Stardew Valley 1.6

It has crossed everyone's mind at some point. Waking up one day and realising that this daily grind we're in is eating away at our health like a horde of termites devouring an old oak rocking chair. And maybe it has even crossed your mind to send it all to hell, to burn that tie you leave the house with every morning, to go to an office you don't want, to have money you spend on things you don't need, and to greet people you don't care about. It's happened to all of us.

Fortunately, ConcernedApe gave us a good escape route to free our souls and find inner peace some eight years ago. I refer naturally to Stardew Valley, that life simulator that revolutionised the concept of the indie game, that became a social phenomenon, and that changed the life of its creator forever, going from living almost day by day to forging a millionaire empire that many others would have completely lost their minds over.

But Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone didn't, and totally contrary to all the voices around him whispering of expansions and additional paid content for his farm game, was adamant that he would never make anyone pay more than what they do for the base game. During these eight years, Stardew Valley has continued to grow slowly but inexorably, inside our screens and filling our hearts. Sometimes it just added a few lines of extra text for a couple of characters and some new decorations for the cabin. Other times, a whole new area with a unique story and dozens of hours of additional gameplay. For free, I repeat. ConcernedApe has once again expanded the Stardew Valley experience with 1.6, now on all platforms, so it's time to put on our farming overalls and travel to the valley to restore Grandpa's old farm once more.

And we dove headfirst into the new content from the ground up, as that's how the developer recommended we discover all that this 1.6 has to offer. In this case, we opted to check out the new Meadowlands Farm type, which combines several smaller farming areas with forests and pastures along with some waterfalls, which are one of the new elements added to the game this time around. A new type of blue grass grows in these fields, which boosts the growth and happiness of our farm animals, so this Meadowlands is recommended if you want to focus more on ranching than farming. However, I don't recommend starting with this farm if this is going to be your first time in Stardew Valley. It's a model with a lot of potential for decoration and advanced design of the farm spaces, but it can be oppressive to start raising chickens and farming at the same time.

While this new farm model may not be ideal if it's your first day in Pelican Town, you'll certainly get to grips with Stardew valley's controls and interface much quicker than my first time around, as another improvement here is the new guides and feedback on movement control, menus and tool usage. In addition, the game now adds a visual and audio notification every time you achieve a milestone, major or minor. For example, if you catch a new type of fish or reach a new level in one of your character's skills, you are now notified in real time with a "new ideas coming to you" pop-up. You no longer have to wait until you go to sleep at night to find out if you will gain an extra point in Gathering or Combat.

The update is full of little details introduced throughout the experience, both in the first few hours of gameplay and in endgame. For example, a bookseller named Marcello now comes twice a month to the back of JoJa (or the cinema, depending on your run) where he sells tomes that slightly increase some secondary stats, such as the horse's trot speed or the item spawn rate when defeating monsters in the mine. There are now new animations for the characters, variations on the animals in the background image. A new final quest and mysterious boxes from Lord Qi. More than 300 new items have been added including furniture, cooking recipes, books, new ingredients, crops and many, many secrets that are still hidden in the game.

The most striking feature of this update are the new events of the Squid Festival and the Trout Derby. They are more of a neighbourhood gathering time with some exclusive items in the shop, but the Desert Festival is much bigger. It works like the Night Market in Winter, but for three days in Spring we can gamble on monster races, buy unique hats from villagers or decorations that can't be found at any other time in the game calendar.

Even with the extra time they've put into this version on consoles, this update comes with some performance issues. In my case, playing on Nintendo Switch, I've found myself at regular intervals with performance drops and small jerks that freeze for half a second on the screen. Nothing to take you out of the game, but the problem is that they're especially annoying when you're in combat or in the fishing mini-game. They will most likely be fixed in a patch in the near future, but it doesn't hurt to warn that they can happen if you can't wait.

While not as flashy and expansive a piece of content as the inclusion of Ginger Island was in the 1.5 update, this 1.6 version of Stardew Valley is an "even more and better". A new letter of thanks to fans who are still faithfully farming, digging and feeding animals in Pelican Village after so many years, and an even fuller and richer experience for newcomers. Stardew Valley 1.6 only adds more perfection to what we already thought was impossible to beat, and once they fix those little technical bugs that annoy but don't sour, the sweet return to the digital farm will once again become your obsession for another 90 or 100 hours. Maybe more.