While ConcernedApe and his new team are toiling away on the official Stardew Valley 1.7 update, fans of the popular farming game are constantly releasing interesting new mods for PC players to discover.
One new mod, The Act of Cooking, aims to expand the game’s recipe system by adding actual minigames that you need to complete in order to cook your food. An expansion for the already existing Love of Cooking addon, this clever mod makes cooking an actual skill… similar to fishing!
Created by modder Kanadeyoru, who also created the custom weather Weather Wonders mod, The Act of Cooking aims to make cooking more interactive. “Instead of just picking a recipe and instantly making it, you’ll play a short interactive minigame where you go through all the ingredients in order to cook your meal,” the modder writes.
With the mod installed, cooking is a balancing act… literally. Each ingredient needs to be touched individually in a “fast, interactive challenge” that tasks you with clicking on a quickly moving green bar when it crosses over an arrow.
The mod even has progression built in with the difficulty of each challenge getting easier the more you upgrade your pan. It’s a simple addition, but it adds some additional interactivity to the cooking mechanic that makes it even more engaging and adds a bit of tension. After all, if you mess up, your food will be burnt, and nobody wants to eat a burnt strudel.
Kanadeyoru explains that the mod was designed to be “light, fun, and true to the vanilla style of the game” with a new UI element that looks straight out of ConcernedApe’s original. Additionally, the mod can be used with any modded recipes, allowing fans to cook whatever they like. It even works with controllers!
While simple, The Act of Cooking is a brilliant little mod that shows just how inventive the Stardew Valley community still is over a decade after the game’s release. It’s completely unknown if ConcernedApe will ever add an official cooking minigame into the farming game—maybe that’s a feature of 1.7, who knows—but whatever isn’t officially added, you can bet a mod will eventually exist for it.
