While waiting for FFXIV’s 4.1 patch and GW2’s Path of Fire expansion, I ended up digging through my Steam Library and play a game I have not played before. Yes, I’ve decided to play Stardew Valley.
The first impression is that this game has a low-resolution graphics and it is in 2D. I don’t dislike lowres or 2D games, it’s just that sometimes it’s hard to see what going on when the graphics are not fully defined. Stardew Valley is very blocky and very old school. It reminds me of Chrono Trigger when playing it in terms of the graphics. So right off that bat, I know it will be just another game I’ll play for a couple of hours and then I’m done with it. Well, I’ve been playing this game for 96 hrs now and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.
What I enjoy most about Stardew Valley is the farming sandbox. I can design my farm however I want and do what ever I want. I can choose to be a miner and have my farm setup to be a metal manufacturing site. I can choose to be a fisherman and have my farm setup as a recycling center. I can also choose to have livestock and setup my farm as cheese and mayo factory. I can choose to have a vineyard and setup the farm to make wines and beer. I can choose to have a single cow, a couple of chickens, a half dozen cherry trees and fill my farm with grass — simple retirement life. The possibility is endless.
Since this is my first play through, I want to explore everything at the same time. So at first, I built a simple 3×3 garden to plant Parsnips then I went to see what the mine is all about. The adventurer’s guild master gave me a sword when I enter the mine and I had my first death when I lost a couple of items including the sword. Since that’s really a very bad experience I put off mining for a while and went fishing instead. I cast my line then there’s this mini game where I have to keep the fish inside the green bar by pressing a button. That fish just goes zooming up and down the gauge and I never caught any fish after a couple of in-game hours have passed. So fishing is not for me either. For my first season, I concentrated on gardening. I made more plots; 4 rows x 4 column of a 3×3 plot — so I can plant a maximum of 128 seed and I said to myself, “I’m gonna be rich!” — well that didn’t work out as planned.
I have my 128 seed planted — piece of cake, then I have to water each seed, every, freaking, day — I just want my character to go kill himself. After laboring through watering, I finally unlocked how to craft sprinklers, but this sprinkler will only water 4 out of 8 seeds, that’s really lame not to mention I have to back into the mines to gather the materials I need. Since I don’t have a sword anymore the closest I got as a weapon is the axe, but it’s a single target weapon and the bugs are all over the place. Then I remember that the scythe can cleave and I’ve used it as a weapon until the adventurer guild allowed me in which I bought a sword as soon as possible. After learning the mechanics of the mines and how the enemy behaves, it wasn’t too bad. So I kept mining until I can put sprinklers on each of my plots. Since the sprinkler practically cut my watering time in half, I’ve decided to have a barn with cows — it’ll be fun…right?
Having more than 1 cow is infuriating after a while. Not only I have to feed them every day, I also have to pet them and then milk them. That’s just too much work for a bucket of milk. After some lumbering and mining I’ve finally upgraded my barn to auto feed, and of course, I needed a silo too. So the cows are fed but I still have to pet them and then chase them around in order to milk them. I finally decided that since my barn is fully upgraded, I’ll try pigs instead — so far, I’m loving the pigs. All I have to do is pet them every morning and once in a while the yard is full of truffles — not bad at all. Since I have my barn is now under control I’ve decided to build a chicken coop.
Just like the pigs, the chickens are low maintenance and lay eggs almost every day. Then one night a witch passed by the turned one of the eggs into a void egg. I didn’t want to sell the void egg so I’ve decided to upgrade my coop so it includes an incubator where I can hatch the egg to a chicken — an evil looking chicken. When the void chicken started laying eggs, the value of the void eggs is more than the value of the regular egg, in turn, the value of the void mayo is greater than the regular mayo. Because of this revelation, I now want a coop full of void chicken. I sold all the regular chicken and start hatching void eggs. So far I have 6 void chicken and one void chick. So every morning, I pet the pigs and the chicken then pickup the truffles and the eggs off the ground. Now it’s time to expand — I want a brewery.
During Spring season I can plant melon to make melon wines, during Summer I can plant hops to make pale ales and during fall I can plant grapes to make grape wines. The only problem with wines is that it takes forever to make. I want something fast. Melon, hops and grapes take too long to grow and they only last one season. I did a bit a research I found that my favorite beverage, COFFEE, is the right crop I want and it’s also the most profitable. So last night I restructured my farm to accommodate a large area for coffee, but I need to get some iridium for the large sprinklers. I’ve got a lot of work to do.
Now that I have a better idea on what to do, I’m thinking about starting fresh — but when I taught about how a pain in the ass trying to fix the community center is, I’m keeping this one.
