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Stardew Valley (v1.6)
It’s been a few years since I’ve been back to Stardew Valley; I actually played it four times before, with my second run being the attempt to get everything (which I eventually gave up on) and my third and fourth using a randomizer mod for the community center bundles. I had been feeling the urge, and the 1.6 update and new content provided a good excuse to come back.
I spent the first year doing the community center and getting the farm up and running, and basically just made friends with Linus (who’s on the way to the mine and loves foraged goods) and Lewis (who requests a lot of things). The second year I started trying to make friends and see events, and also unlocked the new content like the movie theater, the raccoon, and the boat to Ginger Island. By the third year I’d successfully caught all the fish and made all the recipes and was nearing a full shipment, so with the goal of getting every stardrop in sight I was committed. I finally decided to marry Emily, who had been the first marriage candidate I got hearts from and also loves gemstones, which I was swimming in. I used treasure totems on the beach on Ginger Island to get enough artifact troves and omni-geodes to get the last artifact I needed for the museum. (I shipped the guaranteed ostrich egg and tried “Danger in the Deep” the first time just long enough to get the radioactive ore for shipment.)
I really like the new “larger board requests,” both because they offer special items as rewards and because they give you something else to do for that week. Mr. Qi’s late-game requests fulfill the same function (as do the Raccoon requests and things like the Trash Bear), though some of those get really hardcore. I also really like the dehydrator, though I wish I’d realized earlier that it only brings fruit up to gold-star prices—so it’s a great use for mushrooms, early-game tree fruit and blueberries where you end up with tons of unstarred produce; but a waste of time for gold-star strawberries or late-game tree fruit.
My main farm was a little of everything, with a full barn and full coop (I LOVED auto-grabbers and was delighted when I finally found two auto-petters in the Skull Cave during the year four desert festival) and eventually juminos harvesting my fully-sprinklered farm. I had a segment of the greenhouse dedicated to ancient fruit (which went into preserves jars) and a segment for starfruit (which became wine that I aged in the cellar). I had a sturgeon fish pond and made the roe into caviar (and a squid pond; but I just sold the ink after I finish my cooking list). My farm on Ginger Island became a vast field of pineapples and blueberries, a fact that drove my real-life gardener wife up the wall. I also eventually built a fairy rose honey farm there, but needed to place the beehives so that the roses were in the center where I couldn’t reach them, because otherwise I kept accidentally picking them and needing to replant. I set up the four teleport monuments down by the south entrance, and then two mini-monuments so I could warp to them easily from the farmhouse.
Combat remains my least favorite part of the game, not because it’s necessarily bad but because the rewards are uncertain and uneven. By the end I had the Infinity Sword (and briefly a forged Dwarven sword before it), but I spent the majority of the game with a Galaxy Sword that I used my first prismatic shard to get during year one. It was very late in my playthrough that I made it to the Forge and actually upgraded my loadout. (It’s also interesting how quickly you jump from “I’m scavenging for scraps of iridium” to “I’m swimming in the stuff.”)
I used the wiki with abandon—I think the reason my second play-through, which was previously my most thorough, didn’t finish everything was I got to the point where I was missing a handful of things that were only available in other seasons, and I didn’t want to play a dozen hours for a handful of completion. So I was careful to avoid that and stored lots of items in case I needed them. I also cut corners in a couple of places—I used a stack of staircases to get to level 100 of the Skull Caves. I had the Joja Parrot get the last 3 golden walnuts for me because I was pretty sure they were all random volcano drops. I broke down and used the Stardew Predictor utility to find the last 17 Pepper Rexes I had to kill for the monster elimination achievement. I didn’t craft every item (I didn’t want to grind the Qi gems necessary for every recipe) so I bought a perfection waiver to cover the last 1%. I also bought perfection waivers instead of buying the golden clock, but honestly, that’s just a test of whether you grinded enough cash, so paying half-price for the completion percentage seems acceptable. I achieved Perfection in Summer of Year 4, having experienced pretty much everything in the game.
Overall: This game is such a delight, a solid mix of relaxing and task-based, with just enough time-bound content that I want to be strategic and take notes, but so few failure states that I didn’t worry about screwing things up. It’s everything farming/life sims want to be. Will I come back to it again? Maybe, we’ll see how I’m doing in another 5 years and if ConcernedApe has decided to add more stuff.
I spent the first year doing the community center and getting the farm up and running, and basically just made friends with Linus (who’s on the way to the mine and loves foraged goods) and Lewis (who requests a lot of things). The second year I started trying to make friends and see events, and also unlocked the new content like the movie theater, the raccoon, and the boat to Ginger Island. By the third year I’d successfully caught all the fish and made all the recipes and was nearing a full shipment, so with the goal of getting every stardrop in sight I was committed. I finally decided to marry Emily, who had been the first marriage candidate I got hearts from and also loves gemstones, which I was swimming in. I used treasure totems on the beach on Ginger Island to get enough artifact troves and omni-geodes to get the last artifact I needed for the museum. (I shipped the guaranteed ostrich egg and tried “Danger in the Deep” the first time just long enough to get the radioactive ore for shipment.)
I really like the new “larger board requests,” both because they offer special items as rewards and because they give you something else to do for that week. Mr. Qi’s late-game requests fulfill the same function (as do the Raccoon requests and things like the Trash Bear), though some of those get really hardcore. I also really like the dehydrator, though I wish I’d realized earlier that it only brings fruit up to gold-star prices—so it’s a great use for mushrooms, early-game tree fruit and blueberries where you end up with tons of unstarred produce; but a waste of time for gold-star strawberries or late-game tree fruit.
My main farm was a little of everything, with a full barn and full coop (I LOVED auto-grabbers and was delighted when I finally found two auto-petters in the Skull Cave during the year four desert festival) and eventually juminos harvesting my fully-sprinklered farm. I had a segment of the greenhouse dedicated to ancient fruit (which went into preserves jars) and a segment for starfruit (which became wine that I aged in the cellar). I had a sturgeon fish pond and made the roe into caviar (and a squid pond; but I just sold the ink after I finish my cooking list). My farm on Ginger Island became a vast field of pineapples and blueberries, a fact that drove my real-life gardener wife up the wall. I also eventually built a fairy rose honey farm there, but needed to place the beehives so that the roses were in the center where I couldn’t reach them, because otherwise I kept accidentally picking them and needing to replant. I set up the four teleport monuments down by the south entrance, and then two mini-monuments so I could warp to them easily from the farmhouse.
Combat remains my least favorite part of the game, not because it’s necessarily bad but because the rewards are uncertain and uneven. By the end I had the Infinity Sword (and briefly a forged Dwarven sword before it), but I spent the majority of the game with a Galaxy Sword that I used my first prismatic shard to get during year one. It was very late in my playthrough that I made it to the Forge and actually upgraded my loadout. (It’s also interesting how quickly you jump from “I’m scavenging for scraps of iridium” to “I’m swimming in the stuff.”)
I used the wiki with abandon—I think the reason my second play-through, which was previously my most thorough, didn’t finish everything was I got to the point where I was missing a handful of things that were only available in other seasons, and I didn’t want to play a dozen hours for a handful of completion. So I was careful to avoid that and stored lots of items in case I needed them. I also cut corners in a couple of places—I used a stack of staircases to get to level 100 of the Skull Caves. I had the Joja Parrot get the last 3 golden walnuts for me because I was pretty sure they were all random volcano drops. I broke down and used the Stardew Predictor utility to find the last 17 Pepper Rexes I had to kill for the monster elimination achievement. I didn’t craft every item (I didn’t want to grind the Qi gems necessary for every recipe) so I bought a perfection waiver to cover the last 1%. I also bought perfection waivers instead of buying the golden clock, but honestly, that’s just a test of whether you grinded enough cash, so paying half-price for the completion percentage seems acceptable. I achieved Perfection in Summer of Year 4, having experienced pretty much everything in the game.
Overall: This game is such a delight, a solid mix of relaxing and task-based, with just enough time-bound content that I want to be strategic and take notes, but so few failure states that I didn’t worry about screwing things up. It’s everything farming/life sims want to be. Will I come back to it again? Maybe, we’ll see how I’m doing in another 5 years and if ConcernedApe has decided to add more stuff.
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