Daily Dialogue Tips by SMC

This is a collection of tips by people in the Stardew Modmaker Community for writing interesting, non-repetitive daily dialogue for your custom NPC! If you've got a good tip that's not included here, feel free to add it.

Also keep in mind you don’t need to have unique dialogue for literally every heart level of every day of every season! Abigail has the most dialogue lines of any vanilla NPC and she only has around 70 lines - more minor characters like George have about 30, so remember that it's okay to have some repetition. Many custom NPCs have general dialogue for heart level + day of the week (28 lines total) plus special lines (day before festival, first day of the season, resort lines, conversation topics, etc.)

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• What are their gift likes & dislikes? You can hint at these through little anecdotes

• What are their hobbies and/or interests? Are they particularly passionate about anything?

• Who are they close to and who do they dislike? This can be both existing characters (vanilla or custom) or people they know who aren't in-game. Does your NPC have any particular insight into another character or interesting stories of shared experiences (positive or negative)?

• What's been happening recently in their life? What's going to be happening soon?

• Has something recently reminded them of something from their past?

• Has or will something notable happen in one of their heart events that they might discuss? ie. if their heart event involves confessing something, maybe it's playing on their mind beforehand, or maybe they're still thinking about something that happened in their last heart event (though keep in mind that players might move to the next heart level without seeing the event). If something exclusively comes up in events, it could feel a little isolated.
  • Conversation topics are great for this, especially as you can't always control when a character will roll into the next level of heart dialogue vs. when the event will actually be seen.

• Limit day-specific dialogue to birthdays and pre-festivals, in case players don't talk to your NPC on that specific day
  • Similarly, don't include critical information in a one-off daily dialogue - what if the farmer happens to never see it?

• Avoid generic smalltalk such as "what's up?" or "Hi, [Player]", since this doesn't tell the player anything about your NPC's character and isn't interesting to read. If you want to include generic topics, try and make them specific to the character - for example, Kimpoi in Ridgeside asks "how are the trees on your farm?" instead of "how's the farm", telling the player that he's interested in trees.

• Avoid "farmsplaining", or having your NPC tell the player about basic game mechanics such as crops not growing in winter, since this can be annoying to experienced players. An exception is if it's a genuinely obscure mechanic or if it's discussed in an immersive and in-character way for that NPC (for example, a farmer NPC discussing how they're working hard to harvest all of their fall crops before they die with the turn of the season)

• Avoid adding too many interests or topics of discussion - if you make a character too random, people won't get a sense of what they actually like. The trick is to talk about it in different ways, just like people do. So like you say they're into movies/nerd stuff: they could complain about a movie remake, get excited over a collector's release, talk about movie plots, have a favorite ship, be happy one of their family gifted them some merch, etc.
  • Tia likes to have 2-4 recurring "themes" to a character that can come up repeatedly but in different ways - as an example, Faye from Ridgeside has "designs clothing", "has a sweet tooth/likes to nap", and "city girl in the countryside" as her themes.

• Connected to the above, you can also tie one topic into another: for example, if they likes their family but the family doesn't understand them, they could be happy they listened to them talk about movies even though they don't get it.

• If you have a place where you would normally only have one dialogue line that comes up frequently (e.g., Rain dialogue, resort dialogue, the FunLeave and FunReturn lines in marriage dialogue, or string dialogue tied to a certain part of a character's schedule), you can use the Random command to include a few different options so it's not the same line every time.

• If you have a character who doesn't talk much (especially at low hearts), you can narrate what they're doing instead by putting % at the beginning of the line. Example: " %Legend’s attention is on you, but he doesn’t move to respond."