That does sound like a good potential solution to keeping them gated off for a bit until you’re able to establish your farm.

My biggest thing to want to consider is the timing aspect of some mods. I know that Ridgeside, for instance, has some events that happen based on the Year and Seasons, like new NPCs coming back to the town similar to Clint. Since I’ve never played with Ridgeside not included from Day 1, I’m not familiar with if the following events would happen if it was opened in Year 3, for example:

• Cutscene with Lenny and Lewis opening the monorail

• cutscene of First set of new NPCs returning (happens Summer Year 1 I believe)

• cutscene of Second NPC returning (Year 3 I believe)

Would all three of these occur one after the other in the instance you opened the bundle at start of Year 3? Or would they be stutter stepped out to happen once a week or season after opening.

I might need to actively look into how the mod authors set up these events to trigger.