
Stardew Valley opens with a dead-end cubicle job at Joja Corp and a sealed envelope from your late grandfather. Open it and you inherit his rundown farm in Pelican Town: plant and harvest crops, fish the rivers and ocean, mine down through the Skull Cavern, or spend your time courting one of the 34 people who live around town. Eric Barone built the game alone under the name ConcernedApe and hasn't stopped patching it since its 2016 launch; the 1.6 update in 2024 added a mastery system and four new crops you can't buy from any store.
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Whatever you pull out of the ground or the water eventually crosses paths with a villager. Crops and fish fund a save, but a raw Blueberry or Sturgeon usually pays more cooked into one of 231 recipes than sold straight off the farm, and knowing which conversion pays for a trip to the Kitchen is most of what separates a rich farm from a broke one. Items tracks everything that changes hands after that: sell fodder, gift fodder, or something you eat for a buff (Speed from Coffee, Luck from Magic Rock Candy) right before a Skull Cavern trip. Villagers is where a lot of that gold and time actually gets spent, since friendship gates a third of the game's recipes and decides who'll marry you. Marriage Candidates narrows the full roster of 34 down to the twelve who can move into the farmhouse, and getting there runs through the same eight-heart Bouquet and ten-heart Mermaid's Pendant math as any other relationship in Pelican Town.

Seasons, days to maturity, and sell price for every plantable seed in the valley.

A high catch difficulty says nothing about rarity, only how hard the bar fights back.

Every craftable, sellable, or edible object in the game, quality stars and all.

231 cooking and crafting recipes, and what unlocks each one.

Loved, liked, and hated: every resident's gift preferences, birthday included.

The 12 villagers you can date and marry, and what it takes to get a ring on their finger.

39 of these unlock a hat at the hat mouse; ten more exist only on Steam.