I remember hearing about Stardew Valley when it was approaching release. I thought it looked cute. I have this long hidden secret that I love organizational and management heavy games. It doesn’t come out very frequently. XCOM, Surviving Mars, City Skylines, each had their run with me. They burn hot, too. A couple weeks of intense involvement followed by a pretty substantial distancing. I get what I need from them and then move on. Deep down I knew that Stardew Valley was something that I could easily sink dozens of hours into, I would just need to find the right moment.

Well...it seems I have found the perfect moment.

The world has largely been in lockdown for a little more than a month now. I immediately saw the opportunity to crush out some of my backlog. Writing and podcasting about games has meant that, to stay relevant, I have a relatively short amount of time I can allow myself to get drawn in by something. Occasionally I am blessed with the opportunity to put all of my focus into one game, but more often than not, games release in windows with other games. One becomes three, even five. I put 120 hours into Mass Effect Andromeda on paternity leave. I put 110 hours into Assassin’s Creed Origins during a stint of unemployment. Sometimes the stars align. Often they do not.

I understand that describing the outbreak of COVID-19, and the free time the ensuing lockdown has afforded me, as fortuitous comes across as...unseemly. There are millions of people around the world impacted by this trying time. The reality that has settled in for a lot of people quarantined in their homes is, “Well I have to do something.” Hobbies are being discovered, honed, the time suddenly available being put to whatever use it can be.

My friends and I play games a lot. It comes with the territory for me. PvP multiplayer has a strong voice in our decisions. Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Rocket League, and Ninja Theory’s new Bleeding Edge have been vying for our time for the last month and a half.

A few weeks ago a group of four of us were playing Bleeding Edge, a terrific hero-based shooter that can send your blood into a rolling boil in moments. Things reached a head, rage quits ensued, a heated argument followed, and in the wake of a good night suddenly turned sour I had a conversation with myself. A lot of the games that my friends and I interact with relegate player input to violent response. We shoot a lot of things, competitively, for extended periods of time. It was suddenly apparent that the mounting stresses from daily news, entertaining a three year old every day, and maintaining home quarantine were impacting my mood when I sat down to play with my friends. A good friend and I had discussed working in less stressful games for months. We finally took a good look at Stardew Valley and decided to jump in.

Unsurprisingly, I found a lot of peace, structure, and fellowship.

In Jason Shreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, there is a chapter dedicated to the development of Stardew Valley. I was driving to Houston in October of 2018, headed to an event for teachers while working for Pixel Press. It was my leg of the drive, and my copilot was napping-off lunch. I burned through a lot of that book during that trip. Maybe even all of it. But I thought about the Stardew Valley chapter for the next week. When we got to our hotel, I went straight to my Xbox app and bought Stardew Valley. I knew that Eric Barone didn’t technically need my support, yet I still felt this urge deep down to be a part of his journey.

The game sat, installed on my xbox, for the better part of two years. I played through a few days of the campaign but got distracted by some other title.

After the Bleeding Edge incident I looked through my library of installed games. To say that I have a sturdy backlog is an understatement. Gamesharing, writing about games, and having gaming as my primary hobby has led to having more than 300 games in my library. I’ve played about 150 of those games, beaten about 80. Oddly, I only searched for thirty seconds. Stardew Valley quickly found my attention.

One of my best friends, Ryan (@sergeantsodium), and I had been talking about giving the game a shot for the last few months. But, as it often goes with games, those titles most frequented by friends drew our attention away. With mounting stresses from lockdown, Stardew immediately sounded like the perfect choice. Non-violent, serene, structured. Within days, Ryan and I - and our friend Odin - decided to start NerdyBits Ranch together.

A week in, we have our own Discord chat group, I have had four to six tabs of the Stardew wiki open on my computer, we talk about plans and strategies throughout the day, and I spent thirty five dollars on a beautiful fan-made guidebook.

We started with only the slightest impression of what we were going to get, let alone what we were going to do. We cautiously entered Pelican Town in our first moments, met our first few villagers, spent too much money on food at the Stardrop Saloon, and wandered home.

A week in, we have endured five seasons. Thrived, in fact. We specialized, individually. Odin took focus in mining and dungeon crawling, now transitioning to slime ranching. Ryan pushed our first crops across the counter and has built up a highly sustainable crop offering, allowing him to start dabbling in dungeon crawling as well. I took up animal husbandry and artisanal food production, with a minor in skilled fishing. Each day we all have something to do that keeps us from over-stepping on our farmmates. The whole process is intoxicating.

With any semblance of regularity thrown out the window by the outbreak of COVID-19, we are finding it in this small, lovingly crafted oasis. The daily tasks a substitute for routine, the upkeep a prescription for idleness, the close cooperation a salve for loneliness. It has been ages since I can remember longing to get back to a game as much as this. Each day my thoughts wander to grazing field optimization, production constancy, or undiscovered fishing holes. It’s absurd, and silly, and strange, and perfect.

In the Spring of our second year in the game the three of us all got married, in game. The 8th, the 13th, and the 18th. As I met Penny at the bathhouse in our last Twitch stream, I smiled throughout the entire interaction. “There is just so much fucking charm in this game,” I said aloud to the party. “There really is,” they responded. You can tell when people talk while they are smiling.

Animal Crossing came out a few weeks ago, and I remember thinking - with the rest of the world - that it would be a perfect game for the current situation. As time has passed I feel that sentiment may have come and gone. What started as a serene getaway has evolved into a ravenous trading market predicated on finding players with better selling prices for goods gathered.

Animal Crossing, in my research, from testimonials by friends and based on the reaction of the internet, is not a game to be grinded. Nevertheless it has become that. And with people’s finances in such disarray I can only imagine the low, or high-level stress that comes with taking out and paying off Tom Nook’s loans. As someone with no more experience than my own research I can’t belabor this point to long. But suffice it to say, the idea of having to trawl through Twitter in search of players with higher prices for goods, attempting to understand and take advantage of a Stalk Market, seems to provide little relaxation or reprieve.

Stardew Valley has none of this. We look up the prices of our crops, find the best choices for both growth and processing, decide how to divide our harvests, and plant. There is no where to go to get better prices. Our specializations simply make it more profitable for a particular player to sell the goods. The rules are simple, but the possibilities are intricate. Low floor, high ceiling. In this retreat, you are free. The responsibility you take on is your own. As we chew, we decide when we can bite off more.

Truly, my discovery of Stardew Valley, and what it offers, is far more serendipitous than I want to admit. I wish there was a way to spin the urge to tap on Start Game into some tale of fate. What a story that would be. The reality is, I got lucky. I had a few friends who had it, and had already expressed a desire to play it. I also don’t have a Switch so I couldn’t get drawn into Animal Crossing. I spent fifteen dollars, two years ago, and let this little bottle of Starfruit Wine age.

Now, we have the ability to produce a quarter million in crop and processed food revenue in a season. And that number is growing. I started as the animal expert on our farm and I have taken that role and evolved it into an artisanal powerhouse. I make craft beer, high grade artisanal cheeses and oils, I roast coffee, and I make textiles.

I have weaved this narrative for myself that I run the Artisanal branch of NerdyBits Ranch. It’s starting to become our primary money maker. As someone who, like so many people, is stuck at home and unable to work, I have found a way to provide for my friends, albeit in a virtual medium.

I don’t have to worry about finding the right time or place to sell my goods. We have the ability to distribute to anyone who wants our pale ales, goat cheeses, truffle oils, meads, melon jellies, coffee, and high quality cloth.

A part of me wishes there was some kind of overgame to Stardew Valley. I wish, in some way, I could invite people to try my goods. I wish I could make deals with restaurants and grocers for my goods. At the same time, the more I think of that, the less I want to muddy the peace with deep logistical complexity. So I let my imagination suffice. There are a few restaurants that I supply, they are high quality establishments that are run by the kind of people I would want to sit and drink coffee with. The kinds of places you would see Anthony Bourdain visit. The kinds of places that you would see on an episode of Chef’s Table.

Watching an episode of Parts Unknown as I write this, I would think that those chefs would bring Bourdain to the source of their goods. In the universe that Stardew Valley lets me create in my own head, there is so much more going on beneath the surface, which may just be the best way to describe Stardew Valley as a game.

To many, it may just be a game about farming. To me, and perhaps to my farmmates, it’s a prescription for chaos. Treating the unknowable with a calm reprieve. A place where hard, smart work always pays off, and where friends can fellowship without stress. For fifteen dollars you can do a lot worse.

@LubWub
~Caleb

Stardew Valley - The Perfect Oasis