Stardew Valley will get at least one more significant game update, says Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, mere months after stating that he doesn’t “want to just be the Stardew Valley guy.” It’ll be called update 1.7, and the trimness of the numbering implies that it’ll be a large one. For context, Stardew Valley update 1.6 brought eight player PC co-op, new crops, a lot more NPC dialogue, a mastery system, new pets, and the ability to give those pets hats (which caused a few problems).
“Okay, I revealed this at the concert last night and now the cat’s out of the bag, so I will confirm for everyone: There will be a Stardew Valley 1.7 update,” Barone wrote on Xitter over the weekend. “No release date, no estimate. But it’s happening.”
Barone is theoretically also working on a brand new game, the more combat-focussed RPG Haunted Chocolatier, but Stardew Valley keeps luring him back, for there is always something else to fix or introduce, however daft. “It’s just so much easier to just add more stuff to Stardew Valley than to make a whole new game from scratch,” he said in May. “Because Stardew Valley, all the systems, the major systems, are already all done. That’s the stuff that’s not fun to do. When I make an update, it’s like, throw in this, throw in that, let’s add green rain. These random ideas I have. Whimsical ideas.”
In Barone’s defence, if I had made the fourth best-selling premium PC game of all time, I would feel in no great rush to move on from it. I would tinker for years. Well, I mean, I would actually take a lot of holidays. But in between all those trips to Alton Towers and when not playing Micro Machines in my bedroom-sized caramel fondue, I would do plenty of tinkering. Ah, I imagine George R. R. Martin wishes he could be updating the old GOT novels instead of writing The Winds Of Winter.