TheLastBaron

Stardew Valley

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I was gifted this over Christmas and finally got around to playing it over the weekend. I wound up playing for about 9 hours yesterday, it's incredibly difficult to stop. There's always a reason to just play the next day, a crop will be ready, I'll have the money for a barn, oh there's a festival on! I've just started my first winter and wow it looks harsh out there, glad I invested in animals and filled my silo! My farm is still tiny compared to the space that I have so I can see myself losing a lot of time to it.

 

It's not perfect and there's a pile of tiny quirks that get to me(planting seeds, watering, hoe-ing can all be very bizarre with the square you do the action on) and the game generally does a bad job of explaining anything to you. Had myself and my flatmate not played the Harvest Moon games over the years I'd be very lost at times.

 

I'm glad that I seem to be able to get by just fine without interacting with the village much, that was never something that interested me in the Harvest Moon games and this is the same. I just want to build a nice farm! I'm really happy that the game is easy going with how you play and the pace at which you play.

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5 hours ago, thepaulhoey said:

I'm glad that I seem to be able to get by just fine without interacting with the village much, that was never something that interested me in the Harvest Moon games

 

Y'see, I would be really into this aspect of the game, but there's quite a lot of people and I don't find them visually distinctive enough to be able to remember who is who, and where they live etc. There are some obvious exceptions, of course.

 

I have started to notice a couple of patterns with certain folk regarding where they're likely to be or what they're going to talk about. I think I'm only about 8 hours into the game myself (just started Summer) so more will be revealed over time, but yeah, not completely in love with that aspect right now.

 

Also, I can't wait to get a mega watering can, 'cos watering the crops is tedious, even with my fairly modest starter garden. I find myself looking forward to rain days, so I just forget about watering stuff and go do some fishing. Man, I love fishing!

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43 minutes ago, Trip Hazard said:

Y'see, I would be really into this aspect of the game, but there's quite a lot of people and I don't find them visually distinctive enough to be able to remember who is who, and where they live etc. There are some obvious exceptions, of course.

 

Yeah I'm kinda in the same boat, I'm open to that stuff but nobody stands out and it's not clear what I can gain from interacting with them. Same goes for the various festivals, some of them there's something to win or a main thing to do whereas with others other than getting to see the town done up special for them there's nothing to them. I just walk about and talk to everyone to see if there's something to trigger and if there isn't I head home.

 

43 minutes ago, Trip Hazard said:

Also, I can't wait to get a mega watering can, 'cos watering the crops is tedious, even with my fairly modest starter garden. I find myself looking forward to rain days, so I just forget about watering stuff and go do some fishing. Man, I love fishing!

 

That was my first upgrade and I am the same with rainy days. I got the recipe for sprinklers but I don't have the materials for them, so I focused on raising animals as it's a lot less hassle. Over the winter I plan to make some proper fields with sprinklers so I can easily plant a pile of peas or strawberries next Spring and wheat for Summer & Autumn.

 

Also I agree with some of the earlier comments about the Walmart style store in the town, it feels totally tacked on and really heavy handed. Same goes for the intro with the guy working a job he hated in a dull office. Bleugh.

 

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During my week off, i finally got a rabbit's foot and completed the community center. I did it in my second winter, and it felt like it maybe went a season too long, and that's including the fact I took a six month break in the middle of my first fall.

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The Stardew Valley multiplayer update has gone into beta!  At least on PC it has.  There's a password in that post that you have to enter in the steam beta options in order to get into it.  This patch also has a whole bunch of new general content updates to it as well, though those aren't officially documented yet, a reddit thread has found as much as possible

 

I was going to wait until the beta was over to jump back in, but I ended up starting a new game last night and I love this game so much is silly.  It's so nice to go back to it.  I'm focusing on fishing to start with, and it seems like a much more chill and quicker way to build up enough cash to upgrade some things instead of futzing too much with all the basic tools. 

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The lady and I started playing in co-op last night, and its more or less everything you'd expect! 

 

One person hosts the farm, and you can build cabins for up to 3 other people to join.  The cabins can be upgraded just like the farm house, so eventually everyone can have a huge crib to chill in (or players can marry one another if they want).  It looks like everyone gets all the side quests.  Each person gets mail, each person gets their own rewards for stuff. 

 

Time no longer pauses though, which makes days go by noticeably faster!  The host can manually pause everyone, but you can't do anything while paused.  In single player, the game pauses all the time (any menu, opening a chest, while in the fishing minigame, talking to people).  But time just passes normally in all those now.  In a way I kind of like it, as it speeds the overall game up even though it means you might get less done in a day. 

 

To adjust the challenge, you can modify the profit margin when creating a game (I haven't looked to see if you can change it on the fly in a game, probably not, as that would break somethings the way its implemented).  You can have normal profit, 75 percent, 50 or 25.  We set it at 75 percent, as with both of us being reasonably efficient, we'd probably be swimming in cash by the first summer if we didn't knock it down at least some.

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I got this game so long ago but wanted to wait for the online to come out. Been playing it with my girlfriend and its alot of fun. A much better experience playing with someone.

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32667390_10105742386538309_4830516693807

 

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Posted these in Slack yesterday.  Stardew MP finally got me to do some research and buy a split screen device (allows 4 inputs to go onto a screen simultaneously) for our projector.  This has been on my list of stuff to do forever so that we could do couch co-op with online games in the living room.  Screen is normally 150", so we each have our own about 75" screen in co-op. 

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On 5/18/2018 at 2:29 PM, Bjorn said:

 

Stardew MP finally got me to do some research and buy a split screen device (allows 4 inputs to go onto a screen simultaneously) for our projector.  This has been on my list of stuff to do forever so that we could do couch co-op with online games in the living room.  Screen is normally 150", so we each have our own about 75" screen in co-op. 

 

This is really cool! I am looking forward to trying out the co-op mode :D

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Thanks!

 

On 5/15/2018 at 1:14 PM, Bjorn said:

Time no longer pauses though, which makes days go by noticeably faster!  The host can manually pause everyone, but you can't do anything while paused.  In single player, the game pauses all the time (any menu, opening a chest, while in the fishing minigame, talking to people).  But time just passes normally in all those now.  In a way I kind of like it, as it speeds the overall game up even though it means you might get less done in a day.

 

So the longer we played, the more and more time passing non-stop at all times bugged me.  It can be a pretty big annoyance at times, particularly with merchants, cutscenes and end/start of day inventory management.  It's particularly bad with cutscenes, since some of them take more than an hour of in-game time, which can end up causing you to miss being able to give someone a birthday gift, miss being able to visit a merchant or just having your plan for what you could do for a day badly thrown out of whack. 

 

There's also just no easy way to pause the game when playing on the couch with a controller.  The only way to pause is for the host to type /pause into text chat. 

 

So I tried modding Stardew for the first time, specifically a time manipulation mod called TimeSpeed.  And it's so fucking good.  I mapped the time freeze ability to the controller, so I can pause at will now, I can freeze time to let cutsenes play out without messing anything up in a day and freeze time while buying to make sure a merchant doesn't wander away.  It's completely eliminated my only real complaint about MP so far.   The mod itself can do some interesting things, like making time pass differently depending on whether your indoors or outdoors, so you can configure it to automatically freeze time when you're just wanting to go into someone's house and talk, buy or deliver something.  It looks like all the farmhand's game clocks just pull from the host clock, so whatever the host does with time just automatically applies to everyone in MP. 

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So it turns out I know a guy who is the real life version of the Stardew Valley farmer.  He farms in the summer, has a greenhouse and restored the local community center in his time off over the course of several winters.  Neat story and pictures in the article in the link. 

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1 hour ago, Bjorn said:

So it turns out I know a guy who is the real life version of the Stardew Valley farmer.  He farms in the summer, has a greenhouse and restored the local community center in his time off over the course of several winters.  Neat story and pictures in the article in the link. 

 

Link doesn't work :(

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On 6/19/2018 at 6:59 PM, Bjorn said:

 

Hmmmm, weird, I know there was at least one other person I shared this with who couldn't follow it either, and they were outside the US. 

 

Here's the full link:

 

http://www.hutchnews.com/632c30f2-bb45-545a-ac83-c539b9ad7ee2.html

 

Maybe it will work that way?

 

Still doesn't, I'm in the UK so maybe thats why.

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