Stardew Valley: Farm your way to emotional fulfillment

This is Elliott.

Elliott is a beautiful man, a sensitive soul who lives alone on the beach to awaken his artistic spirit, who spends most of his days at the library working on his novel but still finds time to commune with nature. Tiny animals sometimes stow away in his pockets. I want to woo him, to entangle him in my love, to trick him into marriage and haul his ass back to my farm so I can have someone to help me water the goddamned crops.

There are a lot of goddamn crops.

Playing Stardew Valley has taught me how Wild West settlers must have felt. It’s just me on this farm, the subsistence chores take so long that I don’t have time to fight back the encroaching wilderness, spouses are fungible, GET ME AN ABLE-BODIED WO/MAN NOW.

To be fair, I could have picked the broke-ass small-town doctor. All he talks about is suntan lotion and washing your hands after you sneeze, but he’d be happy to have a wife with her own living. The wanna-be musician who works at the big-box grocery store would probably be pretty happy, too, especially since he could move out of his parents’ house. The jock who’s ditching college in the hopes of going pro is a conceited jerk, but at least he’s strong. (And he’s not living with his folks. Mind you, that’s because they’re dead. But still.) Any one of these guys would make a serviceable helpmeet, without my having to drag them out of their orbit. But noooo. Gotta get the starving writer. My inner 13-year-old, my chief counselor during video games, was very clear on this point.

Elliott has long hair.

Okay, maybe that’s my outer 45-year-old speaking.

But he has long hair. He’s necessary. From the moment he drifted onto my screen, he was doomed.

Note: I didn’t realize until too late that the adorkable gothboi who lives in his mom’s and stepdad’s literal basement was marriageable. And you can marry only one person at a time. Next playthrough, he will be mine.

What’s Stardew Valley?

Stardew Valley isn’t a dating sim. It’s a farming sim. But the early stages have so many things to juggle–farming, land-clearing, mining, crafting, developing relationships with the townsfolk, poking into all the odd corners of the world, all while racing your own exhaustion meter and the clock–that you’re busier than a one-armed paper-hanger, and there’s a mighty temptation to haul in someone with two good arms.

Mind you, you don’t have to do everything at once. Stardew Valley is open-ended, with just enough structure to make you feel like you’re living in a village and not caught in the eternal, changeless agricultural hell that is Farmville. You can cultivate your farm if you want to, or mine, or fish; or you can chuck it all in and spend your days making friends with the villagers. You can work frantically to make money to open the higher levels of the game, like me, or you can enjoy the lower levels as a pleasantly sophisticated farming-and-crafting game. Or you can side with the big-box store and help them crush the little town into processed blandness. It’s up to you.

The game begins with your dying grandfather giving you a sealed letter. Don’t open it now, he says. When this modern world has drained you, then you can open it. Cut to a gray cube farm, with you in your office chair, typing on your computer. You reach your breaking point, you open the letter… and your grandfather tells you he’s left you his farm, in little Pelican Town, far away in a place called Stardew Valley. In the next scene you arrive at his old cabin, with your new neighbors welcoming you to town and wishing you luck clearing the overgrown land and bringing farming back to town.

Despite the airy-fairy name, Stardew Valley is relatively modern. I’d set it just before the onset of cell phones. There are computers and massive cathode-ray TVs everywhere, teens are glued to video games, and you watch the weather channel every day to see what tomorrow’s weather will be. (It’s 100% accurate, which dents the realism somewhat.) The locally owned grocery store is fading away under competition from big-box megastore Jojo-Mart. There used to be a community center, but now it’s abandoned and overgrown with weeds because everyone is at home, glued to a screen, and Jojo-Mart wants to buy the building and turn it into a Jojo-Mart warehouse. It’s not that different from a real small town in modern America.

And then you find out that the derelict community center is inhabited by little Miyazaki-esque nature spirits.

The central theme of the game is nature spirits vs. Wal-Mart. Yes. This is a thing, and it’s awesome.

I haven’t gotten far into that level of the plot yet, so I can’t talk much about it. What I do know is: There are weird shrines scattered around that no one talks about, there’s a wizard living in the forest, and all the stuff that’s more mystical than life in a real Wal-Mart-infested small town is unlocked with skills I don’t have and objects I can’t make. The skills will come. All it takes is practice. The objects require items I have to plant and grow (with expensive seeds and a lot of work), or forage (with luck and work), or mine (in what’s effectively a dungeon, with lots of time and limited access to equipment), or charm out of someone (with so much time and so, so many gifts), or make using equipment that I can build myself if I have the right crops (planted and grown) or forage (luck and work), or mine (time and equipment), or charm (SO many gifts)…

It sounds exhausting, but it’s not. It’s the satisfying kind of grind, with enough effort to make it feel that you’re earning your way, and enough results to make it feel worthwhile. When you get what you worked for, it feels magnificent.

The grind is broken up by the seasons. Each season is 28 days long, and at the end of the season all your crops die–no Farmville-esque planting and replanting strawberries or wheat for months at a time. Each crop takes a certain number of days to ripen, and some, like peppers and corn, keep producing without being replanted, while others, like pumpkins and kale, are harvested once. You have to learn the rhythms to get maximum yield. Because the shortest growing time is four days, the end of the season is a gradual winding down as plots empty and aren’t replanted. Then the new season starts, and you have to buy new seeds, buy or make new fertilizer, and start all over again. At first it frustrated me, especially because no one told me everything died at the end of the season, but now I enjoy it.

Meanwhile, the world around you changes, too. The fish and foraged plants change with the season, and some wild foods have their own mini-seasons of a few days. The town holds two festivals a month, which hijack at least part of the day. I’ve played for less than a year, but on this first playthrough, with everything new and different, it’s almost like adapting to the cycle of a real country town.

Fighting the clock

And then there’s your character’s bizarre insistence on going to bed every night.

Time is a major element of the game. Many people and services are available only at certain times, relationship statuses decay with time, farming is naturally dependent on time. But everything you need to do takes a lot of time. The size of the game world is about average for a game of this type, but in-game time runs fast enough that just walking across town is a significant time investment. Farming also takes time, as well as running down your energy bar. Fishing involves walking to a good fishing spot–none of them are close by–and then spending more time fishing, which, for no good reason, also runs down your energy. The mine/dungeon is all the way across town, plus it’s a huge time sink. And no matter what you do, you have to budget enough time to get home by 2 a.m., or you’ll pass out where you stand and whomever brings you home will take a cut of your money and stuff. Because despite being a former white-college worker who presumably went to college, your %$#@ character never learned to pull a goddamned all-nighter like a civilized person.

Right now the biggest block to my advancement is mining. I neeeeeed metals. The most metal-rich levels are deeper in the mine, and every five floors there’s an elevator that lets you jump to that level once you’ve reached the given floor, but they make the floor right before it a total bastard. Time and again I’ve rushed through my chores, said hi to Elliott at a run (courtship is a long, slow, daily business), dashed to the mines, fought my way through slimes and bugs to level 29, and then… midnight. Up, out, and overland to my cabin, stumbling through the unlit wilderness, so I can get home and click on my bed before 2. Or, at the very least, pass out on my own floor.

It’s possible to grow coffee in Stardew Valley.

It doesn’t help.

If I had someone else to water the crops, fix the fences, feed the cat, then maybe, maybe, I would have enough time to mine down to where the real ore veins are. Maybe I could build the devices I need to start making serious money. Maybe I could get away from subsistence farming, give back to the community, reopen the community center.

Come here, Elliott.

I love you. I swear.