Stardew Valley 1.6 and Returning to the Simple Life

This post is for 2024’s WeblogPoMo2024, a challenge to post every day in May. While I cannot commit to being able to write something every day, I will try to post something every week in May.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update. I absolutely adored the game when it originally released. It was the first ever game in the farming/life sim genre that I really stuck with for any significant length of time. I never really felt a pull to stick to it longterm, though and eventually fell off. I don’t really have forever games as much as games I come back to on a semiregular basis. Stardew has had two revisitations from me. The first one was when multiplayer was new. The second one was a couple years ago. While I enjoyed my time with the game both of those times, I never even completed the base game’s content again to get to the “new” stuff.

This time, I feel a much greater sense of momentum, not only because of the promise of new stuff at the end of the road, but also some very thoughtful changes to the early and midgame parts of Stardew Valley. Perhaps the biggest of these changes is the alteration to the game’s economy. Nothing has been particularly rebalanced in terms of the various methods of making money. Rather, there are just a lot more things to spend that money on now. At launch, Stardew Valley felt balanced around two years of ingame play, with the possibility of completing everything in one if you knew ahead of time what to plant or fish for. Now, the game feels balanced for maybe three or five years of ingame play not counting the Perfection completion. There’s a lot more to spend money on. There are new options to randomize required items for the community center bundles, and there’s more reason to play through many years of the game.

I find this rebalancing act to be very interesting as a concept. Like the game was intended for one type of player at first, then a bunch of stuff was added to the end of that experience over time. Now there’s more runway to get to that same end-game style content, but also it makes that curve a lot smoother. It feels like an appropriate change to a game intended to be more comfortable and anti-stressful, but it does also mirror some late-game updates to other indie titles. One of the ones that most readily jumps to mind is Terraria’s Journey’s End update, which added a huge amount of content to make playing and replaying the game more interesting and ensmoothen the path to endgame content.

I guess I don’t really have much to say about it at this point. I’m still working towards the “new endgame” so to speak, so I don’t really have a complete formulation in my head yet, but I am thoroughly enjoying myself and encourage lapsed Stardew Valley fans to go back and enjoy the game again.