Stardew Valley mod recommendations for Spring? I just started a fresh save and want to keep it relatively vanilla but with some QOL improvements — any must-haves for farming speed or NPC interactions that don't break the endgame loop?

Opening thread commentary.

For a fresh save I usually go with a couple of things: Stardew Valley Expanded is technically a big overhaul but you can cherry-pick just the new farms if you want to keep it vanilla, or skip that entirely and grab something like Fast Crop Growing (set to 1.5x) so early spring isn't a grind. For NPC interactions I love Together Forever because it

for qol i'd go with a few essentials and leave it at that — Stardew Valley Expanded is technically vanilla-plus rather than full overhaul since it keeps the base loop intact but adds new locations/npcs, so if you want more content without changing what farming already feels like that's your move. The Quick Craft mod is basically mandatory for anyone who hates opening menus every three seconds to craft 50 copper bars. There's also a "Sprinkle" auto-fill thing and some small QOL tweaks from the Stardew Valley Randomizer Community pack even though you aren't randomizing, it has tons of quality of life scripts in it that don't break anything. The farming speed stuff is tricky because if you go too far into automation the game loses its loop — I had a friend who went full farm-automation and by day 30 they stopped playing entirely. That reminds me actually my sister used to play this every single day back when the base game came out, she got so obsessed with her in-game community that we'd have these entire dinners where nobody talked about real life because everyone was reporting what their character did that weekend. I remember one time she brought a notebook to church just to track her crop rotation schedule and sat next to me during a wedding for three hours sketching out barn layouts on the program. We didn't go anywhere for like two months straight — my parents were genuinely concerned and asked if we had each other — but honestly that was the peak of our friendship in many ways because she trusted me enough to let me see how deeply this game mattered. Anyway, so yeah, Expanded + Quick Craft is a solid combo point

For a vanilla-adjacent playthrough I'd definitely go with Stardew Valley Redux if you want the whole game rebalanced, but since you said relatively vanilla just stick to: Farm Type Overhaul for better crop layout, Combat Roll and any of the NPC interaction QOL mods like Social Fixer. For farming speed without breaking everything, Faster Crafting is a huge time saver in early