The modding community for farm-life simulator Stardew Valley is incredibly dedicated and active, with a huge selection of mods for all kinds of farmers. There are mods to enhance the game, change the graphics, up the difficulty and add brand new content that feels right at home with the rest of the game. If farmers want to be able to make friends with the mythical cryptid Mothman, they can. Likewise, if Digimon fans have ever felt dissatisfied with the normal pigs and cows of Stardew, there's just the mod to fix that problem.
Digimon Ranch, created by DonValleyParkway on the Stardew Valley Nexus, lets Digimon fans introduce Digimon into the world of Stardew Valley. The mod replaces the sprites for both the barnyard animals that can be purchased from Marnie, as well as the items that players receive from said animals. There's some pretty impressive sprite work to make sure that the new content doesn't stand out from the rest of Stardew's art style. On top of that, since the mod only affects textures, this should be fully compatible with the latest version of Stardew Valley and its new additions as long as the other required mods are up to date.
For those who may be concerned that adding Digimon to their games may completely throw off the game's balance, don't worry. The mod only gives existing vanilla content a new coat of paint and doesn't actually touch the core gameplay of Stardew Valley. The Digimon basically takes the place of the vanilla animals, with DonValleyParkway emphasizing that the intent is not to alter the core Stardew experience.
DonValleyParkway also provides a shoutout to a similar mod that inspired his own. A similarly designed mod, known as Pokemon Retextures, was created by Irow on the Stardew Valley Nexus. This mod replaces the livestock in the game with Pokémon. Much like DonValleyParkway's mod, Pokemon Retextures only replaces the textures of the livestock and doesn't alter Stardew Valley's gameplay in any drastic way.
To install Digimon Ranch, players will first need to navigate to the Stardew Valley Nexus and download a few prerequisite files. Players will first need to download SMAPI, which serves as the basic modding framework for the game. SMAPI comes with an auto-installer, which makes preparing Stardew Valley for modding fairly easy. This should also create a separate .EXE file to launch Stardew Valley with mods.
After installing SMAPI, players will next need to install the Content Patcher, which is also available on the Nexus. Content Patcher allows mods to be installed without directly replacing any of Stardew Valley's core files. This makes Stardew Valley mods easy to both install and uninstall. This also lets players play the normal Stardew Valley by simply not running SMAPI's .EXE file.
Content Patcher doesn't include an auto-installer, but luckily it's not very complicated to set up. All players need to do is navigate to their Stardew Valley folder, where a Mods folder should've been added by SMAPI. If there's no folder named Mods located inside the Stardew Valley folder, simply creating a new folder with that name should work just fine. From there, players should unzip the Content Patcher files into the Mods folder.
The only thing to do from there to install Digimon Ranch is to add the mod's files into the same mod folder that they added Content Patcher's files into. From there, simply launching Stardew Valley through SMAPI's .EXE will load any mods in the mod folder. Any mods that support Content Patcher are super simple to install, making Stardew Valley an incredibly versatile game to mod.
Digimon Ranch's content replaces the barnyard animals, so once the player builds their barn, they should be able to start using the mod. Of course, it's always a good idea to test mods to verify that they work. The Digimon Ranch mod could be tested in two ways. First, the player could visit Marnie's farm and check to see if the animals located there have had their textures replaced. The second way would be to use console commands to spawn a barn animal.