Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley is a 2016 farm life simulation game developed by Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone. Players take the role of a character who inherits their deceased grandfather's dilapidated farm in a place known as "Stardew Valley". Stardew Valley is an open-ended game where players manage a farm by clearing land, growing seasonal crops, and raising animals. Players can build skills in farming, foraging, fishing, mining, and combat. The game also includes social features, such as building relationships with townspeople, with the option to marry and have a maximum of two children. A later update added multiplayer, allowing online play with others.
Barone developed Stardew Valley by himself for over four and a half years. He was heavily inspired by the Harvest Moon series, with additions to address some of those games' shortcomings. He used it as an exercise to improve his programming and game design skills. British studio Chucklefish approached Barone halfway through development with an offer to publish the game, allowing him to focus more on completing it. The game was originally released for Windows in February 2016 before being ported to other platforms.
Stardew Valley received generally positive reviews from critics, including Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of Harvest Moon. Stardew Valley has been cited as one of the best video games ever made and became one of the best-selling video games, selling 41 million copies by December 2024, and is credited with causing a resurgence in popularity for the farming sim genre. The game appeared on several publications year-end lists and received accolades, including the Breakthrough Award at the Golden Joystick Awards and a nomination for Best Game at the British Academy Games Awards.
Gameplay
Stardew Valley is a farm life simulation game set in top-down perspective while being open-ended. The game is primarily inspired by Harvest Moon. The game starts with the player character leaving their corporate job to manage a farm just outside of Pelican Town, a town in the eponymous Stardew Valley.The main objective is to restore the farm of the player's deceased grandfather and assist in the town’s revival. Players have a choice of completing bundles of goods to help restore the Community Center or picking the Joja Warehouse route, aiding the rival. As the game progresses through its four 28-day seasons, the completion of bundles will unlock new areas and activities, such as exploring a new island. Players may select from several different farm types, each with a unique theme and different benefits and drawbacks. Each theme helps players focus on improving different types of skills faster. On the farm, players need to cut down trees, break rocks, and use a scythe to clear weeds to make space for tilling and planting. The farming system allows players to plant seasonal seeds that need daily watering and must usually be harvested before the next season. Players can also build barns and coops to raise animals for products like eggs and milk.
The player assumes various roles, developing skills in farming, foraging, fishing, mining, and combat. Interacting with townspeople and giving them gifts builds relationships over time. Players are further able to marry one of 12 bachelors or bachelorettes, which allows the spouse to help with daily chores on the farm, such as cooking, feeding animals, or watering crops. After marriage, the character and its spouse will have the option to conceive a child. Time in the game is divided into day-length segments. Each morning, the player begins with a full energy bar, which decreases as tasks are completed and can be replenished by eating food. A nearby cave system holds ores that can be mined and smelted. The caves also house monsters, giving the mining experience an action RPG feel. Switching between a pickaxe and a sword is necessary while exploring deeper levels, where more valuable treasures can be found. A multiplayer mode was introduced in a later update, allowing online play with other players.
Development
Stardew Valley was originally titled Sprout Valley and was created by American indie game designer Eric Barone, known professionally as ConcernedApe. Barone graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma in 2011 with a computer science degree but was unable to get a job in the industry, instead working as an usher at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. Looking to improve his computer skills for better job prospects, he had the idea to craft a game that would also pull in his artistic side. Barone grew up in the Pacific Northwest and incorporated many elements of the region into the gameplay and art.Stardew Valley originally began as a modern fan-made alternative to later Harvest Moon titles, as Barone felt the series had gotten "progressively worse" after Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. Unable to find a satisfactory replacement, he created a game similar to the series, saying he intended "to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon" and that "no title in the series ever brought it all together in a perfect way". Barone was also inspired by other games, including Animal Crossing, Rune Factory, Minecraft, and Terraria, adding features of those games such as crafting, quests, and combat. He was the sole developer of the game, creating all of its pixel art, music, sound effects, story, and dialogue. Barone used Reason Studios, a digital audio workstation, to create all the music and sound effects within the game and Paint.NET for the pixel art.
Initially, Barone considered releasing Stardew Valley on Xbox Live Indie Games due to the ease of publishing on that platform, but found that his scope for it became much larger than originally anticipated. He publicly announced the game in September 2012, using Steam Greenlight to gauge interest in it. After the game was shown a great deal of support from the community, Barone began working on it in full, engaging with Reddit and Twitter communities to discuss his progress and gain feedback on proposed additions. Shortly after the Greenlight period in 2013, he was approached by Finn Brice, director of Chucklefish, who offered to help publish the game on release. Chucklefish took over many of the non-development activities for Barone, such as site hosting and setting up his development wiki. Barone decided not to use Steam's Early Access feature for development, as he felt it was not well suited to Stardew Valley. Barone spent four years on the project, redoing it multiple times and often spending 10 hours or more a day on it. He originally programmed it in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework, but later migrated to MonoGame in 2021, which, according to Barone, "futureproofs the game and allows mods to access more than 4 gigs of RAM".
Barone aimed to give players the feeling of immersion in a small farming community, saying he wanted Stardew Valley to be entertaining while also having "real-world messages". In contrast to earlier Story of Seasons games, which could end after two years of in-game time has passed, Barone kept Stardew Valley open-ended so that players would not feel rushed to try to complete everything possible. During development, he recognized that some players would attempt to figure out mechanically how to maximize their farm's yield and profit through spreadsheets and other tools, but hoped that most would take the time to learn these on their own. To that end, he designed the cooking aspect of the game purposely not to be profitable, but instead to pay back in bonuses that aided exploration, farming, mining, and fishing skills. Barone also opted not to include the butchering of farm animals for meat products, encouraging players to name and tend to each animal.
Release
In April 2015, Barone announced he intended to release the game only once he felt it was feature complete, refusing to put it onto Steam's Early Access program or accept pre-sale payments. The game was released on Steam and GOG for Windows on February 26, 2016. After its release, Barone continued to work on it, taking feedback from the community and patching bugs, and stated plans to add more features. Barone anticipated adding more end-game content, as well as ports for other platforms. He said that he initially planned a four-player cooperative mode to be released in the game at launch. In this mode, Barone planned that players would share a common farm, each player tackling different tasks, such as one player mining while others tended to different parts of the farm. The multiplayer feature supports both local area network and remote online connectivity. Barone had planned for public beta testing of the multiplayer feature in late 2017 for the Windows version, but was still working to improve the network code by early 2018. The multiplayer beta for Windows was released in April 2018 and officially launched for all PC platforms on August 1, 2018. In December 2018, the multiplayer update was released for the Nintendo Switch. An official sheet music book for piano and album was released in 2018 by label Materia Collective.Mobile versions for iOS and Android were developed with help of The Secret Police, with the iOS version released on October 24, 2018, and the Android version on March 14, 2019. Both versions include the ability for Linux, macOS, and Windows users to transfer progress to their device. In 2018, Barone said he wanted to assemble a team of developers to help continue the game's development. By 2019, all versions of the game, except on mobile, were self-published by Barone. In 2020, Barone collaborated with Fangamer to announce the physical release of the game's standard and collector's edition, as well as the Switch and PC versions.
In March 2024, Barone published an update significantly expanding on the initial features of the game. The update was later made available for mobile and console platforms in November of that year. The Switch 2 edition of Stardew Valley was released on December 25, 2025.