Stardew Valley’s Hefty 1.6 Update Has More Features Than We Expected

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update is finally here—and it’s bigger than any of us anticipated. The developer, Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has been coy about some of the bigger features the update would introduce, teasing a festival and some new dialogue, but more or less left it at that for a long time. In the week leading up to today’s release, they did share a handful of spoiler-free lines from patch notes on a daily basis. These seemingly minor technical changes were met with raucous acclaim from the Stardew community, but they were only ever the tip of the iceberg. Now that the day has come, ConcernedApe has released the full patch notes, and holy shit, is there a lot going on here.

First of all, ConcernedApe lied. When he first made mention of 1.6’s new content, he said a single “major” festival that was being added, which we now know is the three-day Desert Festival that takes place in the spring after players fix the bus. What he failed to mention was that 1.6 would also add two smaller fishing festivals, the Trout Derby and the SquidFest, as well as additional “environmental ‘event’ in summer.” All festivals (except for the night market and Desert Festival) will also now have map and dialogue changes after every second year.

After teasing a bunch of smaller mechanical and bug fixes throughout the week, ConcernedApe rounded off the 1.6 drip-feed with the announcement of a significant new feature: the meadowlands farm type that’d come with “chewy blue grass.” This beginner-friendly farm type, which starts players with a coop and two chickens, is now available for players at the start of the game. There’s also a new “mastery system” that is accessed by an entirely new area, so add that to the growing list of unexpected new additions in Stardew’s 1.6 update.

One of the updates ConcernedApe provided last week was that players would be able to phase through their loving pets (who often blocked their paths) much quicker in 1.6, but it turns out that wasn’t the only adjustment pets were getting. As of 1.6, players can now have multiple pets, which is handy because the patch has also introduced turtle pets as well as new breeds of cats and dogs to adopt. Pets whom players show lots of love to can now also give gifts back to their owners, and in return players can now put hats on their cats and dogs.

One of the earlier promises made about 1.6 was that it would feature new dialogue, and I can now confirm a metric ton of it’s been added to Stardew. NPCs now have custom gift reactions, dynamic dialogue in reaction to things around them, custom dialogue when accepting the flower dance, and some previously missing dialogue has even been restored to the game.

To run down just a few more major changes:

• PC lobbies can now support up to eight players and stability has been improved across the board.
• The world map will now show your exact position rather than a fixed point based on the zone you’re in.
• A whole host of new items have been added, but there are simply far too many to reasonably list here.
• There are four new home renovations.
• A bookseller comes to town twice a season now.
• Tweaks to Ginger Island, including a world map of the location and golden parrots to help players find the golden walnuts there.
• A big tree which will apparently lead to a whole new side quest.
• More crops, including carrots and broccoli.
• And so much more than I can fit here, y’all.

I think it’s safe to conclude that the 1.6 update to Stardew is far meatier than anticipated, and to even call it an update or a patch is downplaying the size of the thing. It really is essentially DLC or an expansion, and one that not only over-delivers in terms of content, but seems to polish the game off and make a slew of changes for modders, who will ensure the game’s being worked on for the next several years while ConcernedApe moves back over to full-time development on Haunted Chocolatier (and ports the update over to other platforms)

If you want to see the astonishingly long patch notes in full, you can find them here. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit down and finally spend some time playing Stardew Valley after writing about it for a week straight.

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