As I mentioned when writing about how cool voice-dubbing mods are for Cheap Week, I love vocalized mods. Also called voice mods, these community-made projects add voice acting to otherwise-silent games, or redub games that have voice acting in a gibberish language (like Hollow Knight) with English. My favorite of these mods is Stardew Voices, which adds voice acting for 12 of Stardew Valley‘s love interests: Abigail, Alex, Elliot, Emily, Haley, Harvey, Leah, Maru, Penny, Sam, Sebastian, and Shane. And as Stardew Voices creator Shannon Hobby tells me, a ton of work went into getting the mod to some semblance of a finish line (the mod is still in beta).
When she’s not building a mod, Hobby is a voice actor, software engineer, and Twitch streamer. She told me that casting actors for Stardew Voices was a delight, and that programming was fun. The audio editing, which Hobby handled with assistance from producer, sound designer, and voice actor Victoria Cheng, was a different story.
“There was so much audio,” Hobby said. “And I had to go through all of it and clean it and pick takes and split the files and then name all the files appropriately. It was tedious, music-less work that took up the majority of my time, and I am still working through errors made during this time.”
Although she enjoyed casting actors for the mod, Hobby also points to this part of the process taking a long time, likely more so than most other voice mods. “The casting process was abnormally long for this project because I wanted to be as financially responsible as possible,” she said. “I was making good money at the time but still had to ensure that this fit into my budget. Instead of casting everyone at the same time, I cast one character per month. This would help spread out the cost and give me time to catch up on audio editing and creating scripts in between each character.”
Hobby’s commitment to paying the Stardew Voices actors is a big part of why this is my favorite mod. It’s not completely unheard of for mod creators to pay those who are working for them, but it’s still not a practice that is followed 100% of the time. Hallownest Vocalized (a voice mod for Hollow Knight) does not feature paid actors, for example, and New Kunlun Vocalized (a still-in-progress voice mod for metroidvania Nine Sols that is, as of August 2026, in the midst of casting actors) doesn’t have paid roles either.
And, to be fair, these are passion projects. Most people go into them knowing they’re not making money, especially the creator who is going to pour a lot of time and effort into something that they then can’t go on to sell. But Stardew Voices is still largely the exception when it comes to whether or not anyone is getting paid.
“As much as I wanted to challenge the notion of ‘things aren’t worth putting effort towards unless they make you money,’ I probably flew a little too close to the sun here,” Hobby said. “I talked to a very business-savvy lady the other day and she was shocked at how much time and money I had spent on something that I would make no profit from. ‘But it’s good for my portfolio!’ I reasoned. ‘Four hours on a project is good for your portfolio; this is unreasonable. You didn’t even message the creator to see if he would buy it off of you?’ [she responded]. I’ve gotta start thinking like an entrepreneur if I’m going to start responsibly carving my own path, but that is a skill I will develop over time.”
Hobby provided me with examples of the audition info and scripts she provided when casting for the 12 roles. The listing for Abigail offers a rate of $100 per hour and estimates the actor will spend about 6-8 hours recording dialogue, for instance. That’s a lot more than unpaid, but I think it’s money well spent. If you have the chance, you should try playing through Stardew Valley with the mod–the audio mixing is top tier and each of the actors deliver stellar performances.
“When you’re paying someone for the recording sessions, you’re not just paying them for the time it takes to record and their equipment–it is their years of experience in performance nuance and on-the-fly script analysis,” Hobby said. “There were a ton of times I was slapped in the face with ‘I never would have thought to say it like that but that is exactly how [character name] would say it.'”
Hobby told me that she’d give actors two weeks to submit their auditions, and that she’d receive anywhere between 90 and 150 auditions per character. Cutting each wave down to a more manageable top 10 and then a top three before picking who landed the role took time, but Hobby says it was well worth it as it led to the discovery of some excellent talents, some of which weren’t even Stardew Valley fans.
“[Auditions] ranged from superfan to ‘I don’t even know what a parsnip is,'” Hobby said. And, granted, that’s the case for several voice mods. Artist and voice actor Lyco, who voices Hornet in Hallownest Vocalized, had never played Hollow Knight, for example–which is hilarious because Hornet’s voice is the best part of that mod.
As is the case on so many projects like this, Hobby says the biggest challenge she faced was burnout. “For the majority of this project I was working full time at a pretty demanding tech job,” she said. “I put pressure on myself to finish this as fast as possible so that the voice actors could finally see the fruits of their labor. I used the last of my PTO leading up to New Years, set and announced the deadline, and put all of my eggs into the basket that I would be able to lock in during the holidays to finish the project.”
Hobby said that her planned crunch week kicked off with her catching the flu. After resting for two days, she pushed to meet her own deadline. “I was a shell of a person. I had nothing left in the tank for actually marketing the mod.”
The announcement video on TikTok did well though, and news of the mod spread. And with its spread, Hobby found more work. “Launch is also the time where your mod is getting stress tested,” she said. “When I say I finished the mod, I didn’t go through all of the dialogue lines to make sure they play [correctly] or see if [the mod] installs correctly on Mac. I was then getting inundated with messages from frustrated people having issues with the mod. I just watched the notifications come in from my blanket cave and went ‘this last week was awful, I worked so hard, and this failed launch invalidates years of hard work–way to go Shannon!’ I was being dramatic, but I truly felt this way–and still do sometimes.”
Since its release, Hobby has made major changes to the mod. “I’ve completely refactored the code and created a way to test all of the lines. It works for multiple different languages now and I’ve added tools to help others create their own dubs in any language–this should be out soon-ish with a little tutorial, but I’ve learned my lesson about deadlines. No promises on when it will be out.”
As stated in the FAQ on the Stardew Voices Nexus Mods page, Hobby has no plans to dub the entire game, writing that she no longer has the means to finance a project at the scale she has been. She isn’t against maybe doing a small crowdfunding campaign one day to raise funds to add Clint and Sandy, the latest romance options added in Update 1.7. According to her, the best-case scenario would be for Stardew Voices to lead into a small business in which other indie game devs who want to add voice acting to their games post-launch (like Potionomics did!) but don’t know where to start, can turn to her to help lead the project or at least provide advice.
“This mod is my dream. I would love to add voiceover to every game ever made and have that be what I do every day until I die. I’m grateful I got to do it at least once though,” Hobby said. “I hope I get the opportunity to do this professionally in the future, but if not, I can’t imagine I would never do a project like this again. Just after a little well-earned break.”
