akkornel / svswap

Swap the player and farmhand in a Stardew Valley save.

Stardew Valley Player Swap

This is a Python program that takes in a Stardew Valley save file, and lets you swap the current player with one of the farmhands. This is useful because it lets you move the save file between different people.

This program was created because I was in a co-op farm with people in three different time zones—US/Pacific, CET, and Australia/Brisbane—who had different work schedules. To maximize play time, we wanted to hand off the save file between two different people. The problem is, Stardew Valley assumes the person hosting the game is the player.

It's important to note: This is not perfect! There are a number of issues that I know about, and probably more that I don't know about. Check out the GitHub Issues to see what problems I know about. If you find an additional problem, you can make a note of it, but please do not expect me to fix problems! I only put this code out here because it did not feel right to keep it to myself. But at the same time, I cannot say that it will work fine for you.

Requirements

• Stardew Valley 1.5

  This code was developed against Stardew Valley 1.5. If you last saved your game in an earlier version of Stardew Valley, the current player should upgrade to 1.5, then load and save the game (by sleeping). Once the game has been saved with Stardew Valley 1.5, you can run this program.

• Python 3.8 or later

  This code was developed against Python 3.8. Later versions should work. Earlier versions might work, but there's no guarantee!

• lxml 4.4.1 or later, and a compatible libxml2

  lxml is a Python wrapper around libxml2. This is used for one important reason: Python's built-in xml.etree.ElementTree module has a problem with XML namespaces: The Stardew Valley saves use two XML namespaces—xsd and xsi—but only the xsi namespace is preserved properly when the XML is written out.

  The lxml modules properly preserve XML namespaces, so this package is required. You can get it from PyPi, and if you use a distibution-packaged version of Python (like from a Linux distro, WSL2, Macports/Brew, etc.), you might have lxml available as a package.

• Pip 21.3 or later

  You don't technically need pip, but if you plan on installing lxml without using a distro package, then it's probably worth installing via pip.