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Editor's note: The mod-maker interview series continues! Today CopperSun is interviewing LenneDalben, who has just released major updates for the popular Townies Need Food and Townies Need Artisan Goods.

Lenne, your focus has been on a series of smaller mods that basically make Pelican Town feel more like a ~town~ and the player a beloved member of the community. What's been your overall inspiration for your mods?

Thanks for the intro! I've mostly focused on mods that I'd personally use, although I've made a few mods that were requests. Townies Need Food (TNF) in particular came about from wanting to use cooking more, and Townies Need Artisan Goods (TNAG) from wanting to use artisan goods for more than just profit (although profit is valid). The common theme there is to add a little more purpose to things already in the game.

TNAG was also inspired by the Diverse Stardew Valley Discord server, and JeweledNebula and Airyn provided a lot of ideas. 

Q: Speaking of TNF and TNAG, can you talk about the new integrations in the big updates?

Of course! TNAG now incorporates some artisan goods and craftables from Tiakall's Host Trees, specifically for her new NPCs Jean and Jorts. There's also now orders for Mia, Sterling, and Henry from Always Raining in the Valley (ARV) by Himetarts, and another order for Alecto by ZoeDoll. TNF now has recipes from Love of Cooking (LoC) by Bblueberry, and an order for ARV's Henry. 

Q: How do you go about working with other mods/mod authors? Are they usually happy that you're featuring their work?

For LoC, I asked Bblueberry for permission before writing up anything, and she agreed. For Host Trees, Tiakall suggested adding compatibility, and I was happy to oblige since it's a much smaller pack than say, PPJA, so it's easier for me to incorporate :) Both Bblueberry and tia were pleased that I was incorporating their mods. 

Q: Love of Cooking is known for being a big change to how cooking is handled in SDV. How are you integrating TNF with it?

Since the new-ish update to Content Patcher (CP) that allowed for checking if a player has a recipe, the LoC integration was made a lot less worrisome. Bblueberry and I were initially worried about how to make the special order not show up way too early, so being able to check if the player has the recipe went a long way to assisting with that.

The integration for LoC is that the vanilla NPCs now request recipes from LoC in addition to vanilla recipes. 

Q: Beyond just adding recipes and items, you usually go to a lot of effort to make the NPC requests fit in with established characters. How'd you go about that process for these?

First I go through the gift tastes, for quick wins to decide if a given NPC really loves a particular recipe or item. If no one "loves" that particular thing, I'd consider if the ingredients are any help, like maybe a particular NPC likes that ingredient. If that isn't of any help, I'd base it on the "likes" for the recipe, and then lastly base it on which NPCs don't have requests yet.

Sometimes I do get creative about giving "simpler" recipe items to specific NPCs, like Clint asking for quick things, or if I think I can get the NPC to say something interesting or funny about the recipe, like Evelyn and garden pie. For TNAG specifically, JeweledNebula and Airyn provided a lot of ideas on which NPCs would request which vanilla items, so much love to them <3 Tiakall helped me come up with some ideas for Host Trees requests.

All this is to keep things interesting and help balance out who's asking for what, so that it's not like, Sam requesting 6 orders and no one else (although I do find Sam to be an easy target for requests :D ). 

For the special order text and dialog, I checked the vanilla quests and dialog files to get a sense of the NPCs' "voices." That helped guide how I wrote up the text and reactions. I even copied some of the verbiage from the vanilla quests and dialog to help make the orders and reactions feel more "vanilla" and like they belonged.

Q: "Checks"? So players don't need to worry about getting orders at a bad time?

Both mods are coded to include some checks for season (stews and soups requested in the fall and winter, for example), whether you met an NPC (no requests to give something to Sandy before you met her), and of course, whether you have the recipe. There are a few other stray cases with additional checks, and both TNF and TNAG include a spoiler guide with the full details. 

Q: What do you find uses up more of your time with a mod like TNF: coding, writing the orders, or something else?

The coding aspect is actually pretty quick because I copy-paste from a previous order, and then use find and replace to change key components like the name of the NPC and the name of the order. I'd say this is also my favorite part, working out the conditions like a fun logic puzzle.

The longest and more difficult components are probably brainstorming who is requesting what, and writing the dialog and order text. For TNAG, which includes extra special rewards (events and conversation topics), that also included writing the events and conversation topics themselves. The events took the longest, with all the research and testing of where I wanted the NPCs and objects, and what I wanted them to say. 

Q: What kind of rewards can players expect if they get these needy townies their food and goods?

For TNF, your rewards are gold and friendship. This is in part because I envisioned these as simpler requests, and used the special orders board because I could use CP for it. For TNAG, your rewards include gold, friendship, and for some orders, events and conversation topics. So, NPCs will comment on what you gave them, and you may even see them use what you gave them! Details on which orders have which rewards are in the spoiler guide as well.

This was a fun challenge for me from a modding perspective, and I'm really happy with how it turned out! 

Q: In addition to TNF and TNAG, you have a series of mods that make certain aspects of the game a bit easier. Is that part of your general philosophy for playing SDV?

It's definitely a part of my playstyle! I like a chill relaxing experience, and reducing "grind" is part of achieving that. 

Q: So most of the "easier" mods are simply mods you made for yourself?

I want to say it's most of them, but I remember two specifically were requests: Easier Stable and Easier Farm Totem. The stable one was that someone asked in the main SDV discord server if something like that existed, and I realized the answer was no, but that it would be relatively simple to edit. CherryChain and ParadigmNomad gave me some useful pointers on that and I was able to quickly put that together.
Easier Farm Totem was an idea from the DSV server, and Airyn was part of the conversation on that. I realized this would also be a simple edit, and also "actually I would like this!" That mod took about two hours to write and release, and most of that was writing the mod description, haha. After making both, I kept them in my Mods folder. :)

Q: We haven't yet touched on Unique Mobile Greetings. That's different from your other mods; what inspired it?

I'm a huge fan of Aedenthorn's mods, and Mobile Phone in particular is one of my favorites. I love being able to call NPCs, and I actually suggested the feature of NPCs calling you (a la Sims), which Aedenthorn kindly implemented.

Aedenthorn made the greeting / goodbye lines easily editable, and I wanted to try out writing dialog. Thus, Unique Mobile Greetings was born! I've written some fanfiction before and taken a creative writing class, so it was exciting to be able to use that in a mod. Jonqora helped me brainstorm some ideas for it, and I think that's part of how I decided to make it more dynamic by having the dialog lines depend on your relationship with the NPC. 

Q: What's an aspect of creating mods you feel is underappreciated by users?

This is a great question! My experience with writing my bigger mods has been mapping out my ideas in notes, including spreadsheets, and taking care to consider balancing in sell prices and who would sell what for my shop mods, and who would request what and say what, plus the rewards in TNF and TNAG.

All of that takes a lot of time, and it's part of what has deterred me from implementing a lot of integration with other mods. First is all the balancing and who would request / sell what. Then there's the dialog and potentially events... Creative writing is fun and rewarding, but it requires more effort on my part than the coding aspect. 

Q: You're a great example of an author who makes mods that appeal to yourself, but also has really stretched yourself to create special touches like event rewards. What would you say to aspiring mod authors?

My advice would be, don't feel pressured to include all the bells and whistles out of the gate! Take your time. I wasn't initially planning on adding event rewards and conversation topics to TNAG, but I had a quiet voice in the back of my head saying "you can try it and see how it goes." My first event writing experience was six hours of pain with troubleshooting, and it was over a year ago. In that time, I've gotten more comfortable with writing and troubleshooting mods, and that helped boost my confidence to stretch and add those events and conversation topics. 

So if you're interested in writing a mod, you can have your working product out, and add extra features later in a future update. Feature updates are fun! Oh, and I should also add, from getting over my fear of event writing, I made a tips and tricks page to share what I learned!

Thanks Lenne!