Help! They’re overlapping at a festival!

13 Nov 2021 Leave a comment

by LemurKat in Modding Tips, Stardew Valley

Festival positions are the bane of an NPC creator’s existence.

Firstly: There are various mods that change the layout of the festival, often moving the canon NPCs at the same time.

Secondly: There are SO MANY custom NPCs to take into consideration.

Conflicts are inevitable.

Generally speaking, if two NPCs are standing in the same place, yes, notify the author. We work on a “First in gets priority” principle, meaning that you should first approach the creator of the later NPC to suggest that they might move.

Unfortunately, SVE compatibility seems to trump all, and when Flash moves his NPCs for whatever reason, causing them to conflict with ours, then we are left with the choice to either move ours again – or remove them entirely from the festival.

(This is why a number of my NPCs will not appear at festivals with SVE installed).

Is the creator obligated to move them for better compatibility?

No. NPCs may be put in specific locations that tell a ‘story’ or show something about the character. Or the creator may not wish to play the good old game of ‘shuffle the NPC around the board until nobody complains’. We cannot test our characters with every single mod installed, past, present and future, and although it is common courtesy to try and avoid overlaps where possible, places to move them may be limited. Spirit’s Eve, for example, is extremely crowded.

Note that some of the larger mods (ie: Ridgeside) have a configurable option to turn their NPCs ‘off’ from attending festivals.

Here’s a simple (?) guide on how you can move them yourself.

  1. Determine which of the two NPCs you want to move. Unless you particularly want one to remain where it is, the first step would be to see when each mod was last updated. If it hasn’t been updated in years, it’s best to move that NPC. Why? Because if you move an NPC being actively maintained, then next time it is updated your work will be undone.
  2. Find the festival positions in the NPC’s file. Note that for older mods, these will be stored in the [TMX] folder, but for more recent ones, they may be in the [CP] one. Some may have a specific “festivals” file, which makes editing much easier (ie: East Scarp has a “Festivals” folder, with each NPC having their own entry). You can use CTRL-f to search for “Data/Festivals within the CP folder.

Content Patcher Festival Positions:

{
            "Action": "EditData",
            "Target": "Data/Festivals/winter25",
            "TextOperations": [
                {
                    "Operation": "Append",
                    "Target": [
                        "Entries",
                        "Set-Up_additionalCharacters"
                    ],
                    "Value": "Aideen 45 60 3",
                    "Delimiter": "/"
                }
            ]
        },

TMXL Festivals Position:

"festivalSpots": 
	[  
		{
		"name": "Aideen",
	    "map": "Town-Christmas", 
		"position": [45, 60],
		"direction": 3
		},
....
],

3. Find a new location on the map for the NPC to stand. You can refer to this page for help with that (or merely load your game and use Debug Mode to find an appropriate location). This page contains a reference: Custom NPC Tiles Spreadsheet

4. change the co-ordinates above to the new ones you have chosen:

Value": "Aideen 47 60 3",
"position": [47, 60],

5. Save the file and test it in game. And voila, NPC is moved!

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