Happy 10th birthday Stardew Valley

A pink cake is in order for the celebrations!

Published in February 26th 2016, Stardew Valley has reached a very mature age of 10 years and it’s incredible how much excitement and enjoyment it still brings me. Not quite daily because I need to ratio how much I dare to play. The game is one of the “oops, it’s 4am” games so I mainly these days limit it to longer holidays.

With recorded 1,165.9 hours in Steam (excluding time playing when offline), it’s my most played non-sports, non-TCG video game. I bought the game for my 29th birthday a year after its release.

Stardew Valley is in many sense a wonderful game. Developed by a single developer ConcernedApe, the game has received regular large updates and the 7th update is coming some time in the future. Imagine buying a game for like 5 euros and then receiving a decade worth of well crafted updates that keep improving the game — for free.

It’s not only the developer who keeps improving the game. There’s a very active modding community with a ton of great mods of all sorts: quality of life improvements, visual changes, new characters and stories. Whenever I feel like I’m getting bored with the game, switching to a new story mod or getting an official update brings me back for dozens of hours. Over and over again.

As a teenager, I fell in love with Harvest Moon games. I loved the cozy vibes, farming and relationship building. Stardew Valley is what you could call heavily inspired by Harvest Moon games. It brought that experience to PCs and improved on a ton of different things and captured the hearts of millions of players around the globe.

If you haven’t played Stardew Valley yet, I highly recommend giving it a go. But maybe do it during a weekend — just in case.

Thanks Eric for this wonderful game!