The enduring appeal of Stardew Valley lies, in part, with its open-ended nature. Creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has expressed a desire for the game to be “infinitely replayable,” but one player recently took that concept to an extreme, pushing the game’s systems – and a Nintendo Switch – to their limits. Reddit user Holozard deliberately slept for 1,000 in-game years to see what would happen, and the results were, predictably, chaotic.
Holozard’s experiment, detailed in a post to the Stardew Valley subreddit, wasn’t a simple matter of hitting the ‘sleep’ button and walking away. The challenge lay in automating the process for an extended period. To achieve this, Holozard ran their Nintendo Switch continuously for over three weeks, enduring nine crashes in the process. They employed a controller with a turbo button to repeatedly press the ‘A’ button (confirming the sleep action) and used a hair tie to hold the control stick in a position that would move the character right, directly towards the bed. This setup ultimately led to significant stick drift on the controller, effectively destroying it, but it allowed the character to repeatedly go to sleep.
The in-game consequences of a millennium-long slumber were dramatic. While the villagers themselves didn’t age or pass away, the farm and surrounding areas underwent a radical transformation. The landscape became overwhelmingly overgrown, with massive mushrooms – some reaching building-sized proportions – and weeds dominating the terrain. JojoMart and other locations were swallowed by the rampant vegetation. Holozard spent three full in-game seasons simply clearing the overgrowth to document the extent of the changes.
Beyond the overgrown landscape, the experiment revealed an unusual accumulation of rare events. The farm was littered with meteorites and owl statues, occurrences that are typically infrequent in a standard playthrough. Holozard reported finding “a lot of nice, purple stones” and nearly half a million mushrooms after clearing the land. This suggests that time, even inactive time, significantly alters the probability of these random events occurring.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the farm animals weren’t thrilled with a thousand years of neglect. Holozard shared images of a particularly “grumpy” chicken named Huffy and another looking “a little thin,” highlighting the impact of prolonged abandonment on the game’s livestock. The experiment serves as a stark reminder that while Stardew Valley allows for extended periods of in-game time to pass, the game wasn’t designed to handle such extreme durations.
This isn’t the first instance of players pushing Stardew Valley to its boundaries. As TheGamer notes, the community has a history of undertaking bizarre challenges for the sake of experimentation. One player previously constructed an elaborate “booty express” – a network of chairs – to avoid walking altogether, demonstrating a similar level of dedication to unconventional gameplay.
The experiment comes as Eric Barone prepares to release update 1.7 for Stardew Valley. While the update promises new content and features, it’s unlikely to address the specific scenario of a thousand-year sleep. However, it may provide players with new avenues for exploration and experimentation, potentially inspiring further unusual challenges. The incident underscores the game’s surprising resilience and the creativity of its player base, even when subjecting it to conditions it was never intended to withstand.
The long-term effects on the game’s code and stability from such an extended period of continuous operation remain unclear. The nine crashes experienced during the experiment suggest that the game’s engine has limitations when dealing with extreme time dilation. While Holozard’s Switch survived the ordeal, the sacrifice of a controller highlights the potential hardware costs associated with such ambitious experiments.
Holozard’s 1,000-year sleep experiment is a testament to the enduring fascination with Stardew Valley and the lengths players will go to uncover its hidden depths. It’s a reminder that even after years of exploration, the game still holds surprises, and that sometimes, the most interesting discoveries are made by simply doing something no one else has tried before.
