Updating Mods for Modders
This page is a STUB right now, sorry!
If you know anything that can help, please add it! Just click "edit" and put in whatever you know that you think could be helpful.
Update Keys
When you update, don't forget to update your manifest with the new version number and (if you didn't already include it) the update key(s) for NexusMods, ModDrop, or wherever your mod is uploaded.
Legacy Feature
There is a legacy feature [where?]. When you add a location through Content Patcher, you can give your map a name like Custom_ES_Orchard. If you add "MigrateLegacyNames": [ "ESOrchard" ], that tells Content Patcher to load the location from the TMXL data (if present); after that it'll be a normal CP location.
Update Check Timing / Caching
Pathoschild said the update checks are cached for about an hour in the server, because Nexus is sometimes slow. If you don't see an update notification for your mod update right away, it may be because of this.
Small Text Changes (Nexus Eats)
If your update consists of small text changes (say, adding a comma, removing/adding a few letters, or updating a version number) and nothing else, there's a good chance Nexus will "eat" the update. It will show as if your update uploaded successfully, but it will in fact still be the old file. One way to get around this is to add a comment to a file or a readme file and add a bunch of text there. I'm personally fond of an elaborate explanation like so:
This paragraph is here because otherwise Nexus will think it's too smol an update to only update the manifest.json from version X to Y. Is this long enough? This is silly Nexus, but I guess you're trying to avoid spamming of uploading new versions of files or something? It's a shame this negatively affects Stardew Valley mods like this, considering most mods will contain text files of some kind.
Using GitHub Releases
GitHub doesn't play nice with multiple mod releases under the same repo (monorepo) if they're on different version numbers, and it doesn't make use of update subkeys either. So you'd have to 1) have different repos for each mod or 2) keep all the mods at the same version number. For a working example of the second one, refer to Zoryn's releases.