Stardew Valley "thriving more than ever" as new mod-centric 1.6 update gets a March release date
The farming sim is eight years old and has 30 million copies sold
Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has marked the 8th birthday of his farming sim phenomenon baby (also called Stardew Valley) by announcing the impending release of update 1.6. The PC version - the one we care about - is arriving on the 19th of March, and consoles and mobile as soon as possible after that. The actual content of update 1.6 is largely a mystery, but Barone has teased a few things here and there, including that it's "mostly changers for modders" that'll make it "easier and more powerful to mod".
At that time, Barone also confirmed that 1.6 brings new game content but "much less" than 2020's hefty 1.5 update (which brought the beach farm to Stardew Valley, along with some pretty wild endgame content). In a later tease, Barone Xeeted that new content including new items, a new festival, more secrets and "???" would be included in 1.6, as well as 8 person co-op on PC. It sounds a bit like 1.6 grew beyond Barone's initial intentions, because he recommended you play it with a fresh save "to experience everything in context". Given some of the stuff that arrived in 1.5, I would expect the unexpected, but we'll know more when the patch comes out in a few weeks.
I'm intrigued by what changes to modding this update could bring about. Stardew already has a very healthy modding community, adding new crops and a host of sneaky things like being able to access your storage anywhere and everywhere, which I certainly would not use because I am neither lazy nor a big cheater. But in fairness I haven't properly been back to Stardew for a while (not since my ill-fated attempt to battery farm hens).
Still, now might be the time. As Barone points out in his Xitter thread, Stardew Valley has a live concert tour, an official cookbook coming soon and over 30 million copies sold - it is, he says, "thriving more than ever", and if you've never played it before I do sincerely suggest checking it out. Barone could probably spend the rest of his life doing updates for it. Although now that 1.6 is out of the way, we can probably expect him to get back to Haunted Chocolatier, which is his next (and typically mysterious) game.