What Did We Play Yesterday?

The thing that bugs me the most in Stardew Valley is probably the crib thing.

The Farmhouse can be upgraded three times. The first upgrade adds a kitchen and master bedroom. The second upgrade adds an additional room and a nursery with a crib and two kid beds. The third adds a cellar, a huge storage space which is the only area you can set up casks to age wine.

There is no way to get rid of the nursery or move the furniture. And this is incredibly annoying. I understand why, development wise, the furniture should be immobile, but the nursery needs to be a separate upgrade. If I don't want a nursery on Switch I have to forgo having a cellar, there's no way to get rid of it.

I get why it was set up this way, but after three major updates I do not understand WHY this design choice persists. There are multiple mods that address this issue, which only compounds my annoyance.

I had two kids with Leah my last game. I don't want to be the guy who moves from farm to farm having spouses and kids all over the place, you know? I have all this stupid furniture from the museum and whatnot and I need somewhere to put it. Throw me a bone here.

The long-awaited Stardew Valley 1.3 multiplayer update just dropped. As it happens, I just rebought. I was feeling kind of sad, and I'm taking a break from Fortnite, so I finally picked it up on Switch and it's great how conducive SV's daily format is to portable gaming breaks. The game cheered me up quite a bit.

As far as Switch vs PC goes, outside some understandable keymapping wonkiness (putting decorations on walls) and the lack of cheevs, I've enjoyed it over the PC version. I wish there were more Switch cheevs, but I don't want unfun additional achievements like "Fector's Challenge," so I can accept this. I do miss a few quality of life mods, chiefly the villager map, but mods are truly supplemental in this game so it's not a huge loss.

The 1.3 update has been prioritized for Switch but has no release date. I'm pretty excited about the new content but I'm into my current farm on Switch and don't want to play the PC version to access it. I don't know that I'll ever take advantage of the multiplayer, which requires the "host" farmer always be present in the instance. I'm more interested in the added content and wonder how pots will change the game for me, as I am always quite obsessed with establishing the greenhouse.

This is supposed to be a chill game, but I still want to try powergaming the farm since I've never really done that before. Last game I used the River Farm and loved the convenience for fishing and crab pots but ultimately regretted the lack of farmable space, so this time it's the standard farm for all the hot farming action I can handle. It would be nice if you could terraform your farm after the fact to increase space (for a hefty fee, of course).

I love the fishing minigame and easily max out my fishing stats and gear early on, so I wanted to see if I could use fishing as a substitute for mining and get enough ores to set up a good-sized quality sprinker system. I routinely go out on lucky days with an iridium rod, bait, and treasure bobber, and (at this point) usually have a trout soup, which is +1 fishing, and I have the pirate perk. Additionally, I found what appears to be the best treasure fishing spot, which is next to the bush outside Jodi's house on the river.

So far, fishing is a good way to get artifacts, but an unreliable way to get ore. I sometimes get gold and even iridium ore, but until yesterday I never fished iron ore. In fact, that ore was from geodes, which add an extra layer of RNG since geode contents are determined when they are opened, not when/how they are obtained. There may be some bugs for geodes on Switch (more than once I had a series of magma geodes only contain Neptunite).

If you want to do a no-mining or low-mining run you should expect to buy iron and gold ore. Buying iron ore is not a huge deal. Gold costs about $2,000 a bar, which is not great, but if you're focusing on farming it's manageable.

The way Stardew Valley is structured if you know what you're doing you should be poised to blow it out of the water by year 2 without working terribly hard. By then you should have the recipe for lighting rods and have probably picked up a few iridium bricks for iridium sprinklers, but even if you haven't, you will probably have amassed a number of quality sprinklers, which are key to being able to manage large harvests.

I think livestock is generally a crapshoot outside pigs, which produce truffles, so I'm not too interested in that aspect yet, but I've been dutifully amassing hay anyway and began building structures so I can upgrade to auto-feeders. I have a long-standing tradition of having at least 2 chickens named Mulder and Scully and a duck named Skinner so I need to at least do that much. Somehow I managed to score 2 dinosaur eggs in the first 2 seasons (clearly my dark master Satan smiled upon me), so I will try hatching dinos this game, which is something I've never tried before.Collapse