Anki Study Break: Stardew Valley

By Nymvaline

A while after making my mod for Slay the Spire, I made a similar mod for Stardew Valley, that pauses the game at the start of day and every few hours during the day to make sure you do some reviews on Anki before it will allow you to continue playing. Other than that, it doesn’t touch any gameplay or balance stuff.

Get the mod from Nexus Mods here

What it’s for

Assuming you don’t want to click through to the Slay the Spire mod for the same explanation, here it is again: I use Anki for flashcards for memorizing various facts. Sometimes, I play a game, and tell myself that at every pause, I’ll do a couple of cards.

But I usually cheat, and skip a pause, or five, or twenty. So this mod enforces that I have to use Anki to continue playing, and allows me to use my gaming time to also work through some flashcards.

This isn’t for turning my Anki study sessions into gaming sessions. It’s for getting a few more flashcards done during my gaming sessions.

If you don’t use Anki, this mod is probably completely irrelevant for you. (And if you want to learn more about Anki, Nicky Case wrote a good introduction to spaced repetition flashcard systems here: https://ncase.me/remember/ )

How it works

Very similarly to the Slay the Spire mod, the mod interfaces with the Anki add-on AnkiConnect, found here: https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect or here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159 (thanks, FooSoft!)

At the start of each day1, and at regular intervals1 (default every 32 in-game hours), the mod gets from AnkiConnect a baseline number of how many reviews you’ve done that day, and creates a dialogue box that pauses3 the game and prevents you from continuing. Leave the game running while you do your reviews. Select the “Card Check” option in the dialogue box, it’ll query AnkiConnect again. Once AnkiConnect says that today you’ve done 102 more than the baseline (202 for start of day), select the “Card Check” option again, the dialogue box will go away, and you’ll be able to continue farming. (Or fishing or fighting or foraging or whatever you happen to be doing that day.)

There’s also an option to exit to menu, which will create a confirmation dialogue box - in case of misclicks so you don’t accidentally lose your progress.

Caveats

It worked on my machine, the last time I used it, which was a Windows computer running Anki 2.1.49, with AnkiConnect on all the default settings (you can set a different URL for AnkiConnect, but it hasn’t been as thoroughly tested), only one other add-on (localize media), Stardew Valley set to English (I assume other languages will work, but this mod’s text won’t be localized and I haven’t set up translation files) on SMAPI 3.13.4 with Stardew Valley 1.5.6 (build 22018) with no other mods. If you run into issues that I don’t run into, or if the setup instructions aren’t clear enough over there, you can file a bug on GitHub or comment on the Nexus Mods page. Someone mentioned on Reddit that it worked well enough on their Mac.

Computers Only, so if you only play Stardew Valley on mobile/Nintendo/whatever, this mod not going to work for you.

The reddit post where I initially announced this mod

The github where the code for this mod lives

The link to the mod on Nexus Mods, again

  1. Both the start-of-day and the every-few-hours pauses can be toggled on or off in the config file4. If you don’t want your day interrupted by this mod, I suggest only using the start-of-day pause. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. The number of cards to study at the start-of-day and every-few-hours pauses can be changed in the config file. And the number of hours to wait in between the every-few-hours pauses can be changed in the config file as well. I found 3 hours with 10 reviews at each pause to be the sweet spot between getting to play the game, not feeling like the Anki reviews are taking too long, and actually doing some Anki reviews. YMMV, but that’s why I added the config file to tweak those numbers. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. This (and any) dialogue box will pause the in-game clock in singleplayer, but not the playtime timer. I haven’t tested this in multiplayer, but I don’t recommend it - I don’t think time will pause, and you might find your farmer passed out at 2 AM when you alt tab back into Stardew Valley. ↩︎

  4. The way the config file is currently set up, it only loads the config when opening the game, so if you edit it on the fly it won’t change the numbers. I might come around to making that later, depending on if I see a need for it. I currently don’t, because if I have no more reviews to do I can close Anki and I can play normally (the mod sends requests but never creates dialogue boxes because it never gets info back). ↩︎