If you’ve ever made cautious forays into the online communities for Stardew Valley, you will know they are intimidating and inspiring in equal measure. Players post screenshots of their megafarms: “Autumn farm, year 6,” they’ll say, alongside a photo of vast fields of pumpkins, the space usage finely tuned to produce maximum yield for minimum effort. “Summer Year 4,” another will announce, showing a holding with actual dozens of beehives (when I don’t even have one) – and that’s just one small part of their whole farm.
Buying, planting and harvesting that amount of stuff seems an impossible mountain for me, with my small patch of green beans and potatoes, to climb. But the communities are also very quick to offer advice and help, as one might expect, so perhaps one day I will be able to do my own megafarm post. In the meantime, I am awed by both the size of one r/stardewvalley user’s farm, and the beauty of their solution to a recurring problem.