A conceptual interface mod for Stardew Valley, designed to support neurodivergent players by reducing cognitive friction without lowering difficulty.
Role
Solo — research and design (personal case study)
Timeline
2 months
Client
N/A (personal project)
Build in
Figma
Stardew Valley is often described as a cozy game. Its pixel farm, unhurried seasons, and gentle rhythm make it a place players return to when they want to relax. Yet beneath that calm atmosphere, the game constantly asks players to keep track of information: birthdays, quest deadlines, crop schedules, animal care, and dozens of small details spread across different menus and moments.
For many players, this is simply part of the experience. For players with cognitive accessibility needs, however, the way information is presented and retrieved can create unnecessary cognitive friction.
This case study explores how interface design can better support those cognitive processes. Through a conceptual mod for Stardew Valley, it proposes a set of interface modifications that reduce cognitive load without changing the game's mechanics or intended difficulty.
The goal is to remove barriers of cognitive friction, not to reduce difficulty. Difficulty is what the game asks you to master: managing the farm, prioritizing, accepting the consequences of a badly planned day. Friction is the mental cost of operating the interface while you do that: remembering, searching, rereading, reacting in time. This project works only on the second.
No proposal forces anything on the player; each one is optional and, where it makes sense, adjustable. Anyone who enjoys keeping track of their own deadlines in their head stays free to do so. The principle: give the player autonomy over pace and load, without changing the task.
This proposal is designed for PC and Mac only, because SMAPI, the mod loader Stardew Valley's community builds on, runs where the game's files are accessible. Consoles don't allow that.
On top of these three pillars sits the cognitive science each category calls on: prospective memory (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990; Fuermaier et al., 2013), visual search and selective attention, time pressure and autonomy. Play Without Barriers (Tencent, 2024) supports the field.
This study ran no primary validation test. The barriers are grounded in three sources: the cognitive literature, an analysis of existing mods, and formative research with players, spontaneous accounts from neurodivergent players on Reddit about their relationship with the game. The validation I would run, once the mod is built, is described in "Next steps and validation."
Beyond the three lenses, some proposals lean on concepts from the design literature:
Glanceable design (Matthews, Forlizzi & Rohrbach, 2006), information understood at a glance, with minimal effort.
Visual variables (Bertin, 1967), the visual grammar (colour, shape, opacity) that encodes meaning.
Information architecture / findability (Morville, 2005), structuring a collection so an item can be found again.
Diegesis (Fagerholt & Lorentzon, 2009), whether the UI lives inside or outside the game's fiction.
The community already feels these barriers. The two reference mods, UI Info Suite 2 and To-Dew, add up to more than 2.2 million unique downloads. But they make information visible, not manageable, and they stay in the pull model.
Reveals hidden information (crop growth, birthdays, animal state) via tooltips and the HUD. It proves the demand, but its philosophy is coverage: everything visible, all the time. It answers "what's the state?", not "what needs my attention now?". More visible information isn't less load.
A board for jotting down tasks. But it's reactive: the player still has to notice the deadline and remember to log it, externalizing memory only after the prospective work is already done.
The clearest evidence isn't in the mods — it's on paper. Players keep notebooks, bullet journals, and spreadsheets to hold what the game won't: bundle checklists, gift preferences, fishing conditions, birthday calendars. When people leave the game to manage the game, the workaround itself is the proof — what they rebuild by hand is exactly what the interface should surface, at the moment it matters.
Search "stardew valley checklist" and brace yourself for a world of spreadsheets, printable planners, and handmade notebooks decorated with pixel villagers.
The game holds every deadline but never surfaces them: the player has to remember what's coming, where to check, and when to act. The proposal adds proactive letters (birthday, planting, quest reminders delivered through the in-game mail, in a villager's voice) and a quest pin on the HUD. The letters close the planning gap by pushing information at the right moment; the pin keeps the chosen objective in view without opening a menu.
Six systems, six different places, zero reminders. Welcome to the administrative side of cozy farming.
Plan
organize the tasks into a plan: what to do, and when
Remember
hold the plan in mind until is needed
Start
begin acting at the right moment or cue
Do
carry the plan out as intended
Prospective memory runs in four steps. In adults with ADHD, only the first, planning, breaks down. Remembering, starting, and doing stay intact (Fuermaier et al., 2013).
pull
The quest pin
The player pins an active quest to the HUD. The objective and its days remaining stay in view, so the deadline no longer hides inside a menu.
push
Proactive letters
The game sends a letter the day before a deadline, with the context needed to act. The game does it on its own.
Birthday — a gift hint, from someone close to the villager
Last planting day — before the season closes the window
Dated quest — before a timed quest expires
Standard letters
quests, events, tips, lore, achievements
Friendship letters
heart events & messages from villagers
Repeatable letters
random gifts, by friendship level
LOAD:
keeping track
MECHANISM:
push (the game sends)
GAG:"Indicate / allow reminder of current objectives during gameplay" (Cognitive · Intermediate)
Most crops die on the first day of the next season, and each one has its own last possible planting day, counted backward from when it needs to harvest. The game shows the growth time in the seed's tooltip, but doing the math and remembering the deadline is left to the player. The letter arrives on the eve of that day, naming the crop and its deadline. The sender is Pierre, who owns the General Store and sells the seeds: he has reason to keep track.
Since some crops share the same last planting day, their letters can pile up. The frequency is configurable: one letter per crop by default (small notes are easier to act on than a dense list), with the option to switch to a weekly digest.
Stardew Valley has 34 villagers with birthdays, each on a fixed day. A gift on a birthday is worth eight times the usual friendship, and if you miss it, that bonus is gone for a year. Each villager has their own taste: a handful of loved gifts, a few liked ones, and plenty they dislike or hate, across hundreds of items. The date is on the calendar at Pierre's shop, but the player has to remember to check it and figure out what to bring. Two things to hold in your head, almost every other day, all year.
Wrong gift. One year to recover. Or five minutes on the wiki. We’ve all been there.
On the eve of the birthday, a letter arrives, one day early so the player has time to buy or craft the gift. It includes a hint at a gift the villager likes (never one they love, that's left as the player's discovery).
The hint changes by year: in the first year, the letter is narrative, from someone close to the birthday person; from the second year on, it's random, from one of four town figures matched to the gift.
Not every forgotten quest is lost for the same reason. Before the letters, it's worth seeing how quests work today:
A quest can arrive by mail or by a board in town. Some have no deadline (Story Quests); others run against the clock (Help Wanted, Special Orders). Either way, it lands in the journal. The journal button pulses when something new comes in, but after that first signal, it goes quiet. To check the objective, the deadline, or how far along you are, the player has to open the journal, find the quest, and read through it every time.
Every quest ends up in the same journal. Good luck remembering to open it.
The proposal is two new letters, one for each kind of forgetting:
1. The Special Orders letter (quest with a deadline). These are community requests posted on the town board: gather materials, slay monsters, catch fish, within a fixed number of days. Miss the day, lose the reward. The player knows the deadline exists, but the journal never speaks up again after the first pulse.
The letter arrives around the last quarter of the timeframe, early enough to act. It reminds what to do, when it's due, and carries a new hint to help get it done. Signed by whoever posted the order.
Every Special Order was mapped by hand: I wrote a letter template for each one, with variables for the sender, the deadline, the task, and a hint matched to the request. The full spreadsheet holds every combination.
2. The Story Quests letter (quest with no deadline). These are plot-driven quests that arrive by mail: a villager asks the player to find and deliver a specific item, tied to the story and the characters' lives. No deadline sounds forgiving until you forget. Nothing prompts the memory, the quest sinks into the routine, and most ask for a seasonal item. Miss the season, wait a full year.
The letter arrives three days after the quest is received, before the window closes. It puts the quest back in view, naming the item and who to deliver it to, written in the villager's voice so the hint reads as conversation, not instruction. I mapped every story quest in the game and wrote each letter individually.
LOAD:
keeping track
MECHANISM:
pull (the player chooses to pin)
GAG:"Indicate / allow reminder of current objectives during gameplay" (Cognitive · Intermediate).
Sure, Willy. Let me file this right next to the other ten things in my head I'm definitely not going to remember.
A new icon, drawn in the game's pixel style to match the existing ones, marks whether a quest is pinned or not. It sits next to Cancel, inside the quest: one click sends the quest to a compact box on the HUD; another unpins it.
Each pinned quest shows the name, the objective, a live counter, and the days left: exactly what the player would open the journal to check. Up to three fit at once (configurable), and the count shows in the header. When a quest is completed, the pin vanishes on its own.
Explore the prototype
The pin is pull: the player chooses to use it. To compensate, the empty box stays on screen on purpose, with a shortcut to the journal, so the player doesn't have to remember the feature exists.
The flag that marks a pinned quest uses shape and contrast, not color alone, to tell its states apart (GAG: "Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a fixed colour alone," Vision · Basic).
Every option is configurable through GMCM: how many quests to pin, where the box sits, whether to show the counter and days remaining, and the background transparency. The default works out of the box.
Letters are already saved in Collections since version 1.4, but the archive was built as a record, not a retrieval tool. The proposal adds a dedicated Mail tab with an icon per letter type (quest, gift, event, friendship, info, planting) and filters by type and sender, so the letters from Category 1 stay findable after they leave the mailbox.
It's like Where's Waldo, but every Waldo is wearing the same shirt.
LOAD:
keeping track
MECHANISM:
pull (the player retrieves in menu)
GAG:"Allow all narrative and instructions to be replayed" (Cognitive · Advanced)
The proposal is a real mail archive: its own tab in the menu, next to Inventory, Skills, and Collections, always a click away. Inside, each letter gets a small icon set by its intent, so you can tell at a glance what each one is, and the list can be sorted or filtered by type or by sender. The reminder letters from Category 1 keep living here too: when a birthday, planting, or quest letter leaves the mailbox, it stays available to be pulled back.
Six icons, each tied to the context of the letter: a quest, a gift, an event, a relationship, a piece of lore, or a farming reminder. The base game's letters and the mod's share the same icons when the context matches.
Explore the prototype
Dry soil differs from watered by a faint shade; unfed and unpetted animals show nothing at all. The player has to scan every tile and enter every building to check. The proposal adds proximity markers (a half-drop for watering, a half-heart for petting) that pulse near the player and fade with distance, plus a count on the HUD for watering and feeding. Both are glanceable, read preattentively, and fully customizable.
Before getting into the category, it's worth pinning down a few game terms that come up throughout:
Term
Tile
Watering
Feeding
Petting
Mood
Friendship
Barn / Coop
Hay
What it is
The smallest unit of the game's grid. Each crop bed takes one.
Using the watering can (manual) or sprinklers (automatic).
Without water, the crop doesn't advance that day.
One hay per animal per day, or grass if they graze. Without food, no produce that day.
Clicking on the animal. Raises mood and, over time, friendship.
The animal's daily state. Combined with friendship, it determines whether produce
comes out large and at what quality (silver, gold, iridium).
The long-term bond with the animal. It sets the consistency and level of the products.
Barn houses larger livestock (cows, goats, sheep, pigs, ostriches);
coop houses poultry and the like (chickens, ducks, rabbits, dinosaurs)
The animals' food, cut from grass with the scythe and stored in the silo.
One hay per animal per day, when they aren't grazing.
If the barrier is a slow, serial search, the fix is its inverse. Glanceable design is information built to be read "with low cognitive effort," in a single glance, without pulling focus from the main task (Matthews, Forlizzi & Rohrbach, 2006). It works through preattentive processing: the brain categorizes basic features (colour, shape, size, motion) in parallel, before conscious attention, in under ~250 ms (Healey & Enns, 2012; Ware, 2020). The feedback gap forces a tile-by-tile hunt; a glanceable signal is read preattentively, in parallel.
Match expectations
form platers already know
Abstract
stripped to the minimum
Distinct
stands out by contrast
Consistent
one visual language
Proximity markers
A water-drop over each dry plant, a half-heart over each unpetted animal. Faint at a distance, full on approach or hover.
Match
Distinct
Abstract
Consistent
HUD Count
A running count in the HUD: "[N] crops need watering", "[N] animals need feeding".
Match
Abstract
Consistent
LOAD:
keeping track
MECHANISM:
push (ambient/peripheral)
GAG:"Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a fixed colour alone" (Vision · Basic)
"Avoid placing essential temporary information outside the player's eye-line" (Vision · Intermediate) "Provide an option to turn off / hide all non-interactive elements" (Cognitive · Advanced).
The first two are Vision: the project's scope is cognitive, but since the load here is a costly visual search, solving it also benefits players with low vision. The third is the cognitive anchor, the control to reduce or turn off the markers.
Perception and cognition aren't separate systems. When the eye can't catch something automatically, the cost falls on attention and working memory, which is exactly the cognitive system this project deals with. That's why the guideline is "Vision" on paper, but cognitive in effect, for these players.
I thought of two markers, one for each task where reading the state fails:
Watering: an unwatered tile can be hard to see, especially in a large field.
Petting: here there's no marker at all. To know which animals still need petting that day, the player has to test them one by one or open the Animals tab in the menu, which shows it but requires stopping the game to go check.
To reduce this visual search effort, contextual markers provide immediate feedback for daily tasks like watering crops and petting farm animals.
The system operates dynamically based on player proximity and task state:
Explore the prototype
Explore the prototype. Use the arrow keys or click to navigate.
Explore the quest pin settings menu prototype in Figma
