stardew, has something for everyone, but these kinds of character expansions and additions appear to be a community favorite. Sophia, an anime fan, inspires a lot of fan art and cosplay. However, as Hardaker points out, these characters were not always present in the original version of the mod. When Hedegaard decided to continue development after its initial success, adding more marriage candidates was something he wanted to learn how to do, but it was also one of the most difficult additions.
Hedegaard initially worked on the mod alongside an accounting job as it grew in complexity. However, after about six months, he decided to create a Patreon account as well as a PayPal donations page. Although Expanded is free to download and play, Patreon supporters receive benefits such as behind-the-scenes content and early release access (which Hedegaard also uses to test new builds). He is now devoted entirely to the mod.
As Expanded gained popularity, it began to spread online. In 2019, a subreddit and a Discord server were launched, respectively. People frequently joined to ask for hints on unraveling Expanded’s mysteries, which is how moderator Hecate first got into the server. But she soon decided to stay for the sake of the community. ” “Everybody in the Expanded Discord is very nice and very friendly,” she claims. “When the community is welcoming, you want to stick around and help out.”
The server now has approximately 19,000 users. “It’s sometimes like herding cats,” Hecate says neutrally. Downloading multiple frameworks is a somewhat arcane process for inexperienced modders, and issues with incompatibilities or other unexpected factors can arise. Newcomers seeking assistance are frequently unaware of all server etiquette, such as posting in the appropriate channel, but moderators and other community members will still try to assist. “I’m learning so much on how to handle the issues that pop up when it comes to like the game breaking or the mods breaking and figuring out what needs to be fixed,” Hecate adds.
Hardaker goes on to say that the server tries to assist anyone who is new to modding, whether they are attempting to run Expanded or not, so that they can have the same experience of discovering even more Stardew Valley. “There’s a great community here, and there’s so much more you can do with the game once you get into it.”
The server’s activity fluctuates depending on whether the mod or the base game has been recently updated, but the moderators also work to keep people engaged through contests and events. Recently, two artists won a $50 Steam gift card each for creating an autumnal banner and server icon.
Expanded appears to have grown the Stardew modding scene as a whole, in addition to its own community. Though it was the first major expansion mod released on Nexus, it was far from the last. Mods such as Ridgeside Village and East Scarp now add their own slew of new Stardew experiences. They, too, have thriving communities, though there is some overlap because players can run many of these mods concurrently. “It’s amazing seeing all of these same people posting in different Discords,” Hecate says.
Hedegaard encourages other modders to learn from his work by making Expanded open-source. “I’m always 100% OK with that,” he says. “I’m happy to help people […] because I referenced other mods to make my mod [originally].” He’s also forthright about the fact that Expanded is fanfiction, in which anyone can participate. “Some people are like, ‘Oh my God, it’s just like vanilla, it’s incredible, it’s perfect’ — [but] it’s fanfiction! […] I think it’s pretty freaking good, but it is fan-made, at the end of the day.”
Hedegaard is currently in a self-described “crunch” working on the next update, which aims to coincide with the as-yet-unreleased 1.6 update for core Stardew Valley, which has some key behind-the-scenes changes designed for modders but requires a lot of migration work for existing mods. “This update, for the short run, it’s gonna suck,” says Hedegaard. “But for the long run, the modding community needs this update,” Hedegaard predicts. “But for the long run, the modding community needs this update.”
Hedegaard will be able to add features he’s been planning for years with Stardew Valley 1.6, making the next Expanded update a big one. Hedegaard mentions the teaser he posted on Twitter, which shows new animals, crops, and other things. These things could already be added to Stardew, and other modders have, but they require specialized dependency frameworks, which Hedegaard couldn’t commit to. That will no longer be the case as of 1.6.
Hedegaard is also working on the 2.0 version of Expanded, which has been teased but has been delayed due to the plans for the 1.6 base game update. Expanded 2.0 will include a new location centered on magic. Even with such a significant addition, it is linked to the existing content for seamless scaling. “Anyone that knows me on the server knows I’m a big fan of [Expanded NPC] Camilla, who is a witch […] but right now she doesn’t really have all her story fleshed out yet,” says Hardaker, who is excited to see what the 2.0 update has in store for her.
According to Hedegaard, the community fuels the game’s hard work. “It honestly pushes me to keep going forward and keep creating,” he says. “I don’t want to burn myself out, of course, but just knowing there are so many people out there that […] appreciate what I do, I just want to fulfill everyone’s dreams of making the favorite game in the world even better.”
