The sandbox nature of Stardew Valley presents players the opportunity to choose what skills they want to hone. Some players devote countless hours to fishing, others set about exploring the mines, or learning the favorite items of the characters in Pelican Town. For me, I want to learn how to walk.
Many games have mechanics such as jumping, dodging, and shooting that players aim to become skillful at, but oftentimes, the concept of skill does not get applied to the mechanic of walking. In my experience, walking in Stardew Valley does not feel like simply an action that the player can do mindlessly. The act of walking transforms into a game itself—a game of reflex, memory, and strategy.
The most noticeable variation of this ‘walking game’ is one that is underpinned by the time system within Stardew Valley. Whenever I am choosing which task to do next, in other words, where to walk next, I am constantly estimating how long it will take for me to arrive at a certain location. Will I reach the store before it closes? How long does it take me to get home from the mines? What time will it be when I reach the blacksmith? Do I have to restart the day, or can I make it to Luau by 2 p.m.?
There is something profoundly delightful about learning how to walk perfectly within the rhythm of the world. It becomes a game of discovering the quickest ways to walk between one section and another. It becomes a game of clearing a precise, efficient path from my farm house to my stable. It becomes a sensation of swirling the joy con on my Switch just the right way, shifting the sprite on screen pixels to the left of a fence and barreling down towards my next destination.
By focusing on walking, I am reaching towards the sensation of acceleration that is denied by, in my opinion, Stardew Valley’s low base run speed. Since I spend so much of the game walking, the act of transitioning between tasks resists just being downtime. The liminal spaces between sections of the world became play spaces of their own, where the challenge is memorizing the layout of the obstacles and then executing deft swerves around them.
The rest of my gameplay has almost become completely folded into this desire to walk swiftly and beautifully. The moments of fishing, buying, talking, all of it becomes a part of a cooldown phase before the following round of guessing what time it will be when I reach my next destination and trying to walk there as perfectly as possible.
Walking becomes even more intricate and intriguing when it is integral to the other tasks I am performing, such as farming or navigating the mines. Particularly in farming, walking is no longer just a matter of memorization, but a matter of strategy. I am constantly reshaping and retracing the steps I take over my crops to deliver the most satisfying walking experience. Additionally, I frequently find myself strategically re-designing my farm to optimize my walking route. Should I water the plants vertically? Horizontally? How can I weave between the beanpoles? How fast does my watering can run out?
This last one is an endless nightmare for me. The little icon indicating that the water has run out feels synonymous with Game Over. The seamless movement from one action to the next has been broken, the flow halted. Since the watering can is upgraded incrementally as you continue to play, the instinctual sense of knowing when you need to pivot to the pond and fill up the can is constantly being negotiated. And while I know that I can see the amount of water I have left in the corner of the screen, my brain has decided that peeking at it is cheating.
The current strategy I am using is vertical rows of 6. I begin to water from the top left most corner, continuing to the right horizontally. Then doubling back to refill my can, and continuing from the bottom right most corner, continuing to the left horizontally. This continues until I finish watering everything, landing in the middle of the crops, leaving me perfectly lined up to run towards the chest in front of my house immediately afterwards.
One unintended consequence of my walking games is that I have no friends. I actually do not have more than two hearts with anyone. The problem is that I never deviate from my walking paths to talk to people, and I have not studied their schedules enough to understand how to make them destinations. The only individual that I have managed to give gifts to is Sebastian, because he appears along my path back from the mines.
This metagame has begun to profoundly shape my enjoyment of Stardew Valley. This seemingly silly goal of “learning how to walk” has allowed me to transform the experience of navigating into a delicate performance. I have taken the tempo of the accelerated time in the game and used it to craft a new mode of swiftness and purpose into my walking. While I am sure I could watch a speedrunner to learn the objectively fastest way to walk, my goal is not simply moving quickly—it is to move in time. It is to uncover the rhythm of play and the movements that makes the overwhelming hustle and bustle of the game feel perfectly on beat.
