The 400 Project

When I heard my friends talk about this game it sounded pretty lame. Farming, digging in mines, and getting people to like you? Seemed a little boring. However, they kept playing the game, a lot. Which made me think, okay what is this Stardew Valley all about? It wasn’t that expensive so I figured I’d try it out.

I don’t have any screenshots of my farm super early on in the game because back then I still didn’t think the game was anything special. Nor did I ever think it would be fun to write an article about.

 So the premise is: you have a shitty job at a call center and find an envelope your grandfather gave you when he passed away. He told you not to open it until you were needing a change in lifestyle. Guess a few hundred phone calls with unhappy customers would provoke that quicker than other jobs. So you find out he left you an old farm, you then leave your job and become a farmer.

The game revolves around four 28-day seasons. Each day is important as the clock is counts up in intervals of 10 minutes pretty much every 10 seconds or so. Meaning that if you leave for the bathroom without entering a menu you could very well waste and entire day. If you leave for dinner and come back, you probably passed out from exhaustion and a local character kindly took you to the hospital or your home.

The village of Stardew Valley houses multiple characters that all have different likes, dislikes, and schedules. Building friendships with them opens up other things in the game, and curating one far enough with someone who is single will open the option to court and marry them. Each character has a birthday as well, so giving them a gift on their birthday helps skyrocket your friendship level.

Along with birthdays, the community has events that take place on different days of different seasons.

An important thing to note is that collecting special items called Stardrops increase your energy level. However, what I didn’t know was that at the beginning of the game when creating your character you have a field to fill out called ‘favourite thing’. So naturally, I chose balloons. This provided me with some extra humour whenever I received a Stardrop.

One major goal of the game is fixing the community center. Each room has about 4 to 6 packages containing a variety of different items you need to submit to complete. Once you complete a package you get a mini reward, like a helpful item. Once you complete an entire room, you unlock a new area of the map to explore.

Seemed rather important to at least get one photo from my wedding day.

Here’s a screenshot of the farm you inherit. In winter only specific winter forage items grow in the soil, so I usually just explored the mines.

The mines go down 120 floors and are sectioned off into normal dirt areas, frozen areas, and lava type areas and also yield different monsters to fight and treasures to earn.

Yum! Ain’t nothing like the taste of balloons.

Once you’re married and you’ve expanded your house to accommodate a new person, you can have kids. Just like the animals in the game, you can name them whatever you want. I thought Groot was a good strong name for my firstborn.

You can upgrade your chicken coop to hold a variety of animals as well as the barn. Chickens, ducks, goats, cows, pigs, sheep, and dinosaurs. Yep, once you find the dinosaur egg you can put it in the incubator and it’ll hatch a baby dino.

You can also buy/make a stable and get your own horse. Below is a screenshot of me excited on my first horseback ride with my trusty steed named Bucket.

I’m nearing the end of the game so it seems some days are more throwaways then anything as I hunt for the last few achievements I need. All in all I’ve spent about three and half real days playing this game so far. I’d say that’s pretty good for a $20 game!

Have you played Stardew Valley? What did you enjoy? What did you dislike? Drop some comments below.