Welcoming Pokémon Into Stardew Valley With Mods

In the past few months, Stardew Valley has found a place in many PC owner’s hearts. The farming simulation provides a Harvest Moon sort of experience on computers, and people have embraced it. This means an active modding community has also popped up, working to make an unusual game even more unique. Some of the most interesting additions are a number of mods that go ahead and add Pokémon to your game.

There are two major Pokémon Stardew Valley retexture packages that are a fantastic place to start. Irowirow’s Pokémon Retextures changes 15 animals to Pokémon, makes Krobus a Duskull, puts Moonball and Friendball icons on the status screen next to your pet and horse, and lets you look like a Team Rocket Grunt when wearing the Good Ol’ Cap and Joja shirt. This gives you a Glameow (cat), Vaporeon (dog), Meganium (horse), Shieldon (dinosaur), Numel (baby brown cow), Camerupt (brown cow), Miltank (baby white cow and white cow), Swinup (baby pig), Piloswine (pig), Pidgey (brown chicken), Taillow (white chicken), Natu (void chicken), and Swirlix (rabbits). It’s a good way to get yourself set with a substantial number of Pokémon at once.

From there, you may want to grab LittleNerdyOTAKU’s More Pokémon Retextures. Since both Irowirow and LittleNerdyOTAKU’s mods have each Pokémon as its own file, you can pick and choose which characters you want in Stardew Valley. Which works well, since there’s some overlap. This mod mainly offers enemy replacements. You can add a Ghastly (ghost), Dwebble (rock crab, lava crab), Lileep (shadow brute, shaman, girl), Duskull (mummy), Venonat (grub), Venomoth (fly), Aron (metal head), Muk (big slime), Magnemite (bug, armored bug), Poliwag (frog), Spiritomb (skeleton, skeleton mage), Misdrevous (squid kid), Larvitar (stone golem), and Golbat (frost bat) to your game. You can bring Ducklett (ducks), Buneary (rabbit), Slowpoke (pig), Shuppet (void chick), Banette (void chicken), Omanyte (dinosaur), and Tauros (goat, brown cow) to your farm. This mod even changes some characters around, as your toddlers will look like Pokemon’s preschoolers, Clint will become a Machoke, and Leah will look like Rosa (Pokémon Black 2/White 2).

To improve the immersion, you should also grab PokeFish by Zaffy2. This mod has had some bugs with certain fish, making it tricky to remove them from your inventory or causing the game to crash, but those seem to be fixed. Once installed, all the fish you can catch in the game are turned into Pokémon. As an example, the mutant carp is now a Gyrados. Descriptions for all characters are also altered. It only alters fish caught from rivers, lakes, and the ocean, and not critters you might find on the beach.

The rest of the Stardew Valley Pokémon mods are piecemeal additions to compliment the existing textures available. Zhuria has made a Ponyta horse replacement mod, with standard and shiny variations. Or, you can pretend you’re flying with Zhuria’s Altaria horse replacement. Gsnow has mods that replace calves with Machops and cows with Machokes. (The Machokes carry milk, to explain why you can get the resource from them.) Even pets can be separately swapped, with VDotV having made an Umbreon cat replacer, Kiakakash turning cats into Skitties, and Starman Ultra’s Furret dog replacement. You can even turn Jas into a Smoochum, if you want a Pokémon NPC to interact with in town, thanks to Gibbus. 

As for installing, I recommend the Stardew Valley Package Manager by NewSpecies. Once installed, it makes it easy to install or uninstall mods, as well as keep backup of your saves to make sure important progress is never lost. 4

While all these alterations are simple and cosmetic, it does wonders for Stardew Valley. You still get to enjoy a great game for what it is, but also add some of your favorite Pokémon species. It almost makes the game feel like some sort of crazy spin-off.

Stardew Valley is immediately available for Windows PCs.