Beating Stardew Valley the wrong way

this year Stardew Valley Update 1.6 brought a lot of things to the hit indie game, including frogs, desert festivals, and green rain. This is all very exciting, but there’s something else that has arrived with the latest update that will likely turn the game on its head. In the latest version of Stardew Valley, you can pay for perfection.

For those who don’t know, Stardew Valley has a perfection rating, and if you reach 100%, you’ll unlock a final cutscene to complete the game. To get there, you need to craft everything, make friends with everyone, find all those pesky Golden Acorns and Stardrops, and generally finish every mission the game throws at you. This sounds like a lot of effort, and I can tell you, as someone who has done it before, it is. So, I thought, what if I skipped everything and completed the game while doing as little as possible? What if you paid the price for perfection?

This may not seem like a crime to the uninitiated, but as someone who has loved Stardew Valley for years, it feels like the worst thing I’ve ever done. You see, this game offers you a relatively binary choice from the start: you can reclaim the community center and bring Pelican Town back to life by working alongside the magical Junimos, or you can surrender to the great beast of capitalism and sign It’s Up to the Joja Corporation – like Amazon or Walmart – To transform the dilapidated mall into a Joja warehouse alongside Morris, the local JojaMart manager. In all my years, I have never once chosen the latter option.

It’s not the thing that was done. To complete the community center, the game forces you to try new things: fishing, mining, or searching for rare items. If you go the Goga route, all you have to do is collect enough money to contribute to Goga, and you do this by simply growing the most profitable crops and never speaking to anyone in Pelican City outside of Pierre, who feels depressed almost unaware that your actions are contributing In the growth of its largest competitor. It turns a game that is essentially a celebration of anti-capitalist ideals into something that would make Jeff Bezos smile happily from the top of his ivory tower.

Despite my natural inclination to support Pierre, Mayor LewisAnd the rest Stardew Valley CharactersI thought I’d try the new path to perfection, just to see how it made me feel. I think I already know the answer to that question, but in the name of science, I started a new rescue, skipped all the warm fuzzies about how to find your way to my grandfather’s farm, and got paid. And so began my frustrating quest.

The first part of Joja’s path to perfection is very easy. All you have to do is craft 135kg of gold to complete all of the Gugga Community Development Projects, which in turn repairs the local bus, quarry bridge, go-kart system and your greenhouse while also demolishing an obstacle in the river that allows you to pan for treasure. Then comes the first depressing scene. Once everything is finished, you can join Maurice in celebrating the completion of the storage facility. It is worth noting that there is no one else from the city.

Already at this point, I felt a way I had never felt before while playing Stardew. I felt a little like a traitor. As I explained in my country Stardew Valley reviewThis game means a lot to me, and I have known characters like Gusthe local barman, and ClintThe lonely mourner, longer than some of my closest friends. So, to turn my back on them and celebrate the opening of the warehouse alongside Maurice and his followers in Geauga was tantamount to treason. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning, and it will only get more difficult from here on out.

The next step involved getting to Ginger Island. The tropical island, which arrived as part of Update 1.5, is important in the Joja series because it contains the final two pieces of the puzzle. The first is the Goga’s golden parrot. Normally, you’ll have to collect 100 golden nuts to unlock Mr. Chi’s nut room, where you can track your perfection rating before finding the final thirty. However, thanks to the Golden Joja Parrot, you can simply hand over 10,000 gold for every nut you don’t have, and the bird delivers them overnight. Therefore, after spending more than a million gold coins, I obtained all the nuts.

Then it was time to meet my latest partner and representative of Joja’s Special Services Department, Fizz. Once you open Mr. Qi’s Walnut Room, you will receive a message from Fizz, who asks you to visit him in the water cave on Ginger Island. This is where the magic happens. For 500k gold, Fizz can increase your Perfection rating by 1%. Unsurprisingly, I was only about 4% complete when I first met the suspicious Joja actor, meaning I’d need to accumulate 48 million gold to pass the final hurdle.

So, I went into industry. I used all the free land on Ginger Island’s farm and greenhouse to grow Starfruit, the most profitable crop in the game, and worked over several seasons to make it happen. It wasn’t as labor intensive as the first part of the race, as I had the resources to make countless machine guns, but it was boring. The routine consists of planting hundreds of Starfruit crops before bed for 13 days, then harvesting and repeating. I probably could have done it faster, but the exciting part of the experience was over at that point.

After weeks of in-game sleep, it was done. I ran to Fez, handed over the 48 million, and went back to bed. The next day, I strolled down Ginger Island Beach one last time, not even bothering to pull the sprinklers out of the ground, and checked the Perfection Tracker. 100%. finally. All that’s left to do is return to Pelican Town, head north, and climb to the top, the game’s secret area that only fellow perfectionists and those who’ve spoiled it for themselves on YouTube can see.

So, what was it like to climb to the top to witness Stardew’s legendary 100% perfection scene? Unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel well, I wasn’t feeling well at all. Worse still, the game blatantly invites you to take Joja’s route during the final moments, rubbing salt in the metaphorical wound. I definitely achieved something technically, but it felt empty. For hours, I sowed and sowed and sowed, ignoring almost everything that made the game one of my all-time favorites and turning it into something far more monotonous and soul-straining.

However, while achieving perfection in this way did not make me feel anything good, it was only for a moment. After the big reveal of the final scene, I simply returned to the title. From there, I jumped back into the save file where I have a farm full of adorable animals, where I set up a home in Pelican City for Pam to rebuild her life, and even my kids in Stardew Valley, who, admittedly, I haven’t. I haven’t missed it all that much, but it’s nice Knowing they are there. Yes, following Joja’s path to perfection has given me a renewed appreciation for all that Stardew Valley can be and what it means to me.

In the end, I can understand why ConcernedApe made it possible to achieve perfection in this way. It plays to the overarching message of Stardew Valley, and I assume a certain view of how to live your life: doing things the hard way, but the way that feels right, is always more rewarding than the more convenient alternative. One way, you learn some lessons along the way, you make some friends, and you might even find a sense of community, while you sleep and work, and that’s about it. Also, with the latter, your only real friend is Maurice; Let’s be honest, we hate Maurice.

So, if you want my advice, don’t pay for perfection in Stardew Valley. It’s not clear whether ConcernedApe intended the mechanic to present the philosophical dilemma I interpreted it to be or just give those desperate to complete the game a chance to get out, and I don’t know him so I can’t ask. Either way, it’s not worth it. It makes me think of that old cliche, about how the real treasure is the friends we make along the way, but in this case, it’s actually true. Who wants to be friends with Maurice?

Here’s my experience paying for perfection in Stardew Valley. If you’re looking for more games like the hit Indie Farming, be sure to check out our guides to the best games Comfortable games and Best games like Stardew Valley While you are here. Or, if you’re looking for a console where you can try out some of them Stardew Valley modificationCheck out our list of the best Steam deck alternatives.