Stardew Valley

Absolutely, I think there's a lot of room for improvement on this thing. Even so, it's a lot of fun and relaxing. It's also really easy on the eyes, which lets me play it for a long time.

I have played 30+ hours already, never heard of harvest moon or farming simulators before this. Just started spring year 2. Well worth 15 dollars.

Yeah, this game is pretty baller. It's not quite as good as Rune Factory for combat, or Harvest Moon for farming. But it has a lot of just random shit to do, and it's very nostalgic feeling. Easily worth the $15 if either of those games I mentioned interested you.

lol I agree, I was skeptical about the price but purchased it today and it seems pretty damn cool.

Fun game, though early on I feel very overwhelmed. You want to improve your farm, talk to everyone to build friendship values, explore the mine for the adventurer guild, roam around the city/beach scavenging stuff for cash, do some time limited quests from the bulletin board, all the while the clock is constantly ticking down per day. I rarely get everything I want done in a day! Think I may just focus on only a few npcs for friendship and work on the rest later once the farm is established and requires less maintenance.

It's a common Harvest Moon/Rune Factory deal. You start with -so- much shit you could theoretically do, each day. You clearly aren't doing all of it, and that's sort of niggling. But as you progress you make certain purchases and plant certain crops and you end up with a lot of free time each day to just roam around doing whatever. It's probably a specific design choice, as -every- HM/RF game has the same progression. Eventually you narrow down specific activities and specific people, and spend your time doing them. Wink wink nudge nudge.

By the end of the first year, my farm is almost entirely covered in sprinklers and I am working on upgrading my barn/coops so they are automated as well. Spend most of my time fishing/mining. Waiting for the next spring so I can complete the Community Center.

Fun game, worth the $15.

Rime_sl said:

By the end of the first year, my farm is almost entirely covered in sprinklers and I am working on upgrading my barn/coops so they are automated as well. Spend most of my time fishing/mining. Waiting for the next spring so I can complete the Community Center.

Fun game, worth the $15.

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I definitely didn't figure out that you had to until like, two weeks into winter. Also, I never quite looked directly at my sickle, because I figured there would be special grass in the summer to cut. Cleared like 80% of the farm of grass before I actually looked at the damn thing. Oh well, grass starters for everyone. You get a starter, and -you- get a starter! Have 12 animals though and two silos after I realized my mistake, and it was mostly just keeping the animal numbers low enough until I started hitting fall and knew my veggie train was at a temporary end that I went ham on purchasing them. Stockpiled what I could and with my daily income of mayo and cheese dollars, in no threat of having undernourished stock. I will probably fill both "big" buildings before the end of winter, and hopefully I can get the next upgrade for the barn so I can knock out those community center requests.

Hadn't/haven't read any wikis/spoiler deals on this yet, so my mistakes aren't quite as retarded as they seem at face value, hah. The grass thing though... total min/maxer newb move.

Fishing so far is the low part for me, as I am 100% doing it just to do the requests at the center.

I've never played Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, so the almost total lack of guidance at the beginning of this is very off-putting. I end up playing a day or two and then I go do something else because it seems like I'm not accomplishing anything. Mostly because I have no idea wtf I'm supposed to be doing in the first place.

A few big blunder's learned from my first sit-down with the game.

1. My first game, I hit Summer rather quick. I had a massive field of crops in process that all turned brown. I kept watering them for a few days, but nothing came back to life and they were all dead. I lost like 8k gold on the deal. I was pissed, so I stared over and decided to plan for the season change this time. I counted the number of remaining days in the season and bought crops that matured in the time frame accordingly. It was all Cali-flowers leading up to the last 5 days of the month.

2. I ran the mines about 10 times, not accomplishing much, before realizing that the elevators are a progress save system every 5 levels.

3. Every girl in town seems to hate me. I still have no idea why. What ever, ya buncha bitches.

4. The festivals/events are clearly an opportunity to get rare stuff or make connections with people, but I have yet to figure out how to capitalize on them. I did find the most Easter eggs though, which gave me a cosmetic hat.

5. I learned to never exert yourself to the point of fatigue. Even after getting a nights sleep, only 50% of your energy bar will be refilled, limiting what progress can be made the next day.

6. The TV will teach you new recipe's from certain shows, certain days of the week. So, I started checking that daily.

Vorph_sl said:

I've never played Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, so the almost total lack of guidance at the beginning of this is very off-putting. I end up playing a day or two and then I go do something else because it seems like I'm not accomplishing anything. Mostly because I have no idea wtf I'm supposed to be doing in the first place.

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Yeah, that's actually a strange design decision to not have thing sorts of spelled out for you at the start. Even the RF/HM games either have manuals or something to go along with it, while this game uses the unique approach of not telling you that the "manual" for the game is actually unlocked as you use your hoe on what looks like little worms wriggling out of the ground in the non-farm areas. You'll get books which you can read in the Library/Artifact building that describe basic game stuff. But it doesn't even sort of mention that you should be using your hoe on those little worm spots in the first place hah. If an NPC mentions that you should do it, I didn't talk to them on the random day they were supposed to say it, which lead to my spoilered deal above being such a late game discovery compared to when I would have found out normally. It's like the 4th or 5th book you come across that describes it.

Something like that would have been in a manual, or a required cutscene conversation would have said "use that hoe, ho!" or something in the spiritual predecessor games.

Fight: I did the exact same thing my first spring with tons of crops and watering them in summer. Largely because I didn't notice that months have 28 days in them vs. HM's original 30. I had my crops timed to all ripen on the 29th. Color me surprised when that didn't happen. I didn't restart, but I definitely had a lot of wasted money in those, and a lot of plans ended up taking longer to get moving without that bump right before summer. Especially with all the long term ripening stuff.

Bought Fallout 4, found out my 3.5 year old computer can't really run it. Sad panda. Bought Stardew Valley, reminds me of an improved version of SNES Harvest Moon. Happy panda.

Alright homos, who did you marry?

Abigail is such a caricature of a misunderstood gamer girl that I couldn't help but patriarchy the shit out of her. Instrumentals in the rain, bitches.

Rezz_sl said:

Abigail is such a caricature of a misunderstood gamer girl that I couldn't help but patriarchy the shit out of her. Instrumentals in the rain, bitches.

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Yeah, I got up to eight hearts with both her and Leah before I opted for Leah. I had the instrumental scene with her in the winter and the "tree" was a stump. It was pretty funny.

Probably gonna buy this tonight to play on laptop while at parents' house. A lot of these indies basically require a controller, but I suspect keyboard is perfectly adequate or even ideal for this game. Correct?

DoctorSpooge_sl said:

Probably gonna buy this tonight to play on laptop while at parents' house. A lot of these indies basically require a controller, but I suspect keyboard is perfectly adequate or even ideal for this game. Correct?

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Controller support is pretty half-assed. I can see how the Steam controller might work but playing it with a DS4 was maddeningly frustrating and I went back to kb/m right away. If they intend to port this to consoles/handhelds at some point they have a lot of work to do on UI/input.