Baldur’s Village devs “still recovering from shock” after their beloved Stardew Valley mod was DMCA’d by Wizards of the Coast

Stardew Valley mod Baldur’s Village is an awesome mash-up of two of the most popular games ever made. While the mod is now back on Nexus Mods for fans to download, the team behind the project is “still recovering” from their project being taken down in a surprise DMCA from Dungeons and Dragons’ Wizards of the Coast.

After being saved by Larian Studios, the team confirmed that work on the beloved Stardew Valley mod would resume as expected with new content on the way. However, the surprise removal of months of work in a matter of seconds still hurts the team.

Baldur’s Village devs are still recovering

Speaking to Nexus Mods in a recent blog post, the Baldur’s Village team discussed their feelings surrounding the surprise takedown of their work. The small all-female team explained that “making a full-scale, totally free mod like this is hard” and there are always “painful moments”, but the team never expected to have their work taken away.

“It’s been three weeks since the MOD’s release, and we’ve been both excited and nervous,” the team recalled. “We’ve worked tirelessly on updates, bug fixes, and gathering player feedback. We were eagerly looking forward to last Saturday—we just finished Astarion’s 10-heart event, the final part of his romance—and we discovered the MOD was under review.”

“Our team is still recovering from the shock, but our next steps are clear.”

The team explained that their first reaction was that players wouldn’t be able to play the new event they had worked hard to create. Afterwards, the stress of months of work being destroyed took over.

“Panic set in, and we prepared multiple help request emails for the following week,” they explained. “Fortunately, by Monday, we received overwhelming support from the modding community and Larian Studios, and the issue was resolved.”

“Our team is still recovering from the shock, but our next steps are clear: continue updating and creating content, focus on what we love, and give back to the players who have supported us with great projects,” they continued.

Baldur’s Village is a perfect merge of both the Baldur’s Gate 3 and Stardew Valley community, and it’s great that the mod has been saved. Larian’s support of the Stardew mod has given Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest mod team a tonne of revised confidence in their custom campaign project that brings players back to areas from BG2.