Hey there, long time player, first time poster. I've recently decided to try and make a Stardew Valley mod. My progress so far has been banging my head against the wall trying to learn C#. Before I lose my mind into the abyss, I decided to reach out to people who have more experience than I do, to see if what I have in mind is even possible. My idea is to overhaul the skill tree. The only skill mods I've seen so far are the addition of cooking and luck. To my knowledge, nothing more extensive has been done. So currently, at lvl 5 you're presented with 2 choices, which determine the other 2 choices you're presented with at lvl 10. What I envision is a more expansive skill tree, with smaller gains, where you assign a point every time you level up. The player would have the option of splitting points between both trees to be a 'jack of all trades' or making it down to the bottom of a tree to obtain the juiciest upgrades (that could potentially come with downsides to make the decision a bit harder). Example: Would a mod like this be possible to make? I realize that this is an ambitious undertaking for someone with as little skills as me. I'll be starting small and working my way up to this, but any advice y'all could give would be much appreciated.
Hi, I'm also new to modding, but a long-time programmer and I've spent a lot of time poking around in the SDV source recently. Here are my observations: Almost everything related to skills and professions is hard-coded into the game, but that doesn't mean these things are impossible to change. It does mean that you would probably have to use Harmony to patch the game code, which has the downside of possibly breaking compatibility with other mods. At a minimum, you would need to replace the SkillsPage to show all of your current professions; the LevelUpMenu to show the profession chooser on levels other than 5 and 10, show custom professions, and show more than 2 professions at a time; and change how the respec statue in the Sewer works. Adding professions is going to be significantly easier than changing/removing professions. The game logic is littered with one-off references to hard-coded profession IDs. Hunting all of those down and patching them would be a pretty big undertaking. I wish the game had a hook/filter architecture in place to make skills more modular but that would be a pretty huge overhaul. In summary, it would be challenging but not impossible. You probably want to familiarize yourself with programming/C# and how mods work in SDV before attempting. Incidentally, I've been interested in developing a framework that would make a few things like this more flexible for other mod developers--simplifying the process of adding new skills, professions, blueprints, etc. to the point that they could be largely handled by Content Patcher. I'm hoping to get some advice from those better versed in the modding scene first though. I'll send you a message if I start working on something like that.
Thank you very much for your advice! I can see I have a lot of work ahead of me to make this a reality. Better double down on those C# tutorials. When I really get into the weeds on this you might find a message in your inbox...
