Making Stardew Valley Maps

I’ve been wanting to do a new playthrough of Stardew recently, but I felt kinda meh about starting on the same standard farms I usually do (Standard, Forest, and Beach with sprinklers mod). This is probably understandable after roughly nine playthroughs. So, I thought I’d spice up my game with a new farm map mod. I combed Nexus Mods for many many pages looking at farm maps, but couldn’t find any that suited me. They were all either too cluttered, too large, too small, too uniform, had too many choke points, or were just plain uninteresting. Naturally, I thought maybe it was finally time to try my hand at making a map of my own. How hard could it be? 🙃

Stardew Farm Map Concept Drawing

I read the basics of what was possible and necessary with map editing and then sketched out the above rough idea of what I was envisioning. (Yes, on paper, who am I, someone that has money for a tablet? I wish.) I came up with the following requirements for what I wanted on my farm.

• Water features (especially near the farmhouse)
• But no water features in the middle of the map that would block movement (wells can be placed in lieu for watering)
• Minimize decorations and non-removal vegetation in the center of the map (for increased building/decor placement flexibility)
• Large contiguous rectangular fields optimized for iridium sprinkler placement with an amount of tillable tiles comparable to that of the Standard farm
• Tillable grass fields instead of dirt
• Lots of secret paths and areas around the edge of the map
• Provide optimal spaces for all necessary buildings and paths
• Include special features from other maps: quarry area, forest forage and respawning stumps, beach forage, and river fish

These requirements will hopefully culminate in a map that is nice to look at while maintaining maximum flexibility and achieving optimum crop and building placement.

The Map Editor

The only option for editing Stardew Valley maps seems to be the Tiled editor. It’s probably what ConcernedApe used originally, too. It’s a fairly straightforward tool—you just paint tiles on layers. But it also has many deficiencies that, when combined with the quirks of Stardew, make getting up to speed with map making rather slow. However, Tiled does have a comprehensive scripting system, and I was able to utilize that to create several scripts to help remove some of the inherent friction. The scripts are as follows.

• A layer info tool that shows you what tile is in use for every layer at the currently hovered map location. When you have like 15 layers (some reference, some rough mockups, and many production) and are constantly putting tiles on the wrong layers, this tool really helps with tracking down which layer a pesky tile is hiding on.
• A tile properties tool that selects all tiles with certain Stardew-specific properties like diggable, passable, or buildable. This helps a ton with making sure the tiles all have the correct properties. There’s no may to visualize this in Tiled otherwise, which I find absolutely bonkers.
• A suggestion tool that looks at adjacent tiles to suggest what tile to use for the selected location, with suggestions loaded from a database created by scanning all existing Stardew maps (plus a special map I made containing all possible correct adjacent tiles). This one helps out massively when you’re getting started, especially with cliffs, which are exceedingly difficult to match up and have tiles that are spread across a couple large tilesets.
• A tile deduplication tool that finds different tiles with the same or similar tile image data. Really more of a dev tool for the suggestion tool than anything used for making an actual map. Helps one find duplicate tiles in tilesets, since there’s a very real chance some tiles were put into tilesets more than once.

I’ll try to get these scripts shared once I’m done with the map. I’m also thinking about adding the tile inspector as a dockable tool window into Tiled itself, maybe as a plugin or getting it submitted into the project itself—it is open-source after all.

Stardew Map Quirks

As I was mentioning earlier, a lot of the difficulty with modding Stardew maps comes from the little quirks about how ConcernedApe developed the game. It’s pretty clear that he was creating the tilesheets as he went for the most part. Many tiles aren’t laid out in the sheets in logical ways or even next to related tiles at all. For cliffs and edge tiles, this really adds to the difficulty of finding the correct tiles to place next to each other, and was a big part of why I created the tile suggestion tool script. Granted, it is understandable to develop the tilesheets in this way and also to never correct them since Tiled doesn’t have any tools to do this while refactoring all the maps.

Relatedly, CA also didn’t fully create all the necessary tiles for all the different terrains. That results in some terrains with edges that can transition into one direction but not another, or that don’t have any standardized connections, making them much less modular. I’ve even found tiles that have no other tiles that could feasible go next to them—how is anyone supposed to know this when getting started!

And the last thing I’ll complain about is how CA doesn’t seem to be a fan of tile transparency. I’m not sure if there’s some limitation driving this (like maybe tile properties), but so many terrains have adjacent terrains baked into their edge tiles instead of just making them transparent and putting any terrain tile under them. This makes some combinations of adjacent terrain impossible, unfortunately (like medium grass on cliffs or water edges). Luckily, there is a tilesheet mod that adds grass edges with transparencies that I’m using extensively.

Map Progress

I’m about 40% finished with my map so far, slowly working my way around the edges since they’re the most detailed. It’s definitely taking longer than expected—damn my perfectionism.

See the animation below for how the area around the farmhouse looks so far. (Note that Emily is just a placeholder to show where the spouse area is.)

I do hope to get back to working on my website update soon, though. I haven’t had that many days lately where I feel well enough to work on it, unfortunately. But painting a Stardew map hits the sweet spot in terms of what the amount of pain allows. Hopefully, I finish both eventually. 😄