For the gifting portion, only small tweaks have been made, rather than the complete overhaul of receiving a gift. This is for two major reasons. First, the string  changed is meant for any gift, meaning the villager will react the same way to receiving their favorite gift in the game as they will being given trash! Second, villagers can have specific responses to gifts from other mods, which should take precedence over this mod!

This mod therefore only makes small, occasionally dynamic tweaks. Each character has a small change to the gifted dialogue in order to approximate the villager's personality, while keeping it neutral enough that the villager is either really happy, or forcing a smile for the holidays.

Most regular villagers simply have their key changed moderately, but there are some dynamic changes. Interested? A short list of these are contained in the spoiler section, but they aren't as extensive as getting a gift, as you'll see momentarily.




Now for the main event! You've given your gift, and now a villager is coming up to you to give a gift. In Vanilla, this is a pretty simple set of dialogue: 

"Hey, Player. I'm your secret gift-giver this year. Here, open it."
"It's not much, but I hope you like it."

That's about 60-70% of the villager's dialogue. The rest is just a slight variation of words, unless your gifter is a child or George, where you get context about playing at the beach or get George complaining about your reaction to his gift. It's pretty bland, for what it's worth, but it has some charm to it.

This mod overhauls that. Each villager will have a specific reaction, and if their gifts call for it, a unique response to being your gifter! (Robin, for example, can only give you building supplies in the vanilla version of the Winter Star - her dialogue will reference this!) As a result, this will make your dialogues slightly longer (on average about one dialogue box - I tried to keep it to around three dialogue boxes to prevent unnecessary dialogue additions), but will hopefully feel more like the character is giving you a gift, not a canned line.

This particular part of the mod dynamically changes with many characters with story progression and heart levels (mainly the datable characters). An exhaustive list is contained in the spoiler section below, but know that most datables and a few regular villagers will have dynamic changes based on storyline.

Full list of dialogues that change based on conditions:




With the power of the new stuff in Stardew Valley 1.6's new update, we can now change whether a person is capable of gifting at the Winter Star with an extremely simple patch. So, what better way to celebrate this than to add some new potential gifters?

There aren't many non-Town gifters that can't join the Winter Star celebrations, so I've added who I can, with the following requirements for each:

• The Wizard will join if enabled, regardless of plot progression. If not added elsewhere, he'll be down south, near the river.
• Sandy will join as long as she's been met - she'll mostly stick near Emily no matter the year.
• Krobus will join the festivities as long as he's been met and, for immersion reasons, only after the Movie Theater has been built. If he can't masquerade as a human, then he's not going to have a reason to leave the sewers! He'll also be near the sewers, ready to escape at a moment's notice.
• The Dwarf will join if you can understand them. Thanks to SDV 1.6, there's even a reason they might be around. (Note: If the Dwarf is enabled, lines referring to villagers as he/she will be made gender-neutral due to the Dwarf, under the hood, having an undefined gender.) They'll be nearer to the bridge to Joja/Theater.
  

If you enable one and they don't show up/they are out of bounds, let me know! I can always try and put them all out of the way (minus Sandy, but Sandy's had other spots).


Ever had Linus give you a Tea Set, or Vincent give you clay? Disappointed in the gift pool for the Winter Star? Then this option is for you! Thanks to Stardew Valley 1.6, you can now enable Custom Gifts. When enabled, every enabled villager will use a custom set of gifts, specifically chosen to their personality and type of life they lead (so Linus could end up giving you a Living Hat, but no Tea Set, and Abigail might give you various mine-related gifts!). This includes some items newly introduced in 1.6.

In addition, each villager has an ultimate gift. If you're at the highest available hearts with them (or married and 10 hearts or above), a new gift will be introduced into their pool - in general, all of these gifts are meant to be fairly good gifts (Gus, for example, can give 50 Qi Seasoning as his ultimate gift). You won't be guaranteed to get it, and some are extraordinarily rare to get (if you manage to get the Return Scepter from Krobus, congratulations, you've beaten some really damn hard odds), but it'll be a nice bonus for befriending a friend. (I can always alter the gift set after feedback, too!)

NEW IN 1.6: Choose Your Winter Star Gifter!?!?

With how things are set up in SDV 1.6, not only can you turn on gifters with a simple patch, you can also remove them with a simple patch, too! As such, Debug Mode is no more - you can now outright disable people from gifting you in the config!

Never want to see Vincent's face again during the Star? Poor guy. But you can do it! Want to disable everyone but your favorite two NPCs? Go right ahead! With it integrated directly into the config, you can now prevent people from ever being your "secret friend". It's not so secret anymore, Lewis...

Please note that, though the game allows you to turn off gifters, you should never remove every gifter - obviously, if the game cannot find a gifter or giftee, it's going to hard crash. As such, unless you have other NPCs that can give you gifts, never disable every single NPC at the Star. You can disable all but one, but you'll likely end up having some interesting problems (but error handling will still handle the case with only one). It's best to at least have two NPCs able to gift you at the Star.


As you might or might not have (depending on if you opened the spoilers) seen, this mod comes with several configs that can be enabled or disabled. Most are fairly simple, although a couple are made difficult specifically to prevent overrides. The following spoiler section contains  spoilers, but does contain the list of configurations. More will be added if I learn that I've accidentally overridden a dialogue change in another mod!



Unique Winter Star is a dialogue mod that only edits the fixed strings in the festival, putting it among rare company - specifically, as practically no other mod edits these strings, Unique Winter Star is compatible with pretty much any expansion mod (Yes, this means SVE is compatible, as is RSV, ES, etc.). There are a few mods of note that this mod is compatible with (i.e. will have special functionality if each are installed):

• Solstice Winter Star: Is your tree a wishing tree? Your villagers giving you food, not normal presents? If Solstice Winter Star is installed, variant lines for every villager referencing the tradition will be used instead of normal Winter Star lines. These lines are as dynamic as Winter Star's - any of the Winter Star lines have a direct Solstice variant! (Emily even has a specific line variant for her gift line, dependent on whether you've visited the Oasis!)
• Platonic Partners and Friendships: One of my favorite mods, Platonic Partners and Friendships provides SMAPI tokens to denote your relationship type, and these tokens are used by Unique Winter Star to give variant lines. They're mostly described in the spoiler sections above, but in summary, RomanceWithoutSex villagers will receive the marriage lines and will not receive spicy dialogue lines, even if enabled, Fully Platonic relationships will reference them being your best friend or, if married, your term of endearment, and Sex Without Romance villagers will receive unique variant lines (for vanilla or Solstice festivals!) if they are living with you and spicy dialogue is enabled.
• Platonic Relationships: Not a fan of PPAF, but a fan of Platonic Relationships, letting you get to 10 hearts with any NPC? A fallback json will occur and give you the best friend lines once you reach 9 hearts with a datable NPC.
• Immersive Shane: One of the most popular Shane mods, Immersive Shane has some unique lines if you are dating, engaged, or married to Shane and get him as your gifter at the Winter Star. Because of this, Shane's edits to his dating and married dialogues in this mod are disabled unless the overrides are enabled in the config.
  

In addition to the above, I've attempted to make certain this mod is devoid of gendered dialogue toward the farmer, so that it can be enjoyed by farmers of any gender. If I missed something, do let me know, and I can change it on my end.

This mod is also fully i18ned and thus fully translatable! If you'd like to make a translation, simply request to do so on the posts section and assuming there hasn't been another translation of the same language, then you should be approved in short order. The translation can simply be a JSON file that is dropped into the i18n folder rather than a complete reproduction of the mod.



This mod, as is, should be a finished product - I'm hoping I caught most bugs, but it's highly likely some fell through the cracks (the dev process was full of them - Clint had the wrong keys being edited, Maru had Harvey's dialogues, a couple villagers had their before dialogues twice, etc.). Outside of bug fixes, I don't expect there to be too many updates to this mod. That said, I do have some potential future plans related to this mod, depending on interest.

• Further mod compatibility! Outside of mod compatibility checks in case dialogue is already written for a specific mod, if there's a mod you'd like compatibility for that my dialogues don't seem to support, let me know! Compatibility will be considered on a case by case basis, but in general I'd prefer the mod to be more accessible, not less.
• Custom Gift Dialogues! In order to enhance the experience, I can write dialogues for specific gifts being given, specifically the loved gifts of each villager during the vanilla Winter Star. This would either be released as a standalone pack or an optional, configurable addition in this mod, and would be compatible with Platonic Partners and Friendships if any variations based on dating/marriage was done.
• Modded character dialogues! If there's sufficient interest (and I get permission), I can write unique responses for modded NPCs at the Winter Star. However, as I'm not an expert with every character under the sun and mod authors may prefer to write their own, please understand that I may be unable (in the case of denied permissions, likely due to the author wanting to do something similar) or unwilling (if I have little experience with the character(s) in question) to write for them. In the latter case, as long as I have access to the NPC Dispositions, I can at least write a framework for the mod authors to do with as they will, but chances are mod authors will prefer to use their own code. If I have played with the character(s) enough, however, I am willing to write a pack for them if the creator is willing.
  

Thank you to the following, without whom this mod would have been impossible to create:

Aedenthorn for the creation of Custom Fixed Dialogue, which was used until Stardew Valley 1.6
AmaranthaCyan and Airyn for allowing me to make this mod compatible with Platonic Partners and Friendships and Solstice, respectively
Atravita for several coding tips and the original idea for this mod
Everyone in #making-mods on the Stardew Valley Discord for putting up with my... several... questions on how to properly compat dialogues and everyone in #modded-farmers for putting up with my in-progress screenshots and thought processes on in-character dialogue for everyone
Beyondrecovery for the idea for In-Law dialogue for all related villagers (but also how dare you give me scope creep /s)
Pathoschild for helping maintain and create SMAPI/Content Patcher, and for the help on the i18n keys (they now look much nicer)
and ConcernedApe for making the game

(Also, if you're wondering which outfits the characters are wearing in the screenshot, for simplicity I used the usual seasonal outfits: Seasonal Outfits - Slightly Cuter Aesthetic. Feel free to check that mod out!)