Stardew Valley is a source of relaxation and joy. Unless, you do everything wrong. Just like MeinMMO author Max Handwerk.
Ah, the Stardew Valley! A magical, idyllic place characterized by the community of its inhabitants, the daily work on the farm, a few adventures in mysterious caves, or an extensive fishing trip by the sea.
This place particularly delights my wife and me in this cool winter. Instead of letting the rainy, cold weather outside bring us down, we currently enjoy spending a few hours on the couch, sipping tea and playing Stardew Valley in wonderful split-screen co-op.
For those who haven’t tried it yet, due to the graphics or anything else: It’s really the perfect game to get through the winter together. That the game still ranks number 2 in the best-rated Steam Games doesn’t surprise me at all (even though we play on the PS5).
But! One should not confuse Stardew Valley entirely with a cozy game. Sure, it’s not Dark Souls or anything, but there are quite a few tough challenges that require skillful planning or time. And if you don’t meet those, you have to wait a long time until you can proceed again.
It’s particularly frustrating when you think you’ve done everything right, only for the success to be thrown straight into your own trash can. Or rather: into the cooking pot.
Goodbye, beloved eel
In Stardew Valley, one of the great tasks is to rebuild the town’s Pelican Community Center. To accomplish that, you have to produce, mine, or find a lot of resources and goods and deliver them in bundles to the Community Center.
The difficult part: Many of these goods can only be obtained if you have already met certain prerequisites. Or only in certain seasons. And that was the catch.
One of the last things we needed for our finished Community Center was a regular eel. You can catch it in Stardew Valley in both spring and autumn. However, only in the ocean, only when it’s raining, and only between 4 PM and 2 AM.
You have to figure that out first. No wonder I spent ages fishing to catch an eel from the sea. While my wife took care of the cows and goats, slayed monsters in the caves, and maintained social relationships with the village, I joined Fisher Willy to catch the slippery fish.
It took a while, but eventually it happened! There it was, fresh from the sea: An eel, just as the Community Center could wish for. I was thrilled with the success and set off. But not to the Community Center.
As soon as I left the beach, something must have distracted me. In any case, I completely forgot what I was planning to do within moments. I only realized my mistake later: When I cooked a huge batch of sashimi in the kitchen of our farm.
This recipe uses random fish from the inventory. And so my eel ended up not in the Community Center, but in the sashimi for village trader Pierre, which he had requested.
A mistake with a learning effect. Really!
When I noticed the mistake, I could hardly believe it. All that work! For nothing! My wife was laughing, but now the hunt for the eels was back on. Now that I knew what to do, everything went a bit faster.
I had learned my lesson, of course. Never again would something so stupid happen to me. After all, I wanted to finish the Community Center.
From now on, I would pay very close attention to what I throw into the cooking pot.
Goodbye, beloved pufferfish
Do you know what else you need for Stardew Valley’s bundles? A pufferfish! And you can only get it in summer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t summer when I realized this. And that meant: We would have to wait a long time to be able to fish this rare fish for our bundles.
But we were lucky! At some point, the traveling cart actually had a pufferfish for sale – even though it wasn’t the season! What luck! I bought the fish right away, planning to deliver it to the Community Center.
At least that was the plan. But, as it is in Stardew Valley: Something seems to have distracted me. Because when I returned to the Community Center a few hours later to deliver items, the pufferfish was conspicuously missing.
Honestly: This time I don’t even know what I did with it. Maybe I threw it away, ate it, or… cooked it again. The fact was, it was no longer there, and we had to wait for summer to come again.
Today my Community Center is completed, but it was a long road. The one that, with a bit more attention, could have been a lot shorter.
But that’s something in Stardew Valley: Amidst all the relaxation, you really have to be careful. Recently, for example, I blew up all my mayonnaise machines because I accidentally equipped a mega bomb and laid it down instead of putting an egg in the mayo machine. It happens! Have you made similar mistakes? Tell us in the comments! And if you want to see what happens to a Stardew farm after 1,000 years, check this out.
