Battle Royalley is a mod that asks a simple question: what would you get if you took Stardew Valley, the nicest thing ever, and added a ton of murder? I don’t know, because I haven’t been able to get it running.
As reported by PC Gamer, the wonderfully calm and cheerful Stardew Valley apparently now has a battle royale mod, the brainchild of a dastardly modder named Ilyaki. Instead of farming crops, the goal is now to farm human souls in a battle between 100 farmers. I have fond memories of using Stardew’s online mode to relax with my last girlfriend, and I know my coworker Gita Jackson finds it a calm way to wind down after a hectic night. This mod throws all of that out of the window. Presumably.
You’ll need a few things to get the mod running including the mod itself and SMAPI, an API that’s used to launch the game with all of your extra mods and goodies. The mod page also recommends an online server browser for searching for games. It’s a tangle of different programs and downloads that’s a little hard to manage. As a result, like the folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I found myself unable to play Battle Royalley. The server browser works fine enough with regular Stardew Valley, but not with the mod itself. Either people aren’t playing, I did something wrong, or the mods just aren’t interfacing correctly at the moment. Dedicated tech-heads might figure it out and sneak in some pixel-farm murder, but judging from comments on NexusMods, some players are still having trouble joining. There is a video, posted by Ilyaki, showing off a snippet of gameplay and one comment suggest it is playable although the play area shrinks “so fast.”
At this point, we’ve had battles royale of all stripes. Beyond the top dogs like Fortnite and PUBG, there have been things like Radical Heights, the fantasy-themed Realm Royale, and the floppy Totally Accurate Battlegrounds. Battle royale is coming to pretty much every major game, like Battlefield V, so I guess we might as well add it to the most adorable farming sim in recent memory. If I can ever play it, I’ll tell you what it’s like.