Stardew Valley is what you make it. If you just want to fish, you can. If you just want to farm, you can. If you just want to meet people and become best friends with everyone you can. You can also do any combination of these. I don’t particularly like anything in Stardew Valley. I don’t have a preference for what I do, I just want to win. I know what you’re thinking, it’s not a game you can win. It is, though. The only difference between Stardew and a game you can traditionally win is the metric for winning you set for yourself. For example, the metric I set for myself is I want the community center in as little time as possible, and I want to be friends with everyone in the game.
Stardew also is characterized by a lack of rules, excluding the ones you set for yourself. When I first began playing, I decided I wasn’t going to look at the Wiki at all. I quickly abandoned this, and now the very idea of not looking at the Wiki is laughable. There isn’t really any action I preform without looking at the Wiki. When it’s someone’s birthday I look at the Wiki to see their schedule, so I don’t have to look for them all over town to give them their gift. The gift that I know they will love because I also looked that up on the Wiki. When a new posting pops up on the “Help Wanted” board I look up how to get the item on the Wiki. The day before every festival I make sure I know exactly what to do, by looking at the Wiki, so I can reap the most rewards.
The Homepage of the Stardew Valley Wiki
Now, I’m about to describe perhaps the most humiliating thing I do in relation to Stardew Valley. I looked up a Community Center Checklist, and found one on Reddit and-after sending good energy and many thanks to DSoS: John Harris, the creator of the PDF- I uploaded it to the app GoodNotes on my iPad and I began my pursuit of winning. The checklist changed my life. It tells you what seasons you can get certain items and the times of day, if applicable, that the items can be obtained. I also write notes on it. Like I said it is a bit humiliating, but so worth it. Some also may consider it cheating. I would not argue; by the rules they set, it may be cheating. To me, it is not. It is really the only thing that makes the game enjoyable. Before, I moseyed about the town with no real goal, just trying to romance Shane before I knew he would never get the help he needed. You can imagine how difficult that is without knowing his favorite items. I quickly decided to shift my focus, change my rules, and do what some may call cheating. In fact, one could say I’m a lifelong cheater.
My community center checklist, complete with some notes.
Back before my household had a home computer that my mom let us, the kids, use, there was me, a PS2, The Sims 2, and a cheat code book. My brothers and I begged my mom to buy it for us at GameStop. The only game I played was The Sims 2 and I knew it would change my experience. Just by pressing a few buttons on the controller you could have more money, more furniture, max out your skills, literally anything. The Sims is also one of those games that you set the rules and winning parameters for yourself. There is no real end; well, actually, I’m not sure. I never really wanted to finish the game- I wanted to decorate my house and make myself look as close to me as possible. While I don’t remember exactly what I did on The Sims 2, I do remember later playing The Sims 4 in middle school. I would spend hours creating myself and my family, play for a couple days, and then I would stop playing and start a new family. It was a given I would use, and arguably need, cheats; I wasn’t interested in earning money, I just wanted to design things. To this day I have Sims Freeplay downloaded on my phone, and I exploit glitches to have virtually infinite money. Otherwise, I’d be expected to either pay real money for fake money or waste my time doing something I don’t actually enjoy.
My brother and I are pretty sure this is the cheat code book we had. At the very least this is definitely a cheat code book.
I will say that cheating at the cost of someone else’s detriment, like cheating in a game of Monopoly, is not what I do. I do not condone cheating at the cost of someone else’s loss. I cheat to serve my own enjoyment with no cost to anyone else, except the eight dollars my mom spent on a cheat code book (But for 18,000 cheat codes? That’s less than one cent per code). In fact, more people should cheat. While playing Stardew Valley co-op I was struck by how my co-players were all interested in different things to me. I wanted to get as much money as possible, with fishing, so we could begin to save money for all the community center items. My other co-players either also fished, went foraging and talking to villagers, or chopped down trees. As we were playing, I realized everyone is not me. They enjoyed the game differently than me. I enjoy the game only if I cheat. People should cheat if it means they enjoy a game- that is the whole point: enjoyment. The co-op session also helped me realize that I didn’t need to cheat, I just remembered some things about the Wiki from my frequent visits. I obviously didn’t have time to pull up the Wiki, but I was able to remember that Pam loved parsnips, and I shared that information with my group. In this way, the Wiki is its own sort of metagame, a game around a game, a tool to aid in your own gameplay that is fun to interact with on its own.
To conclude, I will never stop cheating. The whole point of a game is to enjoy it, so whether a person finds it in taking the game slowly or stressing themselves out by trying to get the community center as fast as possible with cheats; enjoyment is enjoyment.
