Stardew Valley is a lovely, peaceful place. Too peaceful, maybe. If you’ve been getting the feeling that your quiet farming village needs the fear of the undead put back into them, consider this mod that replaces your trusty brown steed with Arvak from Skyrim.
Arvak, you’ll recall, is the skeletal, black horse with a mane and tail made of ghostly nether energy that can be summoned after finding his skull in the Soul Cairn in Syrim’s Dawnguard DLC. Even if you don’t happen remember his name, he’s a hard horse to forget the look of, for obvious reasons.
Now you can ride him around in Stardew Valley, thanks to this handy mod that’s just been updated to work with Content Patcher and SMAPI. Even at only a few dozen pixels, Arvak is pretty striking: there’s the glowing tale and mane, the exposed ribs, and the extremely goth-looking purple on black colour scheme. The mod doesn’t give Arvak any powers of Oblivion, unfortunately – you won’t be able to storm through town making the crops wither or anything like that.
However, you will be able to ride around in spookier style, and hey, maybe Arvak can learn something about crop rotation while he’s visiting.
To install, head to the Arvak mod page over at Nexus Mods. You’ll need the latest version of SMAPI, the useful mod loader for Stardew Valley. Once you’ve got that installed, pick up the latest version of Content Patcher, which is a nice dynamic way to run mods that change the game’s visual style and data without altering any of the underlying XNB files.
After that, it’s simply a matter of downloading the Arvak mod and extracting the files into your Stardew Valley mods folder. Then open the file config.json with a text editor and change the value to either ‘saddled’ or ‘saddleless’ depending on your preference.
Then you’re free to ride around in Stardew Valley on the ghostly steed, striking fear into the hearts of villagers everywhere. For more, browse through our list of the best Stardew Valley mods, or if Arvak has you hungry for a trip back to Tamriel, you can equip yourself with some of the best Skyrim mods, too.