How Repayable is Stardew Valley?
With a one-man development team and 20 million copies sold, "Stardew Valley" is an amazing game on multiple levels. Ever since its release in 2016, players have loved the pixel art characters and the sheer amount of content and detail present in every aspect of the gameplay.
There’s so much for players to do, in fact, that one playthrough isn’t really enough to experience it all. With different farm maps, 12 marriage candidates, and multiple content updates to explore, no two playthroughs are ever the same.
If you’re thinking about starting a new save file, we have 10 ideas you can use that showcase just how replayable "Stardew Valley" is.
10 Ways To Shake Up Your Next "Stardew Valley" Playthrough
From your life partner to your main product, there are a lot of things you can change to make a new save file feel fresh and new.
1. Choose a New Farm Layout
In "Stardew Valley," there are five original farm types to choose from, plus two additional layouts from later updates. Each farm has its own structure, with varying numbers of tillable tiles and special perks unique to its type. Here are the seven options:
The Standard Farm
3427 tillable tiles
235 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perk: farming
The Riverland Farm
1578 tillable tiles
516 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perk: fishing
The Forest Farm
1413 tillable tiles
1490 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perk: foraging
The Hill-Top Farm
1648 tillable tiles
930 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perk: mining
The Wilderness Farm
2131 tillable tiles
444 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perk: combat
The Four Corners Farm
2952 tillable and buildable tiles
Special perks: fishing, farming, mining, foraging, multiplayer
The Beach Farm
2700 tillable tiles (only 202 can use sprinklers)
1923 non-tillable but buildable tiles
Special perks: foraging, fishing
The farm you choose has a significant impact on the gameplay, as it determines the number of crops you can plant and buildings you can construct. The standard farm provides by far the largest amount of tillable land but all the other types allow you to obtain different types of items more easily.
The Beach Farm comes with a limitation as well as perks — only a small amount of your land is compatible with sprinklers. This means you need to find another way to water your crops efficiently. It’s one of the new maps and is aimed at veteran players of the game.
Other than the Beach Farm, the Riverland Farm is also a bit tough for beginners because it has the fewest tillable and buildable tiles. There’s so much water on the map that your farm feels like it’s half the size of the others, so you need to be very passionate about fishing for this map to be worth it for you.
However, it doesn’t really matter what order you choose them in. To make sure your new save file is fresh and challenging, just make sure you choose a map that you have no experience with.
2. Marry a Different Villager
Each of the 12 marriage candidates living in Pelican Town has their own life and story to unravel as you progress your relationship towards marriage. From unpleasant exes to battles with addiction, there are a lot of wild tales to uncover, and only one way to do it — date everyone.
Admittedly, it is possible to do this on one single save file but that’s not how most first-time players tend to do things. You can date as many people as you want at once but you can only marry them one by one, divorcing the current spouse to move to the next. Alternatively, you can live a calm life with just one marriage partner per save, it’s up to you.
As well as stories, each marriable character also has their own schedule once you’re married, with new dialogue to unlock. They’ll also build their own personal space in your house to keep their belongings and conduct their hobbies.
Giving gifts is how you progress your relationship with NPCs, so who you choose affects what products or items you focus on obtaining in large numbers early in the game. If your crush likes wine, you need to start crafting kegs as soon as possible and if they like gemstones, you need to become a skilled miner.
3. Focus on Achievements
Many of the achievements in "Stardew Valley" are much easier to get if you plan well from the start. To cook all of the available recipes, you need to make sure you don’t miss an episode of The Queen of Sauce, for example. Shipping 15 of every item is another achievement that you can complete a lot more smoothly if you work on it from day one.
Setting your sights on achievements from the get-go will influence how you shape your farm and how you spend your days significantly. With a sense of purpose, you’ll find your desire for efficiency will rise and your concentration level will skyrocket as you figure out the best way to get things done.
4. Complete the New Content
In December 2020, ConcernedApe released a massive free content update for "Stardew Valley:" patch 1.5. It includes new people, new places, new farming land, amazing new items and produce, and even a perfection tracker. If you haven’t picked up Stardew since this update was released, you basically have a whole new game to play.
You can access all of this new content on an existing save file if you want but it’s also a great opportunity to start afresh. It’s best to avoid spoilers about the details but you can rest assured that a 1.5 Stardew save file will be unlike any that came before it.
5. Change Your Main Produce
As your farm develops, most players gravitate towards mass-producing the most profitable produce they can find. However, there isn’t just one crop that stands above all others — depending on your goals and budget, the standard Starfruit might not be the best crop for you.
Other popular contenders include Ancient Fruit, Strawberries, Blueberries, Coffee Beans, and Cactus Fruit. These can all earn 20+ gold per day under the right circumstances and players will often focus their entire farms on one or more of these crops.
You have to design your farm and your practices around the crop you choose since they each have different needs and methods of acquisition. Other decisions to make include whether to sell them as is, as a preserve, or as a wine.
6. Set a Yourself a Time Limit
For many players, the fun of "Stardew Valley" is in the optimization of your playthroughs and farming. Just how quickly can you reach the 1,000,000G milestone? Can you complete the Community Center within one year? With all the tools and features available at endgame, exactly how many gold per day can you squeeze out of your farm?
These are the questions players love to find the answers to and you can start yourself on this path by just setting a simple time limit on your next playthrough. Completing the community center within a year is a great place to start — you’ll have to keep an eye on which crops to grow, stay on top of your foraging, buy animals in good time, catch the right fish, and plant fruit trees as soon as possible.
If you take on this challenge, it will completely dominate the way you play for the first year. Everything you do will be influenced by the bundles you need to complete and you’ll probably have no time left for befriending the villagers. It’s definitely a new way to play.
7. Get a Joja Membership
The Community Center and the challenge it presents is well-loved — but not by everyone. Important gameplay features are locked behind the Community Center bundles and for those that don’t enjoy having their gameplay dictated, this can be really annoying. The good news is, if you’re truly not a fan of the Community Center, you don’t have to complete it.
All you have to do to get rid of that pesky center is sell your soul and go over to the dark side. Yes, the evil corporation Joja — your former employer — offers you the chance to solve all of your crop-collecting problems by simply paying to unlock the features instead.
Choosing this path means that the Community Center will get demolished and replaced by a Joja warehouse, which is quite upsetting but it’s something most players do in at least one save file. With the Joja warehouse, you’ll be free to farm and live however you want in the first year and still unlock new features — as long as you’re making money.
8. Automate Your Farm
Farm automation is a large part of increasing your profit-making ability but it’s no small task. Collecting the materials for 100 sprinklers, 750 kegs, 10 Junimo huts, and whatever else you need will definitely take a lot of time. However, it’s a very rewarding process and there are thousands of articles and content creators online that can provide you with handy tips and tricks.
For example, when you find yourself with upwards of 10 keg-filled sheds on your farm, it can be a real pain to enter each one and check if the kegs are done. The smart way to handle this is to craft one extra keg and place it outside the shed door — if you feed it a crop at the same time as the ones inside, you can see when they’re done without going anywhere near them.
Small improvements like this make a huge difference to the way your farm runs and it’s super exciting when such a project comes together. Plus, with patch 1.5, there are even more ways to automate and improve.
9. Start a Co-Op Farm
If you felt like something was missing during your first playthrough of "Stardew Valley", co-op mode may be exactly what you need. You can both invite new farmers to an existing farm or start a new one together. You can farm with up to three additional players and each of you will have your own little cabin on the farm.
How you decide to work together is entirely up to you. Using voice chat to communicate and coordinate your efforts is one option and leaving each other to farm freely is another. Some people will assign each player a focus: one person farms, one mines, one fishes, and so on.
Regardless of how you do it, working together on your farm is a fun and rewarding experience that will feel quite different from your solo save file.
10. Go For 100% Completion
For those who are in it to win it, "Stardew Valley" has a perfection tracker to determine when a player has reached 100% completion. This was added in patch 1.5, so it includes all of the new content and even includes a reward for those who achieve it.
According to the game, a 100% completed save file needs to ship all produce and forage, max out friendship with all villagers, cook and craft all recipes, catch all fish, and find all the Stardrops. You’ll also need to buy the Golden Clock and the four Obelisks from the Wizard, collect all of the Golden Walnuts, meet all of the monster-slaying goals, and max out your farmer levels.
It’s quite a list but really not that difficult. If you start a new save file with the goal of 100% completion, you’ll be able to start contributing to this list very early on and continue to contribute steadily and frequently. Similar to the time limit, it will give your gameplay a sense of purpose that will really spice things up.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, "Stardew Valley" is incredibly replayable. How much you play depends on how much you enjoy the game but in terms of new and fresh gameplay, there’s enough for at least seven unique save files of around 150 hours each. Plus, for PC users, there are also hundreds of mods for the game that we didn’t even touch on.