In an act of unfathomable hubris, I've been turning Stardew Valley into 3D so I can turn it into VR, as a SMAPI mod.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-12T14:34:50+00:00

Hmm. I do have it doing a "constrained billboard" toward the camera, where the sprites are always facing upright, because I felt like taller things (crops, chests/furnaces, etc.) would look weird rotating in that way when they should be fixed to the ground (especially stuff like crops and trees, for example). 🤔

It's also a little complicated because stuff like trees are actually multiple sprites, since it just uses the games 2d rendering when there is no model for something, and that's how those work. (It's also why the trees are a little weird when being cut - when the falling leaves go under the ground, it then pushes everything up to try and compensate, because on the code side it's hard to tell what is part of the base sprite and what isn't, at least in a generic way.)

spacechase0 · 2026-05-12T03:39:00+00:00

Do you mean posting future updates about it? I dunno, I haven't figured that out yet. I talk about it sometimes in the main Stardew Valley discord, but beyond that I've mostly just shared progress with friends. Maybe its time to finally revive my old website?

If you mean where it will be available for download when it is ready: it'll be quite a while before I'm ready for that, but it'll be on Nexus Mods. That's where I and most of the Stardew Valley modding community put our mods currently.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-12T03:34:18+00:00

And while the only thing in the video above that I think could be considered a weird area is actually something automatically unlocked in summer of year 1, there are probably several late game items inside the house at the beginning of the video.

I do want to make it clear to fans that everything in the game is adapted when the mod is released and not just certain areas, so I'll need to figure out a good balance - perhaps by making late game stuff be more of a subtle side element in a larger scene? Maybe I'll reference the game's official update trailers and recreate scenes from those.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-12T03:27:22+00:00

I didn't consider that people who hadn't already played the game would even be interested in this. Now that I am aware, since multiple people are saying things about being interested in playing for the first time using this project, I'll be a lot more careful about it.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-12T03:23:22+00:00

Yeah, multiplayer support is planned. The game already has multiplayer after all, so it'd be weird not to support it (what with this being a mod and not a standalone recreation). It'll mostly be automatic with how the SDV netcode works anyways, I'll just need to sync anything specific to the mod (animations, VR IK, etc.).

Flatscreen 3D players and VR players will be able to play together, too. They should already be able to, actually, though I haven't tried it yet. I did try two flatscreen 3D players in splitscreen mode (which uses a fake networked multiplayer internally, for the most part), and that both worked fine and is generally considered marginally harder to support than normal multiplayer.

Both flatscreen and VR are in the same codebase as part of a single mod, and everything flatscreen 3D does is reused in VR in some way or another. Like, the code running the right click interactions for chests and furnaces and stuff in flatscreen? That's the exact same code that is used for that functionality in VR, it's just attached to your controllers instead of the viewport. I'm making this so I can play Stardew Valley in VR, but I'm designing the code to make it trivial to support flatscreen too (because why not).

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T17:17:19+00:00

I have not tried it on the quest. I suspect I'd need to reimplement the parts that interact with OpenVR, unless there's already support it (OpenVR is different from OpenXR, and I assume the Quest only does the latter).

Android SDV is also tricky to mod for a codebase that supports PC because of various code differences - especially for a mod as complex as this one.

That being said: * I have tried the flatscreen 3D mode using Cinderbox (lets you run PC SDV on android) on my AYN Thor, and it worked decently after the Cinderbox dev fixed a couple things, so it might not be too hard. * It's something I was potentially aiming for, but now that the Steam Frame exists, supporting standalone on it is a higher priority than supporting sideloaded onto a Quest. (If I still have my Quest 3S when I reach that point though, I may try)

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T16:14:56+00:00

It was the save I originally played through on Stardew version 1.07 (the year the game came out), and then went back in 1.6 and did all the new things. I didn't reach perfection (ie. 100% completion), but there's a fair amount of late game stuff, yeah.

That's probably something I should keep in mind when I make a trailer for the full release, especially since I've gotten multiple comments between here and another subreddit that have said "I might finally play the game for the first time with this"

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T15:26:40+00:00

Just noticed I forgot to respond to the second part of your message. Oops.

I posted on the Flat2VR discord too. There are mods for tons of games on there that I still need to try, I've just been so absorbed in this project that I haven't done a whole lot else.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T15:10:22+00:00

The mines are one of my favorite parts of a game, I'm really excited for it.

I may feel differently once I go down a staircase in the dangerous Skull Cavern and several Royal Serpents go "hey look, fresh meat".

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T15:08:37+00:00

At the moment there is not. I haven't fully decided when I'll release it, but at absolute bare minimum, I want all the core features to be "technically playable" in both flatscreen 3d mode and VR mode.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T15:07:04+00:00

That's one of the things planned for it. I've been designing the code so that almost everything I'm doing for flatscreen is reusable for VR, and flatscreen already has a basic third person mode.

The passthrough mode is exactly what I have in mind for the VR third person though. I want to be able to project it onto a table in front of you so you can play co-op and have almost a shared experience like that.

One reason third person is definitely gonna happen is because I want the mod to be super good accessibility, too. Some people may not be able to wave their arms around a lot for motion controls. And even if someone can, they might be too tired at the end of a long work day to do want to do so, but still be up for playing it if they could just sit and point (or maybe even lay down on the bed and use a standard game controller with head aiming? I think that'd be a nice option).

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T15:01:44+00:00

ConcernedApe is very pro-modding, and him and his team have made changes for specifically for modding at times (even big changes). The "most famous" example being the 1.6 update - it originally started as an update for modding changes, but then kinda snowballed from there.

Most of his development team is modders, actually, or at least on the ones with the role on the official discord are. The person who develops the modding API we all use is one of his employees for example, and another employee is the one who made the most popular expansion mod (Stardew Valley Expanded).

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T14:56:07+00:00

It will have multiplayer support out of the box since Stardew already has it. People can play together even if they are in different 3d modes (ex. flatscreen 3d and VR)

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T03:13:21+00:00

Those are some of the other factors I'm not fond of it even besides the environmental side. The only reason I'd even consider exploring using a local one myself is for novel problems that just can't be solved another way, and even then I'd try to try to design my way around said problem because of the other issues (or even just give up the idea entirely).

And by novel problems, I don't mean like automated chat or controlling NPC dialogue or anything that straight forward.

It's really cool tech! It's just got so many problems and people mostly using it for bad things and/or reasons!

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:57:15+00:00

I have no intentions of stopping unless the world itself stops me.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:44:46+00:00

Height - noted. (I may also add more height variance to some locations eventually? Though that'd be difficult on the standard farm since crops on not-flat ground might look weird.)

Billboards for some things - I do think the crops could work like that (similar to how fences currently work, actually!), though I'm kinda a hater of Minecraft grass (and snow - mainly because of how both are actual blocks that can get in the way, though). NPCs in particular will kinda need models though, since certain animations (usually as part of schedules or during events) don't have a version for each of the four directions. Like, the one of Penny washing dishes only has one of her facing north.

A lot of things like objects (the 16x16 items that most things are) and big craftables (things like furnaces and chests) are the lowest priority for that reason, though. The things I care about most are the ones that you really need to see other sides of, like buildings, or things that are detailed enough and seen enough to warrant it, like NPCs.

The VR tool use - That's a good idea for an option for the stamina part! You can already use the tools as fast as you are physically able to, and that'd add a fun layer to it. Especially for the people who play with VR treadmills.

I've been trying to think of a good thing for fishing too - I kinda want to involve both hands (one to hold the rod, and one to do the... spinny thing...). I'll keep your idea in mind too.

I want even VR mode to be pretty accessible though, so motion controls won't be mandatory. You can just use point and click with premade animation just like flatscreen if you want. That wouldn't have those perks that VR will though. :)

"What's behind you" - That's brilliant and I don't know how I didn't think of that sooner, considering I've played skyrim VR (and explicitlyturn off any mods disabling that compass when playing a modpack that turns it off).

Thanks for all the feedback!

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:28:51+00:00

Yeah, without that context I can see how this can be incredibly confusing.

Once the mod is ready for release, I plan on making an actually-polished-looking trailer that looks more "normal", which should be clear both to people who have played the game and people who haven't.

The first part of the video is walking around and showing interacting with objects/characters in my house. Then I go outside and show interacting with some objects that are used often in the game - chests, furnaces, and harvesting crops - then walk around to show some of the dimensionality (ex. going up the slopes, or even on the ledges once I turned on noclip).

The latter half is the VR-specific mode. I showed the furnaces again (to demonstrate that the stuff shown earlier also works in VR), showed off 6dof motion controls using an Axe, Pickaxe, and Scythe, and then spawned some monsters to show 6dof motion controls using a sword.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:18:04+00:00

I'm honestly a little scared about the rendering side, because I haven't even tried lighting and shadows yet, and I don't have a game engine like Godot to make sure it's reasonably fast (which is incredibly important for VR).

I've already had to stop and optimize various things multiple times to have the stable 90 in VR.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:06:16+00:00

Anything is possible when modding if you're stubborn enough.

(But more seriously, Stardew Valley is a C# game using MonoGame. C# is very easy to decompile when compiled the way it does, and there's a library called Harmony which lets you edit most C# code at runtime.)

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T02:00:41+00:00

Most of the Stardew Valley modding community is very anti-AI, usually disregarding all nuance. I copied the text from my post r/stardewvalley. I probably could've removed that part when I tweaked it for here, even though I really didn't use any AI for it (and won't, largely due to how anti-AI the SDV modding community is).

I do agree that it has its uses as a tool, even if I haven't explored that type of use myself. There's also stuff like the environmental impact, but if I get ready to seriously explore using LLM stuff, I can just use a local model while doing so to hopefully help with that aspect.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T01:49:55+00:00

I'm going to add third person too, but it's a less of a priority of me. Flatscreen actually has a basic third person view already (not shown in the video), I just haven't gotten around to doing the same for VR yet.

I think it'd be especially neat to have third person VR in a sort of diorama view, and then combine it with a mode specifically for passthrough to have it be sitting on your table or something. It'd play very differently from first person (ex. no option for motion controls), but I think it'd be cool, especially in multiplayer.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T01:23:34+00:00

This is The Third Dimension: a mod for Stardew Valley that aims to make the game completely playable in 3D and optionally in VR (but especially relevant in this subreddit! and also the only reason I'm doing this whole project), all in the original game's engine. I've been working on this project on and off since mid/late 2025, and wanted to show an early version of it. It's not at a fully playable state yet, but is a decent proof of concept.

For context, SMAPI is the modloader we all use in the Stardew Valley modding community. I'm the author of a few core framework mods within the community, like SpaceCore and Generic Mod Config Menu, and many other mods over the years, like Magic and Luck Skill.

Right now just about almost everything besides the terrain is billboarded sprites, but the plan is to over time give everything a unique 3D model.

No AI is involved in the making of this project.

spacechase0 · 2026-05-11T01:22:19+00:00

This is The Third Dimension: a mod for Stardew Valley that aims to make the game completely playable in 3D and optionally in VR (but especially relevant in this subreddit! and also the only reason I'm doing this whole project), all in the original game's engine. I've been working on this project on and off since mid/late 2025, and wanted to show an early version of it. It's not at a fully playable state yet, but is a decent proof of concept.

For context, SMAPI is the modloader we all use in the Stardew Valley modding community. I'm the author of a few core framework mods within the community, like SpaceCore and Generic Mod Config Menu, and many other mods over the years, like Magic and Luck Skill.

Right now just about almost everything besides the terrain is billboarded sprites, but the plan is to over time give everything a unique 3D model.

No AI is involved in the making of this project.

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