I have a real issue with open-ended games. Not open-world games - though I will admit that they don't do my OCD completionist tendencies one lick of good, I can usually be set with concluding the story and any easily attainable post-game achievement goals, like a bonus dungeon or two. Rather, open-ended games are the type that include many simulation games that walk around in Stardew Valley's mud-caked farmhand boots: those deliberately built on routine in such a way that you could feasibly play them forever.

So now we're going to determine an acceptable end point for Stardew Valley and try to reach it before next week, for the sake of my own sanity. I still have Big Bosses to boss around, gravities to rush and Donkey Kongs to tropically freeze this Summer. A list of possible conclusion points include, in ascending order of difficulty/effort (and again, spoilers ahead if you still want to go into the game relatively blind):

Completing a Year in the Valley

In a sense, a year is enough to see everything Stardew Valley has to offer, and it takes a full cycle to see what each season is like, the challenges and opportunities they present, and the diverse festivals that the townspeople hold annually. Yet, in another sense, the first full year is also just the end of the beginning. Now that you know how each season works, they no longer hit you in the face each time they shift and your farm is suddenly looking like Dresden after the bombs fell (or Shaka, when the walls fell) as every plant dies and you need to start anew with whatever crops are in-season. Instead, the second year is all about smart preparation, confident choices and chasing other goals beyond all the basic building upgrades you've spent the first year working towards.

It's probably worth stating for the record that, were I to stop the game after hitting this milestone, I'd already be done. I'm presently midway through Year 2's Summer. That would be a little too easy, I think you'll agree.

Getting Married

Acquiring a spouse requires a lot of studying the belle/beau that catches your eye, monitoring their daily schedules and a sustained, persistent campaign of courtship that requires constant gifts given at every opportunity. You know, sort of like how a stalker imagines a real-life romance to be. The endpoint is to go steady with them with a special item you buy at the local grocer's (which, I dunno, raises all sorts of interesting questions about how much privacy you can expect to have in a town this small) and then tie the knot with a completely different special item that's a little more elusive to track down.

Marriage has a handful of benefits - your spouse will give you items, occasionally do your farm chores and randomly change the furnishings in your house - but beyond that it exists as one of those major life milestones that a life simulator probably can't do without, especially not one that wears its Harvest Moon aspirations on its sleeve like a couple of pig-themed cufflinks. As significant as a significant other is, however, it's simply one of many facets of the game and a comparatively minor one in terms of gameplay - the friendship/gifts system is far less elaborate than dungeoneering or crop management, for instance. My character got hitched to the local artist, Leah, so I could always arbitrarily decide to end my game with that crossed off the checklist. Except... if I were to quit now, where would that put my infant daughter?

Getting Married and Having Two Kids

So having kids is surprisingly easy. Well, okay, that's obvious enough, but it's also surprisingly easy to raise them. To the extent that I wonder how much of that feature is, like the sprogs themselves, presently in a locked nascent stage that the developer ConcernedApe might expand upon later, along with what I imagine is a Terraria-sized list of other possible additions. My evidence for this is that kids never grow up to be older than toddlers, ascending from the crib to crawling around random locations in your house. They're apparently resourceful enough, since you could feasibly leave them alone as you run off doing Yoba knows what and they're content to just sleep, play with the oven hob or poke your power sockets with a fork.

You can apparently get two kids - I checked the achievement list before starting this article - but I suppose the first one needs to graduate from diaper school to free up the crib before their younger sibling arrives. Either way, they don't do a whole lot, and like marriage I don't really consider these little bundles of joy to be a significant enough part of the game to decide it would be a fine time to make up some excuse about "going out for cigarettes" and quitting just after they arrive. Might as well stick around to keep an eye on the tykes. Wouldn't want them crawling into my slime breeding hutch, after all. That could get messy.

Completing the Community Center Bundles

With this item we're looking at something a little more realistic as an "intended" end point. The Community Center is introduced fairly early on and represents the spiritual struggle the town of Stardew Valley is facing between the old ways of nature-providing self-sufficiency and the new ways of being dependent on the monolithic Joja Corporation, which has set up one of its apparently-ubiquitous convenience stores on the edge of town. The player can opt to help either side of this tradition vs. progress schism, and embarks on a game-long quest to either bring together the necessary resources to restore the town's Community Center with the help of the elusive Jumino forest sprites, which in turn restores a lot of other features around the town that have fallen into disrepair, or simply pay Joja Corp to fix everything with regular donations of large sums of money.

The Community Center and its various fetch quests have been the core to the Stardew Valley experience for me, though evidently not enough to emphasize it more when I discussed the game's appeal a few weeks back. Figuring out how to get certain fruits, certain artisan goods, certain fish and certain forage items has been a large motivator in getting me to poke and prod every nook and cranny of the game's setting, leading to discoveries like the desert, the spa, the quarry, the beach's tidal pools and a secret area of the woods south of the farm. Once the Community Center is fully rebuilt, I imagine there'll be some significant cutscene as a reward and I can feel satisfied to leave the game off there.

However, the last item I need to complete the final bundle is three apples - with the exception of the very remote chance of finding apples in my fruit bat cave or via the travelling merchant, apples only grow in the Fall. So while the Community Center is the most obvious (and closest to completion) end goal for me, I've still got a couple of in-game weeks for those apples to arrive that I can use to chase after some of the following goals instead.

Maxing All Skill Levels

Now, were I to call Stardew Valley an RPG, and it's not a million miles away, maxing out all the different "jobs" your character can level up in would make for a convincing end point for an otherwise open-ended RPG. I mean, level caps are probably where you'd (temporarily) stop in an MMORPG where plot isn't so much a metric of one's progression as it might be in a single-player experience. Ditto with something like Diablo, which is built for replays with higher level player characters and enemies.

Stardew has five of these job classes, each of which is increased in level by performing actions specific to that class. Farming is boosted by planting crops and other flora, watering them, picking them and selling them. Mining is boosted by smashing up rocks, regardless if they happen to have anything in them worth selling. Fishing is boosted by fishing. Combat is boosted by combat. Foraging... well, I don't think I figured out how foraging works, because it's still the only class that hasn't hit its cap yet.

Ideally, I'd like to hit level 10 in foraging - which might involve a lot more running around looking for junk to pick up and sell - before I consider shutting down the game, though unlike the previous Community Center goal I have no idea when this might happen. I might ping the new foraging level either as soon as I complete the next in-game day or a million years from now. Max levels is a logical enough if unimaginative end point, but the circumstances of getting there are a bit too obfuscated.

Earning One Million Dollars

Like life, one could easily conflate personal success with financial gain, and all of Stardew Valley's many career options - farmer, angler, adventurer, miner, errand person - are ultimately different means of accruing wealth. The game keeps track of both your present financial state and the overall amount of cash you've earned, and the next big milestone achievement in this regard is hitting a nice, round one million golden whatever-it-is-the-game-uses-for-currency.

On the other hand, a single achievement for an arbitrary earnings total doesn't make for the most compelling end point for a non-accountant like myself, and I imagine I'll end up getting close and then passing that total without really noticing. It is one of the secret requirements for a certain other item further down this list, though...

Finding All the Stardrops

The game doesn't have a whole lot of incredible treasures. There's a few universal gift items that are extremely valuable, like the very rare Prismatic Shard item. There's five legendary fish that the player can only catch once per save file, each of which sells for a tidy sum. There's the "Rarecrow" set of eight collectible scarecrows. It's the Stardrops however, of which I believe there are eight, that are not only the rarest items to find but also the most beneficial to the player.

A Stardrop, once found, instantly increases the player's total energy - a finite resource that replenishes through food, relaxation or getting a good night's rest and governs everything you do. Once that energy meter runs out after a busy day of planting, chopping, sword-swinging or what have you, the player strolls around at a languid pace until they can find a way to restore it, and their enervated state causes them to begin the next day with half their total energy. It's an important resource to monitor, then, and increasing its maximum value is a true boon regardless of how you personally prefer to play the game.

Of course, Stardrops don't grow on trees. While some are bought at great expense, others can only be acquired by completing specific objectives. So while collecting all the Stardrops is a worthy goal, and a useful one, it also means you're also pursuing a bunch of other objectives on this list to get there anyway. Like the following...

Completing the In-Game Collections for Shipments, Fish, Artifacts/Minerals and Cuisine

The game tracks a lot of these collections in different ways. For shipped goods, you merely have to have found the item and then sold it. For fishing, you need to have actively caught the fish in question: finding mussels and oysters on the beach isn't enough, you have to catch them legit via the crab pots. However, once the fish has been yanked out from its watery paradise, it is instantly added to the fish collection without you needing to sell it. Artifacts and minerals count whether you donate them to the museum or sell them, and cuisine items pop as soon as you've personally cooked that meal in your kitchen (provided you have one).

For me, this is the most favored end point to pursue. I'm a collector at heart, and all these tables with their silhouettes are going to inspire me to keep playing until I finally fill every one and can quietly retire the game, my OCD satiated. The issue with this particular plan is that it will take a full cycle of the second year before I'll have every recipe for the cuisine part - many can only be gained from watching a cookery show every Sunday on TV, which has just enough recipes for two whole years of episodes - so it's going to take some time to get there.

I could just stop at the fishing (only need one more legendary fish) and the artifacts/minerals (need several of these, and most of them are random buried objects) as these are the two collections that award Stardrops for successful completion. I'd love to finish the shipped goods collection too, since I'm very close to a full set and there's an achievement attached to that. Doing the whole Julie/Julia thing might be where I call it quits - I haven't been tracking what ingredients I need for all of the meals I'm missing, and that might include some Spring-only items I'd have to wait a long time to find.

Acquiring All Achievements

Now, the achievement list for Stardew Valley is a reasonable one, and it's generally where I go to these days for games that might be a little too open-ended for their own good. I only stopped playing the endless roguelite Spelunky, for instance, once I had the full set of XBL achievements - at that point, the only challenges that game had to provide were the ridiculous self-imposed ones, like tossing an eggplant at the Lord of the Underworld. A goal as sensible as it is easy.

Most of the above listed accomplishments are also achievements, conveniently enough. When I built this list, I went off the achievements as a starting point - the full collections, finding all Stardrops, reaching a million, getting the spouse and two kids and maxing all skills. The only remaining achievements unaccounted for above include getting friendship levels up with a lot of villagers (there's a few of these, and they include getting to five hearts with twenty villagers and ten hearts with eight) and shipping fifteen of every crop type. Neither would be particularly difficult. If I felt like resorting to my old ways, I could see getting every achievement as an approachable end goal. It wouldn't be the first time.

Getting a Personal Thumbs-Up From Your Dead Grampa's Ghost

When you first explore the farm, you can find a small shrine meant to honor your deceased Grampa. This is the relative that left you the farm, spurring the events of the game into action, and so discovering a note that suggests he'll ominously make a return at the dawn of the third year hints that this would be the actual intended end point for the game.

When you supposedly meet the ghost of your Grampa at this time, he'll judge the progress you've made and light a certain number of candles around the shrine as a response to your accomplishments: reaching a certain goal target, which is dependent on many factors including your marital state, your total earnings, your collections and your relationships with other villagers, earns you a statue that spits out the incredibly valuable iridium ore on a daily basis, which is required for the best equipment in the game and the incredibly useful iridium sprinklers. With a field of those things, you could grow an entire continent of crops without worrying about watering them every day.

This end game rating is an ideal time to check out, especially as the vast amount of iridium makes the rest of the game trivial, but it also comes after two whole years of game-time. It's hard to put how long that would take into pure numbers, because time will regularly pause in menus and days will end early because the player decided to hit the hay before midnight. At a conservative estimate, fifteen minutes is probably the length of a regular in-game day with pauses, and so we're looking at seven hours for a whole season (twenty-eight days) and 28 hours for a whole year. Give or take a few festivals, at least.

Presently, I'm sticking this up as the final goalpost. If I hit this without hitting all of the above first, I'm calling it quits regardless of how I'm doing. Enough would be very much enough after two whole years and a friggin' ghost judging me from beyond the grave.

Actually Acquiring All Achievements, Including the Two Stupid Secret Ones

So now we reach the "nuh-uh" zone. In order to complete the full, FULL set of achievements, there are two secret ones that I had to look up elsewhere. These include completing the "Legend of the Prairie King" Arcade game without dying once, and reaching ten million in earnings. Neither of those things are going to happen.

For the record, completing the Legend of the Prairie King in one piece is a daunting task even with the amount of extra lives it throws your way, and ten million is exactly ten times the present goal of reaching one million, which I'm still a few hundred thousand away from. I think that amount would take approximately 200 hours, unless you've found some easy way to cheese revenue (and I imagine it won't involve actual goat's cheese, though it can fetch a pretty good price).

I'm not sure why those two achievements were included, unless it's to give the more hardcore audience who still want to play the game (or are particularly masochistic, with regards to that Legend of the Prairie King perfect run challenge) a few extra ludicrous accolades to lord over their Stardew-loving contemporaries. Either way, they're secret, so I don't have to acknowledge their existence if I don't want to. I think that's how it works.

In Conclusion

Reviewing this list, I believe the achievements and the full collections (besides meals) are the way to go. Neither of those are going to involve going too far out of my way, are fairly attainable, and befit the sort of targets I generally try to hit in open-world games. Or I could just burn out in the next couple days and throw all this end-game planning out the window, who can say?

Hopefully, I've at least helped a few of you make up your minds if you fall into the same trap of compulsively trying to finish a game with no defined conclusion. Really, that was one of those "look before you leap" considerations I should've taken into account before buying this damn timesink, but that's on me. You won't have to make the same mistake; instead, you can either avoid a similar debacle entirely or choose to start playing this excellent game and consider all of the above for where best to hit the "request stop" button and get off this bus tour of the countryside. That is, if you intend to play another video game ever again.