Stardew Valley - Everything I Wanted It To Be

After years of waiting, Stardew Valley finally got released yesterday. I played 9 hours, in one sitting. This game is everything I wanted it to be (thus far).

There are sooo many small nods to the original Harvest Moon for the SNES that I got taken back to when that game got released 20 years ago. This really is a great game and fans of Harvest Moon (and Animal Crossing) should really try it out.

Here's a fun little image of my farm.

I'm a huge harvest moon fan, but the thing that always drew me to those games most was the villagers with their quirky personalities.

How is the writing in this? Couldn't get a good sense of that from the trailers.

Oh also! Could I play the game and avoid the combat component?

@welding: There are a couple of characters here with quirky personalities, much like in the Harvest Moon games. However I found a handful of characters I like to discover more. Leah is pretty cool - she's an artist who basically ran away from city life to focus on here sculpting cereer. So I try to convince her to show the stuff she made on the square. Something that is cool with the game is that you have conversation options. I somehow managed to have a person completely ignore me.

The writing is a step up from Harvest Moon. I want to say that I found the quirkiness quiet charming so I am maybe not the right person to answer this question.

When it comes to combat I basically were thinking the same thing as you. My understanding is that you can avoid it. I actually are spending more time then I thought with that though. It's a pretty fun system and it's fun to give a town museum some great fosils. To answer your question - yes, I think so, but it's a way more fun system then I expected.

I'm on the fence. I really like the look of it but I don't know if I have the time to invest. Hmm.

This one looks good. I was worried there wasn't any writing or the social parts of HM but that looks like it's there.

Also the number on selling game on Steam right now which is pretty crazy.

Just deciding if I want to dedicate the time more than anything. I never actually got into HM even though I appreciated it. Loved Animal Crossing but wanted it to be more gamey how this is. I bet I just cave and buy this soon. Been putting time into and enjoying more slower paced games recently. Been playing Children of the Nile lately.

Yep, it's pretty awesome

The music is fantastic, the control scheme is great, the level of customization is amazing as well, it really feels like it takes the best things out of the best renditions of HM games and then adds a lot on top of that still.

It's the perfect game to play after some devil daggers runs lemme tell ya, so chill, love it.

Any Rune Factory style adventuring and monster fighting/taming?

@the_ruiner said:

You do fight monsters in the cave, and you can buy animals as per HM standard but not sure about taming, haven't played that much yet.

This is definitely more classic HM then rune factory.

Been playing it for an hour or so at this point and it seems to require a little more time management than I was expecting, which is really cool. I ran into a few bugs so I might wait a little while longer before I jump straight in. Besides I just discovered Factorio and that game is crazy good.

I'm a massive Harvest Moon fan so this game caught my eye when I saw it on steam. To this day Harvest Moon Back to Nature is one of the best games I've ever played so I'll more than likely end up picking this game up eventually. Still debating on when I should though because games like this are massive time sinks and I have a lot of other games to play.

I just grabbed this. I'm digging it so far. I've never played Harvest Moon or anything similar so it's all unfamiliar.

Have to say, after playing through out the weekend, this might actually be my favourite Havest Moon style game. There are a lot of things I love here. There are some things I am worried about but the entire weekend the developer patched the game with new stuff so I guess it'll all be fine. Feel free to post images of your farms!

I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it yet, but it does seem to be a near-perfect indie PC version of a Harvest Moon game. I'm still figuring out where everything is and how it all works, but all of the pieces I'd expect from this kind of game seem to be there. Looking forward to playing more!

I hope the developer makes a sequel or does updates for it. Really nailed this game.

@travisrex: Well, the developer is just one guy, and he's hard at work on bug fixes at the moment.

I played this game until 1:30 am last night. Plan on spending several more hours after I leave work and get some schoolwork done. I like all the skills and the ability to improve (outside of just improving on tools - which you can also do) and the way the mining works is pretty neat too.

I'm abysmal at that fishing mini-game though.

Is it possible to romance male characters (as a male character)? I loved HM back on the SNES and will almost certainly buy this at some point. Gay relationship possibilities would pretty much move it to the top of my list though.

@yesindeed: yes that's in there.

I never played Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, or...well, any game like this before. I picked it up today though. I can see this being my evening game. Just something to play with for an hour each night before I go to bed. (That is unless I fall down the rabbit hole like everyone else...)

So far, my initial impressions are pretty good. I really like the small town, being out in the country vibe.

Would I like it if I was super into the first harvest moon game for game boy?

I've craved that game for years now but trying to get into the later games didn't do it for me. I didn't like the art style of the ps1 game with its pre rendered 3d stuff.

@devil240z said:

I never played that one but ima say yes you would, it remembers me a lot of "friends of mineral town" on the GBA which for me was the best there ever was, I too didn't like any of the most recent ones (apart from rune factory), plus it adds a lot of stuff of its own, it's pretty great.

Man, the steam userbase has a type. Takes a very specific sort of game to not engender rabid frothing rage-hate nowadays i suppose.

That said this looks pretty good and i may end up getting it soon anwyay.

Or i should just keep playing rune factory 4.

@onarum: okay cool. I think the game boy one was similar to the snes version. But I never played it.

Anyway this is going on my short list of games to play next.

Been playing a ton of this and enjoying it immensely. I don't really have too much to add at this point - it is a pretty known quantity. It is really everything I hoped it would be though and is perfectly scratching an itch.

I came off of playing Rune Factory 4 to instead move over to Stardew Valley. Although, I've always preferred Harvest Moon to Rune Factory (The 3DS HM games just happen to all be terrible), and Stardew Valley is definitely closer to a Harvest Moon to a Rune Factory.

There are similar things though, like there is a request system which will give you mini-quests to perform for the townsfolk, and there is some level of combat. It's definitely worth looking into (and it probably helps that the art-style is pretty great to look at).

Great news about the future of Stardew Valley. Here's what developer ConcernedApe wrote on the Steam page.

I'm also very excited at the prospect of adding new content in the future (as well as Multiplayer). I have lots of ideas of my own, and I've also heard some great ideas from others. Let's make this an active community together!

The future is looking very bright!

I feel like I missed out on Harvest Moon so this certainly peaked my interest when I saw it doing well on Steam. I might have to get this in the end.

Look at my little home. I really can't get enough of the graphics.

This game is so good...must. farm. More.

I'm kinda on the fence about this game so i had a question.
There is no time pressure right?
like i could spend 3 ingame years just farming parsnip or what ever and not miss out on stuff or fail the game?

i think i could really like this game but i always feel so pressured to do everything right and not miss out on stuff =/

There's no pressure to do anything. It's a very laid-back game.

@shikon: There are some quests you can accept from a Job Board that are time sensitive, but there is never any stakes involved. It's pretty much just fetch quest type stuff where you either bring the villager the item they requested within a week or whatever and they thank you and give you some gold, or you don't and things just keep movin along like normal. That's about as far as it goes.

There's also Objectives that the game gives you-basically as a way to guide you along-but there isn't any time limit on completing the tasks it shows. It took me nearly ten days to get around to introducing myself to everyone in town, and that was the very first objective the game gave me.

I still didn't do that, an im in autum of year one ^^

You dont "need" to do introductions first, and if you make it your main goal it can be an annoyance. Theres an algorithm at work that will basically have you bump into people randomly. Just talk to people you don't know when you see them. Most of that stuff's just breadcrumbs to be like "hey theres this thing you can do". The introductions quest leads into showing you that you can gift villagers things to build relationships, it doesnt unlock that feature or anything, most unlocks are time based, like the mine always opens five days after you move in, it trickles things out so its not a wall of text tutorial from the start.

Best thing to do first off is to just plant stuff to get money coming in and build some storage space. You can craft chests, the bag upgrade is 2000g. Then clear your farm and stash the wood and stone. Worth pointing out when you get to the end of a season, the instant it changes over, every plant not meant for that season will instantly wither and die, so be mindful of the number of days something takes to grow.

@twolines@mindbullet that's what i figured but good to know for sure, now i just hope i can change my mind set and just enjoy!

I bought the game last night and played it for like an hour and I just want to play it some more! Goddamn I forgot how much I love Harvest Moon.

Here's my hot tip: get that inventory upgrade bag for 2,000G as soon as possible. I'm only on my eighth day of Spring, but am really enjoying the game. Also, I've introduced myself to 27 out of 28 people, and trying to find the last person is maddeningly. I just hope to randomly bump into them down the road, maybe at a special event.

@pabba: I was 27/28 til like mid summer....the last guy might be in the mines? Don't know if he counts.

I think everyone is just in town and no cut-scenes are necessary. Make sure for the store owners, you go behind the counters to talk to them otherwise it won't count as an introduction.

I got them all relatively quick, but I was somewhat obsessive about it and compared the ???s on the social tab to the names on the houses of the map.

update: I went a little nuts near end of spring. oeps!

Guess it kind of shows i am Dutch =p

How are the mouse and keyboard controls?

Man, I'm about halfway through my first summer and I'm making so much money. When the recurrent crops matured I made enough for a full chicken coop and the first house upgrade. I bet I will be able to get the max size bag and a few more tool upgrades by the end of the month.

Pro tip: the first 2 tool upgrades to get are definitely the watering can and the axe in your preferred order. The copper watering can is able to water 3 tiles at once in a line in front of you if you charge it up. Incredibly useful if you want to take your farming to the next level in the summer.

I'm kinda blown away by the design of this game. They took harvest moon and just made it better by giving you way more shit to do and fixing most of the glaring flaws.

I picked this up last night after seeing that my brother was playing it a lot on Steam. It's pretty fun in a laid-back and relaxing kind of way! Right now my farm looks like garbage with no real design but it's functional and I see way to make it better over time. I can tell right away that there isn't a lot you have to do but a ton that you can do. This is probably going to be my time waster while I watch TV game for a bit.

Reminds me a lot of some of the games I used to play in the N64 and Genesis eras. Just charming in a really simple but effective way.

@obsideondarman: pretty good, haven't tried a gamepad yet though, which in turn is a testament for how good the km&m controls are since I see no reason to switch.

@onarum: good to hear. Does it feel like it was designed with a controller in mind at any time?

@obsideondarman: not at all, in fact you can even see a cursor onscreen heh, you control the movement with wasd, inventory slots with number keys or mouse wheel, and you interact the world around you with mouse clicks(sorta like terraria in a way), feels really intuitive.

@obsideondarman: I've been playing quiet a lot on my Surface Pro with the Xbox One controller. Works well but you do have the cursor on screen that you need to use now and then. It works just fine but it could be a bit better.

@onarum: nice one. I hope they mess around with it some during UPF today. It feels like they've been talking about a dedicated Quick Look of it for weeks now.

In regards to control I've been playing with mouse and keyboard. It works just fine. I may try out an Xbox controller later tonight.