Stardew Valley: A Spiritual 'Successor' to Harvest Moon

Malor: You can also get a ring that glows.

Woohoo! I had a nicely profitable day yesterday... I think I'll head over to Pierre's and pick up that huge 24-slot backpack today!

"Closed on Wednesday."

IMAGE(http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/vader.jpg)

After I got that whole situation straightened out, I also dropped my pickaxe off to get a shiny new copper coating -- my first tool upgrade, other than buying the wooden sword.

Edit: And now my axe has a shiny copper skin as well. Fishing is pretty fun and profitable too -- I've reeled in a couple of chests containing iron ore, even!

Played a stupid amount of this today. I've got about 12-15 sprinklers up so my farm is basically automatic at this point. Thing, is I found out that grinding Mushrooms in the dungeon is probable the fastest way to make money. The loot in dungeons is random but it only changes the next day. So if you find a floor with mushrooms you can repeatedly harvest them there. Red mushrooms are 75g and purple are 250g. If you find a floor that is quick to travel to you can make a great deal of cash. My highest in a single day was 35k. 10k was about the minimum.

Got to the 2nd dungeon and the combat is annoying me there. You can't really boost your defense and some of the enemies just swarm you here. If you die you can lose item by the way. Even tools you have equipped. I just quit when that happen. Also figured out the water can issue. It's just hold to charge. Not sure why it wasn't working before.

Fun game but I think I'm at my limit for it. Going by what I read I would need to play for over a year still for the end. I also don't have much interest in raising animals or the dating aspect. Will see though. Might just be a little burned out from playing too much.

I played an absurd amount of this over the weekend. Still wanna play more

I have this and Factorio downloaded, should I start playing now or wait for more patches?

Speaking of patches, the dev has put out 3 patches in 3 days.

He's keeping a close eye on requests and fine tuning at an incredible rate.

Latest patch increased movement speed and fixed the slower diagonal axis speed.

Really impressive turnaround from dude.

Loving the game thus far.

Tamren wrote:

I have this and Factorio downloaded, should I start playing now or wait for more patches?

Honestly you can play now. Haven't noticed any sort of bugs personally.

Sadly it seems the movement mod and steam achievemetns don't play well together. Didn't realized I missed a chunk of them. That said if the choice is between walking faster and pointless achievements I'll take the latter. The movement speed was actually patched a bit, but I still prefer the mod.

Put 4 hours into the game, contemplating restarting. There is a lot of things the game doesn't explain at all that I wish I had known from the start. I felt like I was spinning my wheels too much so I read some guides on steam and I have a much better picture of what to do now.

The movement speed is getting to me though. The game really begs for a fast travel system.

Tamren wrote:

Put 4 hours into the game, contemplating restarting. There is a lot of things the game doesn't explain at all that I wish I had known from the start. I felt like I was spinning my wheels too much so I read some guides on steam and I have a much better picture of what to do now.

The movement speed is getting to me though. The game really begs for a fast travel system.

There are faster travel methods later. Plus get that mod mentioned a few pages back. Helps a lot.

I went ahead and restarted, I'm doing much better on my second run. Money is less of a problem and my skills are already better than when I quit just before the flower dance.

I just unlocked sprinklers, how do you guys set your sprinklers up? They water adjacent tiles, so they cover a little cross pattern of tiles. There are ways to tesselate cross shapes so that they evenly cover an area, but you could also use sprinklers in long lines to water rows of crops at a time.

I'm at mid-Summer right now -- chose to plow on through despite a somewhat rocky start (my first two sets of seed purchases in early Spring were done at JojaMart, because I, for whatever reason, didn't realize Pierre sold seeds... JojaMart sells seeds, but at double the price of Pierre's, giving me just about zero profit from those initial harvests). My skills are all at about 5, and my farm's shaping up pretty good, I think -- 70 total crops (tiles) of produce growing right now... and I don't use any sprinklers. I did finally just upgrade to the Copper Watering Can, which helps.

Tamren wrote:

I went ahead and restarted, I'm doing much better on my second run. Money is less of a problem and my skills are already better than when I quit just before the flower dance.

I just unlocked sprinklers, how do you guys set your sprinklers up? They water adjacent tiles, so they cover a little cross pattern of tiles. There are ways to tesselate cross shapes so that they evenly cover an area, but you could also use sprinklers in long lines to water rows of crops at a time.

I use a chess horse pattern. It's fairly efficient although it doesn't look nice. I'll be upgrading to advance sprinklers soon. Got lucky when the store to the South sold a bunch of them. Always check that place since it can have rare goods.

Hey developers? When you're thinking up enemies to add to your game, do you know what's worse for the players enjoyment than:

1. Enemies that make annoying sounds?
2. Enemies that take a tedious number of hits in order to kill?
3. Enemies that dance just out of reach of melee weapons?

How about all of the above? Those f*cking flies are ruining the dungeon experience for me. I get up to level 19 and EVERY TIME I get swarmed by 4-6 flies that just eat me alive as I frantically break rocks looking for the damn ladder to the next level.

That aside there are still a lot of features I feel are missing from a game like this. And the odd bug too:

1. Some kind of character tracker so that I don't have to comb all over town looking for a specific NPC. I get that they all have their own schedules that they follow but no one will never be able to memorize them all short of a wiki. I would settle for being able to ask another NPC where someone is, this is a small town and they would know.
2. The ability to knock on doors, sometimes I need to talk to an NPC (for a quest even) but they are in a room or house that I can't get into.
3. Hoe's can't hit the soil directly under your feet
4. Randomly swinging a tool costs stamina even if nothing happens, axes and the like should be disabled in town where you can't use them on anything.
5. Once known items should display their prices when you mouse over them, not just in the journal.
6. Once known, the gift preferences of an NPC should also be tracked. This could be shown in the relationship page or the dialogue window "Likes flowers", "hates Eggs" etc.
7. The library has books you can read, but it isn't clear which shelf is which and which shelves are readable. Also the method by which you get books is never explained.

Contemplating restarting again. I'm at the 26th of spring and looking back I can still see a lot of mistakes that I made and now know how to deal with. This is normal for me, I tend to restart games a lot and then settle in for the long haul once I get all the basics down pat.

I can explain a few of those. You can get books via digging around in town and other places. If you see earth worms in the dirt dig there. Also you can craft a dungeon ladder with stones. That said it's better just to buy new weapons from the shop. They help a lot and are pretty much the only way to get them.

Otherwise you are spot on. I don't like the combat in this game. It's not as good compared to rune factory. I've been fighting in the 2nd dungeon. It's got another flying enemy who's really annoying and hits hard. They are the only thing to kill me. And they do often.

I have acquired a void chicken. No idea what she's for but she's not eaten my other chickens yet so that's a plus! Anyone know anything about these?

TheGameguru wrote:

How's the controller support? I saw partial on the store page.

Malor wrote:

Weakish. There are things you can't really do with the controller. Example: I was confused for a good fifteen minutes on how to deploy a scarecrow. As far as I can tell, this can only be done with the mouse, and furniture deployment in general is really awkward with a controller, frequently impossible. And you can't move existing furniture with a controller, either, that also takes a mouse.

it's completely playable and pretty enjoyable to play with the steam controller (including furniture placement). The missus did run into some awkward controls for the arcade games but I dont know how important that will be.

This game has me intrigued, but also a bit wary. My favorite Harvest Moon to play was the one on the first Playstation (which is almost the same as the N64 game). It had a wonderful aesthetic, improved on a lot of the social aspects of the predecessor, and pretty much all the farming mechanics were improved in just the right way. I haven't really been able to get into a game in the franchise since.

So I'm curious, but feel like it might simply have too much going on.

Here's a neat tool for farm planning.

https://stardew.info/planner/

Have you ever gotten anything but trash when fishing from the two ponds on your farm? I can never seem to find any fish, the lake to the south is a much better place in my experience.

I couldn't take it anymore and bought this game. It's downloading now! Going to see if it runs on my little laptop.

I never played Harvest Moon, but the let's play I saw on Polygon has me intrigued for this. Maybe because I missed out on Harvest Moon.

Tamren wrote:

Here's a neat tool for farm planning.

https://stardew.info/planner/

Have you ever gotten anything but trash when fishing from the two ponds on your farm? I can never seem to find any fish, the lake to the south is a much better place in my experience.

Same here. The lake near the dungeon seems better then the one to the south.

Just found the statue and unlocked the quarry. Probable will spend most of winter socializing.

This game is addictive as hell. I've just gotten to Summer of Year 2, and there are so many competing priorities, and only so much time and labor in a day. I invested a ton of money into tool upgrades during Winter (especially my watering can), and man, is that ever paying off now. But even with a Gold Certified(tm) can, which lets me handle four or five times as many simultaneous crops as I could in my first year, I still can't grow as much as I want to, and time is a constant issue.

I'm at something like thirty hours, and I haven't even built a barn yet. There's just so much to this game!

Oh, as an aside, the run speed feels just about right, now. I wouldn't mind further in-game upgrades, but the way it's been adjusted in 1.04 is pretty much the right base speed for starting out. That was my big complaint, and I still sometimes wish he'd run faster, but it's not a constant irritant anymore. I'll still really enjoy going faster when it happens, without feeling the constant urge to reach into the screen and scoot him along a little quicker.

edit: I'm definitely looking into the sprinklers now. Debating over trying to get the bus fixed versus sinking a bunch of money into sprinklers. I need beets, see, for this particular quest, and beet seeds are only in the desert....and fixing that bus is expensive as heck.

Oh, and one more thought: apparently Stardew Valley is selling like gangbusters. As of a couple of days ago, it had moved over 100,000 copies, and it would not shock me in the least if it ends up shifting a million. It's a great damn game, and I bet it'll run on a potato.

Wow. I'm at about 25 hours, and still haven't hit Fall of year 1...

Came across a couple bugs. Omni Geodes are worth exactly 0 coins, which seems odd given that regular geodes are worth 60 and frozen geodes are worth 100.

Also several items in the fishing category don't update the journal properly. If you ship out a cockle or other clam you get the money for it but the journal doesn't show it as unlocked.

I am in love with this game! I am having a hard time getting the hang of fishing though. I hope it gets easier as I gain levels and get better rods because right now, I lose 9 out of 10 fish I hook!

With the NPC schedules and graphics and gameplay, it has a very Ultima/Ultima Online feel to me. First thing I spent money on was upgrading the backpack.

bekkilyn wrote:

I am in love with this game! I am having a hard time getting the hang of fishing though. I hope it gets easier as I gain levels and get better rods because right now, I lose 9 out of 10 fish I hook!

Took me a little while to get the hang of fishing - here's the advice I can offer.

1: If the fish is at the bottom of the scale, resist the temptation to click - you're better off leaving the slider at the bottom, until the fish moves out of it.

2: Once it does, start clicking with very short, regular clicks. You want to be bumping the bar up a teeny bit at a time, not in whacking great big movements, largely because the fish itself moves slowly, if unpredictably. It's really easy to get into an overcompensatory mode, where you're whacking the bar up and down the scale in big movements. You want to avoid that. Remember that the bar has inertia, so after a long click, it continues to move upward. Likewise, when it's moving down, it's got inertia, and will take a while to reverse that movement. Instead, a steady regimen of quick, fast clicks can be used to actually hold the bar steady. Then you can slightly reduce or increase your rate of steady, quick clicks to get the bar to gently move down or up (respectively).

I haven't lost a fish since I started doing that, with the basic rod.

Thanks! I will give short clicks a try next time I am in the game. That gold bar was moving all over like crazy because I wasn't sure how to click. I had a huge amount of beginner's luck the first time I caught a fish right after I got the pole, and I'd even thought that keeping the bar *under* the fish meant to keep it below (as in lower on the scale) than under as if the fish was lying on it, but somehow the fish got caught. Then I wasn't able to replicate what I did at all as every time I clicked the bar seemed to leap up past the fish and then it would fail.

Yes, proper wording for that instruction would have been to "keep the green bar *on* the fish" and I would have been fine.

I use very short clicks and vary the speed. I've had success so far.

Aahhh, that crushing feeling when you gift a beautiful home-made meal to someone and they respond “What am I supposed to do with this?”

*sigh*