Is Stardew Valley Expanded worth installing on a first playthrough?

I'd start a fresh farm. You can add SVE to an existing save, but it reworks a lot of the map and some of its content assumes you've had it from the start, so a year-one save gets a weird half version. Setup's easy: install SMAPI, drop SVE and every mod it lists as a requirement into the Mods folder, and launch through SMAPI. If the SMAPI window shows red errors, it's almost always a missing requirement.