The Psychology of Stardew Valley
best game ever
I’m a lifelong gamer, and Stardew Valley is one of the best designed games I’ve ever played. Other games may try to mimic it, but I haven’t found any game that’s quite like it.
Many people attribute the success (and funness) of Stardew to its cozy aesthetic. It’s a game in which you are a newcomer to a picturesque small town where you try to revitalize an old farm. Consequently, people often cite the escapist dream that Stardew emulates as the reason for it’s success—as well as the pixel art and the music that contribute to the cozy aesthetic.
While the aesthetics, pixel art, and music do contribute to the funness of the game—it’s the entire flow of the game that makes it work.
1. The game starts simple.
The game starts by giving you 15 turnip seeds. All you have to do is plant them, and wait for them to grow. You have a few tools in your inventory that are familiar to any gamer: a hoe, a pickaxe, a normal axe, a scythe, a water can. Everything you need to start clearing your land of rocks, logs, and wild grass, and prepping the soil for planting.
You just clear the area of any debris, hoe the dirt, plant the seeds, and water. Simple.
2. Gradually introduces new quests.
The entire scenario is that you just moved into a new town. Since your new in town, the second quest is to meet all of the townsfolk. There’s 28 of them! That’s a lot. And they each have their own distinct personalities and special cut scenes.
Later in the game, you’ll also be able to date, marry, and even have kids (or adopt kids!) with some of the bachelor’s in town…but the game doesn’t tell you this yet. Because that would be overwhelming.
3. Branches out into a multitude of possibilities.
The second day in Stardew introduces fishing. Then, later on, you’ll be able to raise chickens, cows, and sheep. You can go to the mines to find iron ore to upgrade your tools and build sprinklers, which will make farming easier. You also have the choice to tidy up or decorate your farm. Or you can help the townspeople to get special items. You often have to decide between multiple interesting goals to pursue. And as you go further and further into the game, new areas are unlocked—like a desert and tropical island—that have even more things to do!
Once you get into the swing of the games, there’s farming, mining, fishing, making friends with the townspeople, decorating the farm, maximizing profit, and quests.
It doesn’t sound like a lot when I list it out, but it feels like a lot in game. You get to choose what to focus on, set your own goal, and work towards it. And you're often juggling multiple goals, each with multiple steps that you have to keep track of.
4. Time constraints.
The day is short, and there is too much to do. The single Stardew Valley is about 14 real minutes long. If you don’t make it back to bed in time, you end up passing out, and get a penalty.
People that play Stardew often report a slight feeling of stress, as we rush through and try to get everything done. It is an ironically stressful game for what it appears to be.
5. You can only save the game at the end of the day.
Unlike most games that you can save and exit at any time, Stardew only saves at the end of the day, when you go to bed. This one of the trickiest parts of the game.
Normally, when I was playing, I would want to exit during a boring part of the day, like when I was fishing, but then I’d remember I’d lose progress unless I finished the day. But by the time I was sending my virtual farmer to bed—I was already making plans for the next day, I was also excited to see my stats list for the day (which is shown after you fall asleep), to see if I gained a level in any of my skills, and if any interesting event happened overnight. So I click past the stats screen, I see my game is saved, but then, I think, why don’t I just check the mailbox to see if there’s anything. And then, when I go outside, I see some of my crops have finished growing, and I get into autopilot and start doing all of the other little tasks on the farm. Then—well, I might as well finish this day to save that progress.
6. Gambling.
It’s not actual gambling in Stardew, but the creator is able to tap into the same psychology. There’s many places in the game in which you crack open a geode, for example, and you don’t know what you’re going to find inside—it could be an artifact you’ve been waiting or it could be a piece of stone. This is the same psychology that gets us to scroll on a social feed or TikTok—we don’t know whether the next thing we see will be amazing or disappointing. It’s called intermittent reinforcement. Our brains, unfortunately, like the surprise of not knowing what we’ll see next.
7. There are no microtransactions.
The creator could have easily decided to add pay-to-win or pay-for-features, like so many other games these days do. All of the updates since the game was created (and there have been some major ones) are included with the initial purchase.
I’m so glad he didn’t turn to microtransaction, which would have killed the game.
8. It’s well-balanced.
I imagine the creator spent so much time making sure the balance of the game was just right. There are many ways to make profit—whether it be fishing in the ocean, gathering honey, making wine—and he made sure that any route a player takes is viable and that no route is overpowered.
Why other games don’t compare?
Just the attention to detail to all of these different aspects—the balance and how the game progresses—the care to ensure that the game is approachable and branches out in a non-overwhelming manner. I imagine a lot of thought was put into the length of the day to make sure it was just right.
Many people compare Stardew Valley to games like Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch that have a similar cozy aesthetic. But animal crossing is missing the attention to the progression of the game that keeps Stardew exciting.
(And I haven’t even touched on the storytelling and the character development within Stardew, which is also surprisingly good.)
In my experience, the games that feel the most similar to it are aesthetically different, but what they share with Stardew is good flow and balance. The most similar games that I can think of are Minecraft (although Minecraft does not have an easy start—you are thrust into the middle of things with no instructions) and Factorio (although Factorio doesn’t have decorating options like Minecraft and Stardew. There has to be some others’ but I can’t think of any. What these games get right is not necessarily the aesthetics, the art, or the music—although I’m sure these play a role—but just the whole flow, which also needs careful design.