Ridgeside Village mod What you need to know

Ridgeside Village is an amazing, expansion-sized mod for Stardew Valley. Adding as much as a DLC for other games would, this free mod expands the world of Stardew Valley into a new town with a whole new cast of characters, quest lines, romanceable NPCs, new interesting people, quests, and more. This mod offers both quality and quantity, and it delivers spectacularly!

I installed this mod on my Steam Deck, which made the game portable. You can install it on your computer, also, but unfortunately not the Nintendo Switch. Whichever device you choose, you can enjoy more than twice the game at no additional cost!

You can find instructions to install this mod at the end of this article and in my article discussing the best mods for Stardew Valley Expanded, which this is compatible with, and what mods are best to use together. Most, if not all, are compatible with Ridgeside Village. Click through after reading this article and see what else you’d like to add. Each new mix of mods makes the whole experience new again!

Once you’ve installed Ridgeside Valley, just leave your farm for the west side of Stardew Valley and enter the bus stop. A cutscene will play between Mayor Lewis and a new NPC, Lenny, Ridgeside’s Chief Administrative Officer. Take the new cable car and you’ll arrive at the new map, and Lenny will give your farmer a tour of the village! Everyone has immersive backstories and some exciting events; Lenny will show you the new shops and buildings. With tons of new and unique locations and NPCs, the tour is very nice to have.

There are fifty new NPCs, almost all with their own friendship level, and twenty-two are new marriage candidates. Eight of those are considered “special marriage candidates.” This means that you have to unlock the ability to romance them, they’re not accessible immediately. For example, choosing them in character events or completing questlines will make them romanceable. Otherwise they’ll just remain a friend. You can have weddings, and your spouse will of course move with their own custom room in the farmhouse.

Like base game NPCs, all the new ones have their own schedules. Throughout the week many of the NPCs will visit Pelican Town, although they will not be at the saloon on the weekend. They’ll even post quests on the quest board, make special orders, or send requests via the post. The Ridgeside Village mod also adds two new festivals to celebrate with these NPCs. One is essentially a New Years Eve party, called the Ember of Resolution, and another is a concert! There are thousands of lines of dialogue across this whole mod, it’s truly a whole new game experience.

One of the most unique NPCs added, and my personal favorite, is Torts. Torts is a turtle. He always hangs out at his pond, being taken care of by the village’s children. Lenny says that Torts is one of the oldest residents of Ridgeside Village. He has heart events like a normal NPC, shows up at festivals, and loves soup. He even has a secret I’ll let you in on: certain items have real world effects when gifted to him, such as guaranteeing rain or sunshine the following day!

There are a ton of new quests, be it help wanted or mail quests, but the best rewards are given for the Special Orders. The day after Pelican Town gets its Special Orders board, Ridgeside Village gets their own. These special quests give amazing rewards, such as tons of money, permanent free stays at the hotel, clothing, and other rewards.

Many new locations were added, all of which are within the village. There’s a clinic, an open-air restaurant, a research facility, a stage, two new greenhouses, and most notably a log cabin hotel. This hotel, for the small price of 500g, allows you to stay in the Village for the night instead of having to head all the way back to your farm. Many residents are also merchants, running a business outside of their homes. They sell clothing, farm supplies, weapons, food, and more! The Heaps store, similar to Pierre’s General Store, sells many of the same things, although cheaper. They’ll go even cheaper than that if you become friends with them!

The Ridge Forest is my personal favorite area. It’s a very large map, full of monsters, mining nodes, trees, and fish. Hidden amongst the forageables and trees are artifacts, which we go over in the next paragraph. Also hidden are Mystic Falls and crystals. Firstly, the Mystic Falls are hidden locations, wherein there are secret weapons you are rewarded with for reaching certain heart ranks with the villagers of Ridgeside Village. Secondly there are the crystals. These crystals are all linked to quests, and the crystals want items. You have to feed the crystals items that are the same colors as themselves. They grey one will take both white and black items though! Once you hit thirty items of the correct colors, the crystal quests will be completed, and you will have access to the Ridge Falls, a beautiful set of waterfalls. Within here is the portal to the Spirit Realm.

Now, there are these aforementioned artifacts. These are blessed or cursed and are found via exploring or by puzzles. There is an NPC called Jio who lives in the Ninja House, which is in The Ridge, right before the Ridge Forest. He is, you guessed it, a ninja. He has a book with hints to find all these relics. Now, what are these relics even for? Well, they’re used to unlock and access the Spirit Realm. And we’ll talk about the Spirit Realm…

…Right now! The Spirit Realm is a whole new location in the mod, with it’s own questline. To really boil down what you do with this, there is a curse on the Spirit Realm causing monsters to infest it, and you have to save it! You’ll get across the spirit realm using one way teleporters, and using these you will look for purple fires. Find them and extinguish them to save the Spirit Realm.

To fight these monsters, you should explore the new weapons. The mod adds a whole lot, like swords, daggers, and club type weapons. Though they just about all function the same as regular weapons, they look cool!

Quick Tips for ridgeside village

Ridgeside Village is a huge mod, and can be a little daunting. Here’s some tips to get into it:

• Go slow: There’s a lot of game here! It can be very overwhelming at first, so take it slow. Just like when you first played Stardew Valley, get into it, take it day by day, enjoy it!
• Pick your partner: Some marriage candidates only unlock after certain prerequisites, so don’t rush into a relationship. You might unlock a new bachelor or bachelorette and like them more!
• Ridgeside Gathering: Don’t skip out on this festival! It’s a very, very useful festival for meeting everyone, getting some friendship points, and the items you can buy can be very rare, useful items like dinosaur eggs, a prismatic shard, and more!
• Getting an upgrade: You can safely dispose of your galaxy sword or even your infinity blade with this mod, you’ll want to use the Madame. This sword’s minimum damage is the infinity blade’s maximum damage. You get this sword from doing Maive’s 10 heart event. Forge it with rubies at Ginger Island and you’ll have a new powerful weapon!
• Go hiking: Forage items are amazing in Ridgeside Village. They can even give buffs like speed up, attack up, and so on! Even rooting through the trash is a good idea, though, fair warning, make sure no one is watching!
• Getting Takeout: Be sure to visit Pika’s Restaurant, where you can buy food that almost every villager loves. He serves five random, new dishes every day. You can even buy new recipes from him! I recommend the Autumn Dew Drop Juice, it buffs your mining!

This mod is also completely compatible with Stardew Valley Expanded. Stardew Valley Expanded is another amazing and huge mod for Stardew Valley, and you can read our spoiler free review of it here.

Required mods for ridgeside village

Installation for Ridgeside Village is very easy, though you’ll need to install its requirements. We’ll go over them quickly for you so you can know what you’re downloading.

• The big mod you want is “SMAPI.” This is an API, an application programming interface, that allows other mods to work at all.
• Now, firstly, is “Anti-Social NPCs.” This makes it so the modder can add NPCs you can’t befriend. They’re a normal NPC in every other way, but don’t show up on the social tab.
• Secondly, there’s “Content Patcher.” This mod makes it so mods can change just about everything in the game without actually changing the files, making it so they don’t break on updates, can be updated easily, and are easy to install and uninstall.
• Then, there’s “Custom Companions.” This allows modders to create followers for you.
• Another is “Custom NPC Exclusions.” This allows mods to exclude NPCs from certain quests and events, such as the quest boards that select random NPCs for quests.
• Then, “Extra Map Layers.” This mod simply causes the game to recognize and display extra layers in maps beyond the ordinarily named ones.
• “Farm Type Manager (FTM)” is a framework that allows modders to spawn forage locations, ores, monsters, and objects like boulders and stumps anywhere.
• “Json assets” allows custom content, like sprites, to be added to the game. Sounds simple, but I can’t imagine the work that went into it… This mod requires “Spacecore” and “Expanded Preconditions Utility” to work, though.
• And then there’s the “Mail Framework Mod,” which allows modders to use the mailbox.
• An important one is “SAAT – Audio API and Toolkit,” which allows modders to add new music.
• “Shop Tile Framework” allows modders to create custom shops and edit vanilla ones.
• Lastly there is “Show Birthdays,” which, you guessed it, shows more birthdays on the calendar.

How to Install the ridgeside village mod

Now, how do you install any of these? Here’s a handy step by step guide on how to on the PC platform.

• First, you want to have Stardew Valley installed on your PC and have booted up the game at least once.
• Then you want to go to Nexus Mods and download their Vortex launcher. Don’t worry, use of this program is very easy!
  1. Navigate to games, then unmanaged, then press the button on the picture of Stardew Valley to add it to your managed games. You should now see the artwork on the top left of the launcher!
• Next, you want to download SMAPI.
• Navigate to Files, then click “Mod Manager Download.”
• Now install it in Vortex, and you’re good to go! If you want achievements and the Steam overlay, keep reading. If you don’t mind not having them, skip down a bit. 
• To keep the achievements and Steam overlay, you’ll want to keep the installer window open. 
• Then you want to copy the path that ends with “%command%,” the whole thing including the quotation marks. It’ll look something like this: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stardew Valley\StardewModdingAPI.exe” %command%
• Next, you want to right click Stardew Valley in your steam library. 
• Click properties, then at the bottom will be a text box. Copy and paste the path into there. Voila! You now have achievements and the Steam overlay while using SMAPI.
• Now, on the main page of Ridgeside Village you’ll see a box that says “Requirements.” 
• Click that, and all the ones on top are what we went over and are needed for Ridgeside Village to work. It may look a little daunting, but they can be installed just as easily as SMAPI was. 
• Click on each one, click into Files, and click “Mod Manager Download.” This will place all the mods in the proper game folder, doing all the work for you, making this super easy!
• Then install them in Vortex, same as before. Once you have them all installed, you can install Ridgeside Village.
• Be sure to start a new playthrough to fully experience this mod!

Ridgeside Village is an incredible mod, full of content and love. It truly adds to the vanilla experience, and feels like a paid DLC for Stardew Valley. Between it’s huge array of characters, varied places to explore, and general hominess, this mod should be a main stay on anyone’s mod list.