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Editor's note: The mod-maker interview series continues! Today CopperSun is interviewing Airyn, popular sprite and portrait artist and the main force behind Diverse Stardew Valley. Part 1 focuses on DSV and the new "family packs" coming out soon. Part 2 delves into Airyn as one of the people behind the mod.


So, Airyn. You're best known for Diverse Stardew Valley (DSV). Can you tell me a little bit about that mod?

Sure! Diverse Stardew Valley is a mod with two core features: first and foremost, it's a mod that seeks to improve representation for a lot of people who might not necessarily see themselves or their friends and family reflected in the base game. It started off as racial representation through notsnufffie's alternate Black variants for Emily and Haley on the old Chucklefish forums, and expanded from there to include culture, gender identity, body shape, and disability representation as well.

The second core feature is its unique seasonal and festival outfits for the base game characters, along with a number of other visual immersion details. These are available whether you're using the default character designs or DSV's alternate character designs! We built DSV around the idea of player choice and configurability specifically so that people can decide how many and which of our alternate designs they'd like to play with - whether they want to use all of our alternate designs, go half and half, have just one or two, or play completely vanilla and just use the seasonal & festival outfits, that's up to each individual player.

Does DSV just change portraits and sprites, or does it do anything else?

As of the current version (2.7.1), DSV is 98% visual changes only - the remaining 2% are some minor dialogue changes to better fit our alternate character designs, such as changing Harvey's gift tastes to dislike alcohol if his Sikh variant is enabled.

However, we have plans to add additional dialogue in the future - this will include both dialogue that is specific to a character's identity if using one of DSV's alt character designs (for example, plus-sized Abigail may comment on her view of her body, or Filipino Caroline may comment on putting up parols for Winter Star) and more general dialogue for DSV's Flower Queen feature. Big shoutout here to Tiakall of Tia's Multiple Spouses Dialogue Pack and Realistic Writer Elliott, who's already written dialogue for several characters!

DSV has one of the longest config files of, I think, any of my mods. Why so many choices?

There's a lot to choose, yep! As I mentioned earlier, DSV was designed to be as configurable and compatible as possible, so each character in the main download can be individually toggled to use the vanilla design but with the DSV seasonal outfits, one of DSV's alternate character designs with DSV seasonal outfits, or turned off entirely. There's also options for things that are arguably "improving" the vanilla designs (such as giving vanilla Harvey a visible mustache on his character sprite) or alternate aesthetic choices (such as Sebastian's glasses or ear and lip piercings), so that players can have the ability to tailor as much as the mod as possible to their own tastes.

For players who don't want to go through and set up everything themselves, two different config.jsons are provided with presets we think people will like. Players can use those and just make a couple tweaks to get things configured faster.

When I go to download DSV, there are a LOT of options! What's up with that? What do lightweight and ultra-lightweight mean?

When you're choosing which file to download, there are a lot of options available because we've aimed to add compatibility with as many mods as we can in order to provide a smooth playing experience. That's why we have files like "DSV Ridgeside" or "DSV Make Marlon Real"; they help match DSV's diverse character designs to Ridgeside Village and Make Marlon Real respectively.

Lightweight and ultra-lightweight, however, are a bit different. We received reports that DSV in its main form was too large for some players in terms of file size or, especially on older machines and with older versions of Content Patcher, causing some lag because of the outfits changing throughout the day based on various conditions. For example, on rainy days NPCs have different outfits they wear depending on if they're outside in the rain or at home indoors. Another example is marriage candidates wearing pyjamas in the morning or at night in bed.  To keep DSV available to those players, we created the lightweight packs as alternate options so they could also enjoy playing the mod without any lag from NPC location checks.

A basic breakdown of the differences would be that the main mod is a "deluxe" version that includes all the bells and whistles; the lightweight mod is a streamlined version that includes a single outfit set per season (with a base outfit while indoors and either rain or sun accessories while outside as is weather-appropriate), an outfit for each festival, and a small number of additional features; and the ultra-lightweight option (available by toggling the config in the lightweight version) includes just the core of one base outfit per season, an outfit for each festival, and only the additional features related to DSV's alt character designs.

You're getting ready to re-release DSV in "family packs." Tell me about that. Will this affect the current options?

Our DSV 3.0 release will divide the mod into smaller separate mods with 2 to 4 characters each, grouped according to their family, friends, or thematic coherence. The key advantage of this split is that it'll allow us to continue growing the mod without worrying about the file size (DSV is currently one of the largest Stardew Valley mods available) and it will make it faster and easier to fix bugs and add new content. It will also make things easier for players because we'll be able to merge the compatibility patches into the appropriate family pack, the configuration file won't be as intimidatingly long, and it won't be necessary to redo your entire config if only one or two characters receive new content.

We'll also be able to merge in the lightweight and ultralightweight options, so the mod will be even more configurable! Players will be able to set each character individually to the full, lightweight, or ultralightweight option, allowing players with less powerful hardware to select the full version only for their favourite characters and also allowing us to expand the amount of features available in the lightweight version from what it currently includes.

Furthermore (ed. note: more?!), we'll be able to upload the DSV-compatible alternate character add-ons (currently available to download only from the DSV Github page) as separate mods, making DSV even easier for players to use.

Is the code going to change with the new family packs? Or stay the same, just spread across more files?

As part of this restructure, the code has been almost completely overhauled, significantly streamlining things to provide better performance. Between this and the inclusion of the three "weight" settings, I hope that players will be able to enjoy using DSV no matter what kind of computer they're using to play Stardew.

How is DSV related to Seasonal Villager Outfits (SVO)?

This is something of a tricky question. DSV and Seasonal Villager Outfits were interlinked for a long time - while both had their beginnings on the old Chucklefish forums, SVO had been published on NexusMods for quite a while by the time I joined DSV as a beginner artist helping to adapt SVO's outfits to DSV's character designs, but it was unfinished and didn't have outfits for all seasons or all characters. As part of adapting it, I and a number of the other DSV artists also created a great deal of our own outfit designs to fill those gaps, and once we had enough art that all of the characters had at least one outfit per season, we uploaded DSV to Nexus under the name "Diverse Stardew Valley with Seasonal Outfits (DSVO)" in mid 2019.

As we'd created outfits for the vanilla characters as well, we shared them with ParadigmNomad (then the lead coder for SVO) and agreed that going forward, our two teams would work together to share assets and be sister projects. However, our projects split apart in October 2020 due to a difference of opinion with ParadigmNomad and DSVO was renamed to DSV, as a callback to the original project.

Who's on the team with you on DSV?

2020 and 2020-the-sequel hit the team pretty hard so I'm currently the only active member, but Tenthousandcats and Minervamaga are the other team admins alongside me. Notable team members include Lavender, PKPixel, cel10e, lezbo.ivy, leilacrystal, Medinaquirin, hugbeam, corrin, and Xuy. Special mention as well to Tanpoponoko, who created the original art from Seasonal Villager Outfits! We even have a spreadsheet for specific credits.

We're also open to new artists who are interested in helping with outfits! If you'd like more information, please feel free to join our Discord server and ask. You're also welcome to join if you aren't an artist but have other questions about the mod, of course! We also have plans for adding new dialogue that could use writers.


This concludes part 1 of the interview. Click here for part 2.