Recommendations by Vanguard3000

I tend to prefer a mostly-stock experience, so most of my recommendations are quality-of-life improvements and small tweaks.

Quality-of-Life/Convenience

I tend to think of these mods as quality-of-life improvements, rather than cheats, since they generally just give you information you already have, but in a more convenient fashion.

• Context-Sensitive Gift Cursor - Streamlines the gift-giving process by adding a context-sensitive icon next to the cursor to indicate an NPC's likes, dislikes, and other important information.
  • Made by Yours Truly!
• Lookup Anything - See live info about whatever's under your cursor when you press F1. Learn a villager's favourite gifts, when a crop will be ready to harvest, how long a fence will last, why your farm animals are unhappy, and more.
• NPC Map Locations - See NPC and players on the map, with an optional minimap.
• Skip intro - Skip the intro logos, and optionally skip straight to the load or co-op screen.

Gameplay Tweaks

These add new functionality to the game which change the experience, as opposed to just changing the way existing info is given.

• Automate - Place a chest next to a machine (like a furnace or crystalarium), and the machine will automatically pull raw items from the chest and push processed items into it. Connect multiple machines with a chest to link them.
• Better Shipping Bin - Allows you to retrieve items shipped from the shipping bin. Bigger Backpack - Buy a bigger backpack (48 slots) at Pierre's for only 50,000g!
• CJB Cheats Menu - A simple in-game cheats menu with lots of cheats.
  • Helps a lot with mod development and testing, too!
• CJB Item Spawner - An easy-to-use in-game item spawner menu.
  • As with the Cheats Menu above, helps with mod dev.
• Robin Work Hours - Gives Robin set construction hours, letting her continue her normal schedule and interactions outside of work hours, walking to and from the construction site every day.
• Sit and Rest - Lets you sit to recover your health and stamina.
• Skull Cavern Elevator - Adds an elevator to the Skull Cavern, allowing the player to "checkpoint" the Skull Cavern as you do with the Mines.
• Wear More Rings - Configure the amount of ring slots in your inventory. By default adds 6 additional ring slots.

Expansions

These are larger conversion-type add-ons for the game that add or change significant amounts of content.

• Stardew Valley Expanded - A huge mod adding tons of new locations, NPCs, and crops.
  • I don't always use this mod, but I've played it before and it adds a lot of really neat stuff to the game. Highly recommended for players who have seen most of the vanilla game.