Interactive Children

As of 2023, there is now a new mod replacing Child to NPC: Little NPCs so this entry may one day be updated!

It’s one of the most commonly suggested features: to add more interactivity/personality to the farmer’s children.

The latter is unlikely ever to happen in vanilla Stardew, as Concerned Ape said in an interview:

The main character is intentionally left with an undefined personality, so players can more easily insert themselves into the events and setting. Strong, pre-defined characteristics and dialogue can make you feel like an observer rather than a participant. “When it comes to your own children, I feel like it’s the same thing,” Barone says. “It needs to be left vague, or it will run into that problem.”

interview with Joe Juba of The Game Informer in 2020

However, vanilla does add some cute features to the kids:

• They can wear hats
• They attend festivals
• You can hug them every day and they will sometimes run away from you when you put hats on them, or perform other typical cute child behavior.

If, however, you’d rather not insert your own role-playing into the children as well, then there is a mod for that too!

It’s called Child to NPC.

And it is several years old, extremely complicated (apparently full of Harmony patches), the creator no longer maintains it, but it has had several unofficial updates, and still works, albeit with a few… let’s call them ‘quirks’.

Before installing Child to NPC, create a back-up of your main game file! Whilst I have successfully uninstalled it (and later reinstalled it) without it breaking the save, there is a possibility it will. And better to lose a few months/years of progress than your entire beautiful farm!

By itself, Child to NPC won’t really do anything. It needs a pack to go with it. There are several available:

Babysitter | NPC Child for SVE | Child Age Up

I don’t personally use any of the above, and thus cannot vouch for their quality, of even if they work anymore (although of the three, I have tried Babysitter and it seemed quite decent).

These packs essentially create the child as a custom NPC: they add gift tastes, dialogue and schedules to your character. You can now talk to them, gift them twice a week, and send them off to school three times a week, if the pack above is coded for it.

Also, you can do what I am doing, and create your own children. Child to NPC comes with a handy template, which you can modify as required (Note that this version of Child to NPC itself is broken, and you will need to use the unofficial patch linked above). The only real difference between creating an NPC child and a custom NPC is that you use tokens in place of the character’s details:

{ "LogName": "FirstChild Dispositions", "Action": "EditData", "Target": "Data/NPCDispositions", "Entries": { "{{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/FirstChildName}}": "child/neutral/neutral/neutral/{{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/FirstChildGender}}/non-datable/null/Town/{{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/FirstChildBirthday}}/Jas 'friend' Vincent 'friend' Jasper 'Dada'/Farmhouse 15 5/{{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/FirstChildName}}" }, "When": { "Spouse": "Jasper" } },

These tokens are created by the smapi mod/framework of Child to NPC, and when loaded in the game will translate into:

"Jack": "child/neutral/neutral/neutral/male/non-datable/null/Town/winter 1/Jas 'friend' Vincent 'friend' Jasper 'Dada' Autumn 'sibling'/Farmhouse 15 5/Jack", "Autumn": "child/neutral/neutral/neutral/female/non-datable/null/Town/spring 13/Jas 'friend' Vincent 'friend'/FarmHouse 27 5/Autumn"

Things to note here: Listing Jas, Vincent, Jasper and the other sibling, means that when the characters are walking in a procession, they will not be constantly saying ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ to one another. This isn’t foolproof: they will certainly greet any characters that are not on that list!

My original intent was to start both characters with ‘neutral’ traits and make changes as their story arcs progressed, but these will be adjusted shortly, to make them both into the children I am perceiving them to be.

My spouse, Jasper, and I have two children, Autumn and Jack. Technically, Autumn is the older child, but due to the ‘quirks’ of Child to NPC and me uninstalling it soon after Jack was born, the game code thinks she’s my second child. That’s fine, we can work with that!

Creating a personality and character for your child is pretty much the same as creating a custom NPC: you define their gift tastes, their dialogue, and write their schedule. Thankfully, their schedule doesn’t have to be quite as complicated: if you have the config of Child to NPC set to “wander”, the kids will continue to roam around the house on the days they’re not wandering unaccompanied through town and into the forest and mountains. Therefore, it’s easiest to set their schedule so that they leave when your spouse leaves, follow them wherever they go, and come home with them.

• Note that once you install Child to NPC, your children will no longer sleep. They’re vampires now.
• Because of the gifting mechanic, you can also only feed them, at most, twice a week.
• And you can no longer ‘kiss’ them good morning or good night.
• Also, if your toddlers are wearing hats, make sure to remove them before installing the mod, or you might lose them forever.

Ideally, I’d create a mod that allowed you to shape your child’s personality and tastes through a complicated story arc, but I have many projects, and I’m also somewhat worried about how long Child to NPC will continue to work, so setting up a more basic mod is more idea.

Of my two in-game children, Autumn is adventurous: she loves stories about goblins and princesses – and also goblin princesses! Especially goblin princesses who fight monsters, cos she really wants to have adventures. She’s spirited, and a little naughty.

Jack is more of a daddy’s boy. He loves collecting things, and wants to be an archaeologist, like his dad. He’s a little more thoughtful and solemn than his sister.

TROUBLESHOOTING:

Child to NPC has a lot of bugs, although it has not proven too bad since I reinstalled it.

Some of the issues I have found:

• Clone children: You will have two versions of your kids, a static one that stays on the spawn spot, and a mobile one that follows the schedule or runs around the house. You can talk or gift either of them.
  • I have moved the beds so that the static clones are not visible. This is non ideal, but results in the children emoting a ? or … every morning before running around the house (which is kind of cute).
• Running Rings around the Bus Stop: For reasons I do not understand, when the child NPC crosses the bus stop every morning, instead of walking from left to right like their father or any other NPC, they start running laps and passing through objects. Sometimes they get stuck on objects, other times they will eventually return to the path and continue as if they weren’t just acting like a crazy weird demon-child.
  • Apparently setting the Child to NPC to “wander”: false stops this behavior. But that does mean that on days when they are left at home, they won’t move.
  • Setting the schedule to start at 7.30 seems to help.These bugs have been fixed with lastest unofficial update!
• %kid1 and %kid2 will cease to work in dialogue: Your character is no longer a child: they’re an NPC now, so these keys will no longer work (I think they will default to ‘baby’). This may also result in your MarriageDialogue no longer pulling the kid related dialogue, so you may need to add some more.
  • You need to change any reference of the children to: {{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/FirstChildName}} and {{Loe2run.ChildToNPC/SecondChildName}}
• Your spouse may ask for a third child: For the same reason as explained above.
  • Allow both children to become toddlers before installing this mod, and have Robin remove the crib.
• Other weird side effects: When Jack was born, Autumn’s mobile clone stopped accepting gifts, although the static one would still accept them.
  • Having both kids as toddlers of the appropriate age before re-installing the mod seems to prevent this.
• Your child will no longer appear at festivals: As far as the game is concerned, your children no longer count as children but as NPCs, so the original system no longer works.
  • You can load them in the same manner you load Custom NPCs to festivals.
• Your children will have no pronouns: since you can never be sure of the gender of the first child, you can’t refer to “him” or “her” in dialogue. This is fine if you want to raise your child without gender: use ‘they’ for example, but so far the only way I’ve found is to create a mass of dynamic tokens, set with a config. You can always refer to them by name using the same code as specified above.
• My children are both boys/girls: This is what happens if one child grows into an NPC before the second is born. When Jack was born, I had to change his gender from 1 (female) to 0 (male). It wasn’t that I didn’t want two girls: I just wanted my children to not be identical twins!
  • Don’t install the mod until both children are toddlers.
  • Or, edit your save file to change the child’s gender.
• Don’t name your children after existing NPCs!: This will certainly break things. If you HAVE named your child after an existing NPC (vanilla or custom) you will need to edit your save file.

Given how buggy it can be, is it worth it?

It’s not really that buggy anymore. So… I’ll let you be the judge of that! But me? I say, yes. It is DEFINITELY worth it.