“A good ending”: Phew, the Baldur’s Gate 3 Stardew Valley mod is back online after “mistakenly” being hit by a DMCA takedown from Wizards of the Coast

Late yesterday, news broke that Baldur’s Village – the cool Stardew Valley mod with a town full of Baldur’s Gate 3 characters – had been hit by a DMCA takedown from BG IP owner Wizards of the Coast. Thankfully, WoTC quickly admitted that this had somehow happened by mistake, and the mod’s now back up for you to download.

PC Gamer noticed that the mod had been listed at “under moderation review” on Nexus Mods since March 29, following a DMCA issued against it by Wizards of the Coast. Naturally, this prompted plenty of backlash, including a tweet from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who’d previously said the he thought the mod was neat when it came out earlier this year.

“Protecting your IP can be tricky but I do hope this gets settled,” the BG3 bossman wrote in response to the takedown news, “There are good ways of dealing with this.” Thankfully, what’s transpired since that point looks to be the best resolution of a shitty situation that the modders could have hoped for, with WoTC issuing a statement to PC Gamer which read as follows:

“The Baldur’s Village DMCA takedown was issued mistakenly — we are sorry about that. We are in the process of fixing that now so fans and the Stardew community can continue to enjoy this great mod!”

Ok, cool. The good news is that the matter looks to have been dealt with uber-swiftly, with the mod having become available to download again on Nexus Mods as of early this morning UK time, hopefully a sign that everything behind the scenes has also been resolved amicably in short order.

VG247 has reached out to XunHe1145, the main developer on the Baldur’s Village team, for comment.

Meanwhile, upon seeing WoTC admit its mistake, Vincke tweeted: “A good ending. Happy for Xun, Kawaner, Yudeling, Haruka, and Sirris. I hope they get to develop a lot more of it. And also good on WOTC for fixing this swiftly.”

I’ll second that, as the modders behind Baldur’s Village have created something really cool and it’d have been a really big own goal for Wizards if it had ended up permanently sniping a passion project being distributed for free via the most dangerous spell of them all – Lionel Hutz’s phone call of lawyers. Hopefully it’s not disrupted the modders too much either, as they were busy working on bringing a Halsin romance arc that might feature some bear sex to their creation.

Are you glad to see the situation with Baldur’s Village and Wizards of The coast seemingly come to an end with the mod being allowed to live on? Let us know below!