STARDEW VALLEY DEFEATED

there's me. a long lonely farmer.

i started this save way back when 1.5 released, so around 2020, with the goal of reaching perfection. but i didn't make it then. i made it now though.

this is going to be a farm tour more than anything else. i didn't do anything specific to get perfection. i looked a lot of things up. i did whatever felt nice.

WHY it took a long time is mostly quitting from tedium. if something is overly tedious and i go too hard into it i burn out hard.

specifically for stardew valley, it was raising friendship for everybody. planning that out, remembering everybodys loves, finding the easiet loves and stockpiling them, it's a whole thing. basically setting up an entire supply chain to make people like me. when i came back i wasn't even fully friends with leo, just to show how hard i burned out.

once i was done with that, i did everything else. making friends was basically the first thing i did. shipping everything, getting every fish, getting totems, like 75% of the rest of the game i hadn't done yet.

the farm

i chose the wilderness farm cause why not. i like combat, although i must have given a bun to the statue at some point cause i don't remember ever seeing monsters on my farm. i didn't want the default farm but wanted sprinklers and places to grow vegetables. meadows farm wasn't out when i started this save.

here's my farm as it is today. i won in fall. near the end i went for high value produce. still kept a variety though. mostly pumpkins, but also yams, amaranth, broccoli, wheat.

here's a picture of the left plot before the junimos got at it. cranberries here too for the dehydrator. i really went by vibes. i wasn't concerned with maximum profit or profit per day or anything like that. i just liked filling up all my processors.

i made a lot of use out of those qi sprinkler heads. sprinklers are fun. i like them a lot. i would always buy them from krobus when i got the chance, but i did have a lot of resources so it wasnt a problem to make them.

the right side of the farm had fewer plants. but you can see that i managed to clutch all the big plants (except for powdermelon and qi but shhh).

this part was mostly high value crops, mostly because i wanted all the big plants on one side. but you can see from the other picture that i got pumpkin in the wrong spot. i accidentally filled the plot with pumpkins instead of grapes, a mistake you'll see haphazardly fixed later.

slime presses up there for some extra money. they sell for a surprising amount. who's buying them?

the shed over there was my first.

this one was only kegs and preserves jar. but it was the beginning of a journey to pickle everything.

eventually this shed became for sellable wines (as opposed to ageable wines) and roe and pickles..

here's where the oak resin for my kegs came from. pine tar too but never actually used that. and mystic syrup that i never end up using since the animals eat the blue grass too fast.

here's four buildings. a barn, slime hutch, and two sheds, one much newer than the other.

i got really sick of trying to fill egg processors when chickens were asleep so i finally moved all my animal product processors to a new shed and filled out the rest with kegs.

it let me get extra money by feeling less annoyed about filling up everything. i was also able to process everything since things piled up faster than I could process them.

which goes into another point. a subgoal was to make pickle production on par with produce actually growing, so i made an entire shed of preserves jars to meet it. i think toward the end i got close.

i also had a slime hutch that i would go into every once in a while to collect slime to squeeze into eggs.

golden crackers made fish ponds awesome. i would get 6 roe a day from these things. here is sturgeon, blobfish, and stingray. not the most money but nothing to sneeze at. and pickling a bunch at once is satisfying.

you can also see me trying to correct the grape mistake here. i made a whole other farm plot for grapes next to a third junimo hut. i didnt get them raisins as soon as i wanted though. but they did get them.

my second is the one off to the left. at first, i tried to do the trick of putting machines outside the farm, but i got pretty sick of that, so i moved my oil makers into here. i ended up with a lot of pigs so they were mostly full except on rainy days.

oh and fish smokers for the raccoons and whenever I did go fishing. it's kind of funny that they're not part of perfection. I never finished their questline.

did the classic for my greenhouse. all ancient fruit (except for a line of pineapples from before i could warp to ginger island) and all fruit trees. made wine with ancient fruits, dehydrated everything else.

here's my farm storage. this is where i put all my shit. there's honey being made over there. I know it's not the best money, but i like having a lot of different money sources. makes it more interesting.

i liked how i surrounded the flowers with beehives, though. always had problems accidentally uprooting flowers, and you even still see some missing from an iridium scythe reaching too far.

the totems are all hiding chests and a lava eel fish pond, that i never ended up finishing up, but still gave me an appreciable money boost.

my chests were decently organized, but it's hard to keep up with it, and there's more near the exit with random stuff.

these obelisks are such a godsend. having to wait for pam or keep making teleport totems is such a pain. but being able to visit my ginger island farm whenever i wanted is a big reason why i was able to finish this in a reasonable amount of time

staff of returning too. shoutout to that. every time I forget it when dumping out my inventory I almost want to restart the day.

outside the farm

coffee beans, pineapple, starfruit, and strawberries, with speckles of blueberries. and LOTS of mango trees. all of these except the starfruit went into the dehydrators. starfruit were all on at least deluxe speed-gro.

actually went toward speed-gro on my home farm too, just because quality doesn't matter when you're pickling things. like who cares other than trying to save storage space by only getting gold items?

although the idea of having a farm that makes some of the best quality produce in the world that you can't buy because it immediately gets pickled is funny to me. sorry bud, jojamart corn for you. but I got all the pickled corn you could need.

and what if everything was affected by market factors? one year you saturate the market with dehydrated mangoes so the price crashes, but there's a shortage of green beans so now those are expensive. could be a neat mod.

now for something completely different. I put a bunch of seedmakers outside the bus stop when i did qi's beans, then used them for making lots of pineapple seeds to fill out ginger island.

there's also some recyclers from before I learned that the racoons want trash for one of their quests.

I set up geode crushers outside clint's just for fun. it's pretty annoying to deal with so I don't mess with this a lot. I wish they could crush mystery boxes and troves. don't see why they shouldn't be able to.

saving the most boring for last. my house was the kitchen and the path between the bed and the door. I could've moved the bed closer to the door but never did. I only do that on ginger island.

you can see this here. when I finally got the statue of blessings I had to put it in the way or i wouldn't remeber to activate it ROFL. there's also the statue of good fortune and the iridium one. the statue of good fortune probably set me back a week but who cares!! would've loved that thing early just for birthdays.

just happened to age in time. look at all this money. all starfruit wine.

last but not least, here's my kitchen and Sam, who I married for the stardrop. I couldn't get myself to divorce him before the end though. maybe I will. it's kind of antithetical to the character I played.

i put harvey's radio set in the fire teehee

I started the character as a loner who always took in relationships but never gave enough. something missing from his life, despite being able to leave his desk job. it's satisfying, for sure, but being the biggest earner in a town where he can't seem to really change anything makes him sad. so he does everything. romances everybody. but never marries anyone. nobody's enough, and he doesn't feel enough for anyone either.

he could single handedly support the entire town, but can't, for reasons outside his control. money can't fix everything. money can't seem to fix anything.

you can really see that stardew valley's limitations are set by its influences. it's intended to be a harvest moon clone, to have a modern feel for that series. it's a modern game with game design limitations set by hardware limitations of its predecessors.

that's not to say it's bad. it's a very good game. and its themes of not being able to *fix* people is unmatched. baring witness to other people's personal problems that you feel like you could fix, but can't. it's not that simple. people aren't that simple. it's a small town and nothing changes except for those that leave.

and plus, you do change things. you make shane and sam lose their jobs. felt weird to me that the movie theater is staffed by a random outsider and not an existing villager.

even though these are antithetical to the themes of the game, I think it's weird that you can make magical creatures that live in a hut on your lawn harvest your crops, but you can't hire help from the town. the only person you can hire to do anything is robin to build things.

sure you can marry someone who will water your plants for you, but that's... not really what I'm getting at. sorry if this rambling is confusing. it's all my deeper thoughts on the game. helping out the villagers economically directly by hiring them would contrast and confuse with the themes about helping out the villagers emotionally and would be tricky to write around. in fact, it would be tricky because helping them out economically may very well help them emotionally. y'kn'wh'i'm saying?

that's my rant anyways. stardew valley is the best to ever do it, wild to think almost eight years on. cozy farming sims are a meme now but nothing has reached the status stardew valley has. but I think something definitely could top it. bigger risks in writing, better control layout, rebalanced quality of life features, and an evolving world would be key to a stardew valley successor.

oh and by the way, no joja services used :^)