Stardew Valley:
Time to Play a Normal Length of Two Years: 92 Hours
Total Earnings: Year 1 - $240,000,
Year 2 - $2,377,000
Oddly enough, I can't remember which
version of Harvest Moon I played when I was younger. It was
either the original SNES version, or Harvest Moon 64. I never
owned it, but played it with a friend. It's possible that I played
both of those two versions. Though the series, now called the Story
of Seasons, still continues in spin-offs and Nintendo handheld
consoles, it's met its completion in a competitor's composition.
Stardew Valley reviews all aspects of its ancestors and
refines them. It may sound incredible, but this was designed and
developed by a single person, Eric "ConcernedApe"
Barone, who spent four years developing the game, just to hone his
programming skills.
Compared against my vague memories,
Stardew Valley recreates and surpasses its
predecessors.
Stardew Valley begins
with a character customization screen. It's all there; a name, a
farm name, face and clothing customization. The only relevant
decision is that of farm type. Aside from the standard farm
(recommended for first time players), the Valley also includes a farm
on a river, a farm in a forest, a farm on rocky terrain, a farm
haunted by monsters, and a farm for multiplayer mode.
The game opens with a longish,
unskippable cut scene. The protagonist is a young adult working at
the soul crushing JojaMart corporation in a city office. The
monotony of the daily grind, and the despair of the city, leads
Socrates to flee to his grandfather's country farm. Abandoned for
many years, overgrown with trees, grass, and rocks, the goal of the
game is to clean it up, plant crops, raise animals, mine, fish, and
become a member of the community. They player can do as much, or as
little, as they want, with a gentle scoring element after two years.
Though the small village of Pelican Town, situated in the Stardew
Valley, seems like it is set in a realistic world (except for the
fast pace of time), discovery reveals secrets of magic, wizards,
monsters, dinosaurs, and Junimos. The last of these are cute little
creatures, who aid the player and feature on the interactive title
screen.
With the basic tools, a few seeds and a
pocket of cash, the protagonist sets to work. The introductory tools
are the axe, hoe, pickaxe, watering can, and trash can. Each of
these starts at a basic level and can be improved to their copper,
iron, gold, and iridium versions. Each improved version performs its
related task faster and with less energy. The protagonist also has a
scythe for cutting hay, but it can only be improved by finding the
Golden Scythe later in the game. The local fisherman donates a pole
for fishing (upgrades can be purchased at his shop), and a copper pan
for panning (can't be upgraded). Marlon, of the Adventurer's guild
offers the cheapest wooden sword he has. With these tools the player
works their rough fields into a serviceable farm.
Each day begins at 6am with the rising
sun. There's TV news to check and work to perform. Clear the rocks
with the pickaxe, the trees and stumps with the axe. Hoe the ground,
plant the seeds, water them, before venturing into town to speak to
the people. Each use of a tool, except for the scythe and the sword,
expends energy. Energy is restored after sleeping, but beware
working with zero energy. It inhibits current activities, and
prevents a complete restoration in the morning. Eating food is
entirely optional. The protagonist doesn't need three squares a day,
but food restores energy. It also adds to the player's Health Bar
(which is damaged by monsters). The day closes at 2am, or when the
protagonist climbs into bed, whichever happens first. If the clock
strikes 2:10 am the protagonist collapses on the spot and loses a
portion of their inventory when they wake up the follow morning. The
twenty hours of each day provide an abundant amount of time to
accomplish a limited number of goals. Every seven seconds in real
life translates to ten minutes in Stardew Valley Time.
That's 12.6 minutes of real life time to finish one day, technically.
A number of activities pause time, like looking at the menu,
inventory, or watching a cut scene. An average day requires twenty
minutes. The end of the day is also the only time the game saves.
It does so automatically. The player can not save partway through a
day. A day has twenty-four hours, a week is composed of seven days,
and year has four seasons, but beyond that time in the Valley
diverges substantially from real life. Each season is a single month
of four weeks, totaling twenty-eight days. Therefore, a single year
is four months, a total of 112 days.
While Stardew Valley
allows the player to play as many years as they want, the game judges
the player's performance after two years. With only a handful of
coins on day one, the first year is about survival and expansion.
The best season is the Spring of the second year. It was the first
time I owned the resources to necessary to farm at my full potential.
In my first year I earned a total of 240,000 gold. In the
second Spring alone I earned the same amount. By the end of the
second year my total earnings was 2,377,000. While I won't tell
anyone how to play Stardew Valley, I offer a general
piece of advice: try to use all the time you have. Plan each day
before you leave the house, because those twenty hours hours, or
twenty minutes pass by fast. Even that advise might be too much. A
player might discover that optimization detracts from their
experience. Stardew Valley should be about enjoyment
first, and if the farm becomes a job, what then? Unfortunately I
couldn't obey my own advice. While playing Stardew Valley
I suffered a significant number of crashes. The
game crashed an average
of a day or two a week (in game), causing me to lose all progress for
each day. Sometimes it crashed the same day if I tried playing right
after a crash. Sometimes it wouldn't crash for two weeks. The worst
was four crashes in the same day. The fear of losing my effort led
me to go to bed earlier, ending the day sooner than I wanted to. If
you experience the same problem, I sympathize.
On the farm, in the woods, along the
rivers, and in the mines, the player collects resources by their
labor. Aside from seeds and basic cooking ingredients there are few
resources the player can purchase. Almost everything has to be
worked from the earth; made from scratch. For first time players
this leads to a natural inclination to diversify a farm, to try
everything, to produce at least one of every product. The Community
Center encourages this behavior. It includes 31 bundles for the
player to complete. A bundle is a collection of similar objects,
normally four or five. For example, there's a summer crops bundle
that asks the player to grow and deliver one tomato, one hot pepper,
one blueberry, and one melon. Each bundle has a mini reward, and
each collection of bundles, of which there are seven, has a mega
reward. For the first playthrough bundles are the heart of the game,
because it's fun to discover the desired objects and collect them.
The Community Center makes one wonder if Stardew Valley
is a not a farming game, but a collection game. The menu allows the
player to track every type of item they've sold, every type of fish
caught, and every type of meal cooked (side note, cooked foods are
provide more energy, but are worth less than their components when
sold).
Or is Stardew Valley a
money collection game, an economic farming game? Instead of
receiving the seven major improvements by completing the Community
Center, the player can side with the soulless Jojamart corporation,
which has set up their own supermarket in competition with Pierre's
local shop. Purchasing a Jojamart Membership destroys the Community
Center, and allows the player to pay cash for the seven improvements
instead of completing bundles. One can't mix and match between
Community Center bundles and Jojamart Membership payments. They are
exclusive, and both necessitate different play-styles. In
a second playthrough, optimizing for wealth instead of a diversity of
product would favor a Membership. But even thinking about
abandoning the collecting aspect feels unpleasant, because of the
tracking of objects.
To complete the bundles, to collect
everything, the player has to do more than farm. Fishing is a
mini-game some might find enjoyable. Others will abandon the pursuit
after a few attempts at frustrating failure. Of the five skills,
fishing is the only unnecessary task, and can be entirely avoided.
The trickiest part of fishing is the requirements for finding the
right fish. Stardew Valley features 52 different fish,
which appear at morning, noon, or night, in rainy or clear weather,
in the spring, summer, fall or winter, and in the ocean, mountain
lake, river, or a half dozen other locations. Impressively, each
fish feels distinct while reeling them in. The other skills are
Farming, Foraging, Mining, and Combat. Each skill improves with use,
and each improvement, to a max of level 10, makes corresponding tasks
easier. For example, chopping wood improves one's foraging skill,
which makes it easier to do. Each Skill also unlocks crafting
recipes. Level three Farming allows the creation of a Bee House from
40 pieces of wood, eight pieces of coal, one iron bar, and a jar of
maple syrup. Crafting items from the raw resources accumulated by
the player is a huge part of the game, and higher Skill levels unlock
the recipes for more valuable equipment. At the fifth and tenth
level of a Skill the player receives an additional benefit, choosing
between two specializations. A level 10 Fisher can become an Angler
(fish worth 50% more when sold) or Pirate (chance to find treasure
while fishing doubled).
The Skills of Mining and Combat
compliment each other, because Combat is used extensively in the
three mines. The mountain mine, which unlocks on the 5th
day of Spring, Year One, is where the player spends most of their
non-farming time. It is infested with monsters, which need to be
fought, or avoided, while collecting ores. Stardew Valley
includes copper, iron, gold, and iridium ores, which can be smelted
into bars. The player needs five ores, a coal, and a smelter to
produce a bar, and these bars can be used to craft machines or
improve tools. As mentioned above, each tool can be improved, with
five bars of the appropriate metal and an ever increasing amount of
money. Tools must be improved step by step, first to copper, then
iron, gold, and finally iridium. One can't skip steps. Though all
metals are valuable, and one might assume iridium the most valuable,
iron was the most needed. It is a necessary component for so many
important crafts like the keg, quality sprinkler, lighting rod, and
stable. Though the Mountain Mine is deep, contains many treasures,
and should be explored to the bottom, it doesn't contain much iridium
ore. For that the player needs to unlock the Desert Mine, but how to
do that is a mystery for players to explore for themselves. In
addition to the ores, the mines are full of minerals, geodes, gems,
and artifacts. The local museum wants one of each of these, and the
owner rewards the deliverer with useful objects, and pointless
decorative trinkets.
Once the player has grown a few crops,
and acquired some wealth, they can invest in animals. The local
carpenter builds stables, barns, coops, silos, and fish ponds for
cash and wood, and will improve the protagonist's house as well. At
the Ranch the player buys chickens, cows, goats, ducks, sheep,
rabbits, pigs and the tools to care for them. Following the
tradition of Harvest Moon, all animals produce a resource every day
or two, and none of the animals are slaughtered for their meat
(though animals can be sold for a profit).
Next week, a second article on Stardew
Valley.
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