Heyo everyone! I'm very new to the modding community, and a friend of my boyfriend's made a custom sprite of their ponysona to replace the horse sprites in the game, and I was hoping somebody could help me make my own! I'm also interested in replacing the dog sprite with an OC of mine! I don't know if there are any limitations to custom sprites (specific sizes they have to be ect.) but I'd really love to custom make these sprites to make my game more custom and fun! My OC's, if it helps! Thank you
Heya, I'm new to modding too but I managed to throw together my own cat replacement mod yesterday that works in-game so I'll tell you what I did So first, you need to extract your xnb files and there's a neat guide on how to do that here (which also includes further editing information too). I extracted my whole Stardew Valley content folder (after making a backup) just for ease, and in Stardew Valley\Content\Animals you should be able to see the .png and .yaml files for whichever sprite it is you want to edit. You'll only need to edit the .png files so grab an image editing program like Photoshop (if you have it), Paint.net, or GIMP (I use GIMP since I'm on Linux), open up the .png file and zoom right in. What I did next was use the original .png file as a kind of template so I knew roughly how big my sprite should be and what action I should try to draw. I made two new layers, one with a transparent background for drawing the new sprites, and one with a bright coloured background (I used green) to put behind the sprite layers so that you can see any stray pixels. Once you've done your sprites (mine took me the best part of a day since I'm just not used to working so precisely with pixels), make sure to delete or hide the template layer (the original .png) and the coloured background layer, save the image as a new .png file with the same name as the original .png (so dog.png or horse.png in your case) and save it to a new folder for your mods (you might want to add various folders within this one with the names of each mod so that there isn't any confusion). Now you just need to repack your sprite into an xng file again! Make sure you pack both the .png file with a .yaml file with the same name as it won't work otherwise (so just copy the .yaml file from the original sprite). I kept a copy of this .xng file with its corresponding .png file so that it's all neatly packed away. You can now copy your new .xng file into your Stardew Valley\Content\Animals folder and run the game! You'll be able to see pretty quickly if there are any stray pixels, and if there are you just need to unpack your file and move your sprites around a bit so that their placement on the image corresponds more closely to the original. I'm sure there's a proper template or rulers to keep you within the boundaries for each sprite but I haven't found them yet and the above worked for me so hopefully it will for you too
