Stardew Valley is such a great place that it has attracted visitors!

Every morning, a group of visitors will arrive by bus to Stardew Valley and spend their day carrying out various tasks (or at least walking to various places and then standing there until their next appointment).

You can talk with them, and even ask them questions! They have individual personalities and their answers will vary based on those personalities.

At 6 PM they return to the bus and once they are all safely on board the bus will leave. The next morning, more visitors (or maybe the same old ones) will arrive.

Each visitor has the following features:

• Names from the USA census list of thousands of male and female names
• Skin colours from a list of seventeen realistic, diverse skin tones
• Different hairstyles and body types
• Unique clothes that they will change daily with distinct parts (top, bottom, and shoes) that can be combined into different sets, all of which are either randomly-coloured or have a fixed, coordinated colour scheme
• Individual age (teen or adult), manners, social anxiety, and optimism that can affect a lot of things from dialogue to clothes to appointments
• Interactive dialogue allowing you to learn about the NPCs, ask them about their plans for the day, offer help and get stuff for them, ask for advice, and even find out if they are datable
• Daily schedules that vary from visiting the shops to taking in the sights
  

This mod also has several configurable variables:

• FemaleChance: gender distribution
• AgeDist: age distribution (teen and adult)
• DatableChance: chance each visitor is datable
• NaturalHairChance: chance hair is natural
• LightSkinChance: chance an visitor is a person of colour
• DarkSkinDarkHair: whether dark skinned visitor only have dark-coloured hair
• RNPCMaxVisitors: maximum number of visitor visiting per day
• RNPCTotal: Total number of visitors added to the game - this many visitors are saved to saved_npcs.json and they won't change unless you delete that file
• RequireHeartsForDialogue: whether your questions require friendship hearts to get a response
• LeaveTime: the time when the visitors return to catch their bus out of the valley (I wouldn't set this earlier than 1800)
• DestroyObjectsUnderfoot: Visitors shouldn't destroy stuff in their paths anymore (yay!) but you can set this to true if you want to watch them destroy stuff.
  

Future Ideas:

• There's currently an unused "traits" field for each NPC that I think could hold any number of trait-like things. One thing I thought of was occupations like police officers that wear uniforms, etc. This would also probably require favouring random choices that are more specific to the individual, something that isn't yet implemented.
• I would like to add actual animated activities like fishing, playing music, dancing, etc. Eventually!
  

Installation Guide:

• You need SMAPI, install it first.
• Unpack this mod into your game's Mod directory.
• Start the game, but don't load your save file! This is just to create the config file.
• Go to the mod directory Mods/RandomNPCs and delete saved_npcs.json. Go ahead, your kittens are safe.
• Now open config.json in a text editor and adjust the values as you like. Some of the changes need to be made before saved_npcs.json is created, as it will only be created if it doesn't already exist on starting the game. Values that are decimal need to be between 0 and 1, where 1 is 100% chance. Where there are two or more decimals, they have to add up to 1, e.g. 0.5 and 0.5
• Once you have the config file the way you want it, you can start the game and meet your new visitors at the Bus Stop
• If you want, you can edit saved_npcs.json manually, provided you are a little bit nerdy.
• You can also edit any of the asset files, both graphics and text. You can also send your edits to me if they are cool enough. This mod's asset files are explained briefly here.
  

Disclaimer:

This mod is still in its infancy! It most certainly has failings, probably has bugs, may corrupt your save files, and even eat your kittens (nom, nom). (Probably not the kitten thing, but still!)


Help Wanted:

In case this mod is well-received (I hope you like it as much as I do!), my poor darlings would love donations of clothes, hairdos, etc. If you are a content owner who would like to see my babies wear your stuff, please let me know and I will happily add them to their wardrobes! Especially portraits, because 16px by 32px is my artistic limit.

Also, anyone who would be crazy enough to want to work on personality-specific dialogue, that would be awesome!

Thanks:

• To ConcernedApe and ChuckleFish for the great game!
• To PathosChild for SMAPI, I don't know you but you're awesome!
• To ErosDkAl for the new artwork - much appreciation!
• To you, for reading this far and hopefully downloading the mod and daring to unleash it on your save file, and maybe even endorsing it if you are my kind of crazy!
  

Technical Stuff:

• Source code is at https://github.com/aedenthorn/StardewValleyMods/tree/master/RandomNPC
• Assets are explained at https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/articles/302
  

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If you want to complain or ask for help or help me test my mods, you can visit my Discord server.

A list of all my mods for Stardew Valley is available at https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/articles/895.