Anyway, I interviewed baldursvillage, the team behind the Baldur’s Village mod for Stardew Valley. Now, I would like to give you all a fair warning, if you haven’t played with this mod before and if you also haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 or just haven’t finished it yet, there will be some spoilers, so read on with caution! We've also done a video spotlight on this mod, Modsetti and I sat down to talk about it, which you can watch over on our YouTube channel.
On a side note (and yes I am going to shamelessly plug this), it would be a fantastic mod to test the Stardew Valley preview release of our app.
Hey team, it’s great to be talking to you all! Can you each introduce yourselves and share a bit about your background in gaming and modding?
Hey! Super excited to be chatting with you all. I’m Xun, and I’ll be sharing answers on behalf of the team today.
Funny enough, most of us met on Xiaohongshu (Rednote) under the BG3 (especially Astarion!) discussion threads — it was unintentional, but it's wonderful that we ended up as a team. We all loved Stardew Valley and Baldur’s Gate 3, and somehow that shared love turned into... this whole mod.
None of us had any experience making mods before Baldur‘s village. Everything we know now, we learned while building Baldur’s Village — the hard way.
So Xun, what first drew you to Baldur’s Gate 3 and Stardew Valley? Were there any moments from either game that have really stuck with you?
For me, I’ve been playing Stardew Valley since launch day — it honestly feels like a second home.
If you mention the most unforgettable memories definitely knowing this amazing group of creators and building something together. Two games I loved brought some very cool people into my life, and now we’ve made a whole village. That’s pretty wild.
It’s amazing how that shared love for the games turned into something so creative. How did the team end up forming, and was this your first time working on something like this together?
Yep, first time for all of us. None of us knew each other before this — it all started online and stayed that way.
We’re a small, all-female team spread across three time zones, which is a really big challenge for us. Additionally, all team members either have full-time jobs or are full-time graduate students, so we could only dedicate our after-work hours each day to work on this project.
I love the concept of merging these two worlds, what inspired the idea to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 characters to Pelican Town?
Like a lot of BG3 fans, we felt an emotional pang from the endings, not because they weren’t good — they were amazing — but because we just wanted more. More closure, more time, more happy endings.
Astarion longing for the sun, Shadowheart reuniting with her parents but still carrying so much pain, Karlach being stuck with a ticking time bomb inside her while Wyll’s right there in the Hells with her... it hurt.
And I felt a little bummed when Larian announced there wouldn’t be DLCs. I thought maybe I could pick up the pen and start a new story/chapter for this game.
Stardew Valley and Baldur’s Gate 3 couldn’t be more different in tone and style, how did you go about blending the two worlds in a way that still felt true to both?
This is definitely not an easy task. We wanted to stay true to Stardew’s art and narration style while maintaining the intensity and uniqueness of each BG3 character. One challenge of blending the two games was to create the character portraits in pixel art. I have redrawn Astarion’s portrait a dozen times at 64x64 resolution, but we weren't content with the effect. Eventually, we switched to higher-res portraits using other mods for support — that’s why our character portraits don’t use the vanilla size. Otherwise, BG3 characters just... don’t look like themselves.
Astarion is a favourite of mine and I think you nailed the pixel art for him, were there any particular challenges in adapting his personality, as well as the other character personalities, in a Stardew Valley setting?
Oh, tons. One big challenge was to make it make sense — why would these powerful, battle-hardened folks from Faerûn end up in a valley full of crops and livestock?
So we worked on giving each of them a plausible reason to be there — something that would feel natural, but still true to who they are.
That really comes through in the mod, none of them feel out of place in Pelican Town. Are there any favourite moments or interactions you’d suggest players keep an eye out for?
Spoiler alert: One moment I love is after you complete Astarion’s quest, you’ll see him finally enjoying daytime festivals, out and about in the sun. That said, don’t expect him to be everywhere all the time. He is a busy vampire, after all, trying to live a balanced life.
It sounds like a real team effort. Could you share a bit about how the work was divided and who took on which parts of the project?
Since this is a totally unpaid, passion-fueled project, it's impossible to keep an organized peer-to-peer collaboration. Most of us ended up wearing multiple hats. While I was in charge of character art, I also worked on map design, dialogue writing, event scripting, scheduling, and character preferences.
Our programmer, Haruka, has since shifted focus to music production. Yudeling is our lead writer — she’s responsible for most of the character dialogues and events. Kawener handled all our event scripting, and now she is responsible for general coding tasks and fixing those pesky bugs.
And then there’s Sirris — the most fluent English speaker on our team. She worked with a group of volunteer translators to make sure our Chinese-to-English localization stays faithful to the original tone and meaning of the dialogue.
I imagine a project like this came with its fair share of surprises, were there any unexpected hurdles or particularly fun moments during development?
Funnily this project almost got scrapped a month in. The project started with only two people. When the other developer, who was responsible for coding, left for personal reasons, I thought the project might fall apart. I had zero modding experience — I had to look up coding tutorials in order to save this project. And I ended up paying out-of-pocket for some help until we opened donations.
Then Yudeling joined and brought her friend in, who was also new to modding but an incredibly fast learner. We divided the research and suddenly things were flowing. A lot of stress was taken off me.
Later, we found our event scripter and our localization lead. And somehow, the right people just kept showing up when we needed them. None of us had related experience, but we made it. That still feels unreal.
One of the things people love most about Stardew is its cosy, everyday life feel, how did you adapt such layered characters from Faerûn into that kind of space?
BG3 characters come with heavy baggage like trauma, faith crisis, ancient curses... SDV's story has complexities of modern life too, but it is more like, “Hey, wanna grow some parsnips?” So we spent a lot of thought on making these characters' new lives in SDV make sense.
We gave each character a reason to settle down here — something that felt emotionally honest. But we didn’t want to strip their personalities and backgrounds. Astarion's story still revolves around the darkness of his past. Shadowheart still wrestles with her faith and identity even after getting a ranch of her own. We wanted to place their struggles in a gentler world where healing looks a little different. The idea was to let them bring their story with them, and then let them grow beyond it — in the sun, with friends, maybe even with love.
Tone can be tricky with a crossover like this, how did you strike the balance between BG3’s darker themes and Stardew’s lighter, more wholesome vibe?
We tried to find a balance point, where the characters seem true to themselves but still feel proper to SDV's relatively more peaceful world.
For example, Astarion kept his sarcastic and flirty personality. But we toned down the violent and bloodthirsty aspect that obviously fit better in a fantasy adventure. The goal was to make interactions fun and in character, without breaking the atmosphere of either universe.
The mod’s had some incredible recognition, from PC Gamer and GamesRadar to Swen Vincke himself! How did it feel seeing that kind of response?
That was huge for us. We’d been working hard for nearly a year before getting actual feedback on the mod (there was a lot of support and love for the artwork I shared). Seeing people notice the amount of work put into it, especially Swen Vincke, was incredible. It gave the whole team a huge boost and reminded us why we started in the first place.
Also, it made us respect ConcernedApe and big mod creators even more — their perseverance is truly admirable.
Your mod was briefly taken down due to an automated DMCA from Wizards of the Coast. After community support and media attention, WotC realised the error and gave their blessing to the mod. How did that experience feel, and what are your thoughts on the outcome?
It’s been three weeks since the MOD’s release, and we’ve been both excited and nervous. We've worked tirelessly on updates, bug fixes, and gathering player feedback. We were eagerly looking forward to last Saturday—we just finished Astarion’s 10-heart event, the final part of his romance—and we discovered the MOD was under review.
“They won’t get to play the latest event we worked so hard on.” That was our first reaction. Then panic set in, and we prepared multiple help request emails for the following week. Fortunately, by Monday, we received overwhelming support from the modding community and Larian Studios, and the issue was resolved.
Our team is still recovering from the shock, but our next steps are clear: continue updating and creating content, focus on what we love, and give back to the players who have supported us with great projects.
It’s been out for a little while now, have there been any player reactions or stories that really stuck with you?
We were honestly shocked to see some players saying they bought Stardew Valley just to play our mod—that alone felt incredibly encouraging. It’s such an honor to introduce people to this amazing game through our small project.
But what really blew my mind was hearing that someone bought a PC just to run the mod. That felt completely over the top—in the best possible way! We never expected that level of dedication, and it’s incredibly motivating for us as creators.
With such a passionate response from players, are there any plans to keep building on the mod or add new content based on feedback?
The core worldbuilding and roadmap were already set early on — now we’re just steadily working to bring it all to life.
We’re considering letting supporters vote on which character should get a romance route next. We want the community to help shape what comes next.
I'd like to personally cast my vote for Gale as a romance option next! That said, one of the most impressive things about the mod is how well the characters’ personalities come through. How did you go about capturing them so accurately? Were there any lines or moments you’re especially proud of?
Thank you for that. I am proud of a lot of the dialogue. We specifically made some of Astarion’s post-marriage scenes sweeter and cuter than in BG3. This is because the player has to go through the entire affection-building journey in SDV—Astarion's liked gifts are usually expensive, too. So they earn a happy ending through hard work. However, we still maintain the character's core attributes, like Astarion's vampire nature. Sometimes you might wake up and realize he “accidentally” drank a little from you in the night… with blood still on his lips. Just a bit of playful drama.
Localization is definitely a bigger challenge than we thought. Our mod has thousands of lines of dialogue, each needs to sound exactly how the characters speak in English. We found support with a group of volunteers and did our best to deliver. We are very thankful to them. We gained some valuable experience in balancing the dialogue length according to its in-game display.
Each Baldur’s Gate 3 character has such a distinct personality. Were there any that were especially challenging (or surprisingly easy) to adapt to Stardew Valley life?
Honestly, the hardest part was figuring out how each character would react to farm life—and how their personalities could grow under a new environment.
We’re a tiny team of amateur creators. Our average game time on BG3 is 350 hours. It sounds like a lot, but it’s really not enough to let us gain a full grasp of every companion's every side, since BG3 has such a vast amount of dialogue and possibilities of plot development.
That’s why Astarion was less challenging than the other characters as our team members mostly had strong emotional connections to him. His story was the first to be completed, as a collaborative effort from everyone.
The other companions took us more effort to capture. We did our best to dive into each of their backstories to achieve the same depth on top of actually developing the mod. And there will be more stories about the rest of the companions as well.
The mod includes some memorable in-game events. Were there any funny or heartfelt moments that didn’t make the final cut?
Absolutely. There are a handful of scenes we loved but had to cut. One example—in Astarion’s 8-heart event, we originally planned for a cutscene in which the player rapidly hops through different dreams, like in the movie Inception. It was a cool concept, but it made the event way too long. In the end, we had to cut nearly half of it.
This being our first modding project, moments like that happened often — but each one taught us something valuable.
Have you noticed there being any character interactions that the community has loved the most?
A big one was letting players hug Astarion after he killed Cazador. Many players said it felt healing because in BG3 there was no such option. All you can do is watch him cry. Personally, I preferred BG3's treatment that prevented the player character from interfering in that moment — it is Astarion’s moment for self-redemption. But giving him that extra warmth of a hug felt right in SDV.
Another fun community reaction is people complaining that Astarion is too hard to please. He has a very selective range of liked gifts. “Astarion disapproves” has made it to Pelican Town, apparently.
I must admit, I really liked that interaction with him as well, it felt very healing. So I'm curious if the residents of Pelican Town visited Baldur’s Gate, who do you think would fit in the best, and who would have the hardest time?
Our BG3 characters moved to Pelican Town in peace. But if town villagers arrive at Baldur’s Gate through a teleportation circle, it will be a heart-pounding adventure for all of them. It sounds like a good TRPG campaign.
Baldur’s Gate is a dangerous place. Most villagers will have a hard time. It’ll be easier for stronger characters like Marlon, Gil, Mr.Qi, Wizard. Dwarf and Krobus will merge in too.
Abigail can finally experience some real adventure. Maybe she will become a paladin? She’s cut out for that. Seb(mage), Maru(healer) and Sam(warrior) can join her—a classic starter adventurer group.
Emily might also have some talent in magic. Elliot and Leah can become good friends with Volo. Imagine picking up books written by Elliot in Baldur’s Gate!
I can already picture Willy fishing on the Gray Harbour Docks. Linus can definitely find his way in the wildland around the city.
I’m fascinated by the idea of Robin joining local workers and architects to fix the city of Baldur’s Gate after the Absolute damaged it.
But in short, I think the more impulsive, adventurous, or curious characters fit in better with Baldur’s Gate. They are more likely to quickly acclimate to a new city.
What’s one hidden detail or Easter egg in the mod that players might miss?
Some player choices actually change Astarion’s reactions at the end of his 8-heart event. Our upcoming 10-heart event also has different outcomes depending on whether you're married to him or not, so stay tuned!
Also… Mixed coffee is fishing bait. It’s not a bug. Please stop reporting it. We’ll explain eventually.
Do you have any other projects in the works, either individually or as a team?
If you mean mods, I’m currently 100% focused on this one. Baldur’s Village is just getting started. What we have published is merely a framework. We’ve got way bigger dreams for it: new stories, new gameplay, new items. There is still tons of work to do.
I can't wait to see how the mod develops over time, can you give us any sneak peeks at what’s coming next for Baldur’s Village?
The core concept of this project was a fully developed village. A key storyline centers on Karlach’s heart, as we aim to have her find a way to fully restore it. In our BG3 endings, Karlach had to return to Avernus to keep her heart stable. Wyll chose to become the Blade of Avernus. These two joined forces in Avernus and have been slaying monsters nonstop. We wish they can return and enjoy a peaceful pastoral life, even just for a little while.
This storyline has been in development, but it is quite large and complicated and, therefore requires time to refine. Our focus is divided between Halsin’s romance and Karlach’s heart quest, advancing both simultaneously.
What advice would you give to other aspiring modders who want to start a project of this scale?
To be honest, I don’t know if I’m in any place to give advice. Making a full-scale, totally free mod like this is hard. Even the decision to start on it takes a lot of courage. And sometimes luck can be a factor that helps project completion, stubbornness too. For me, the process of developing can have painful moments, sometimes more than fun ones, but we just have to want it enough to see it through.
If you could create a crossover mod for any other games, what would your dream mash-up be?
This was my dream crossover. And in the future, rather than doing another mash-up, I think we could all say that we've been inspired by this experience. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll take what we’ve learned and try making a game of our own. But that’s a story for another time.
Finally, do you have anything you’d like to say to the community?
This mod has gone through many challenges, and sometimes misunderstandings. We want to give our sincere gratitude to those who supported us. Thank you dearly. You’ve made all of this worth it.
The release is just the beginning—we’ll keep working on improving and adding to the mod, and we’ll always welcome constructive feedback.
A huge thank you to Xun and the baldursvillage team for chatting with me, I’m really excited to see how this mod develops, and I know it’ll only continue to grow in popularity!
As always, if you have any recommendations for future mod author interviews, send them my way or drop them in the comments below.
11 comments
WOTC can go eat dirt
Although, it may not be a modded game that you would play maybe others will, show more compassion for the efforts they put into this.
- WOTC never ceases to impress me with their farming of negative press 🤣