Farming dopamine in the Valley

I always like to say that I am not a gamer, I game. Singular. I started playing in 2023 as I felt I might be missing out on a lot of cool stuff by never having played anything more complex than Tetris or Mariokart.

Stardew seemed like an easy way to get into something more complex, though it was very puzzling and difficult at first. People who have gamed their whole lives have a lot of innate knowledge that I simply didn’t have, even as a fairly tech-savvy person (like, I run a couple of websites for fun in my spare time!) so even figuring out how to get the menu to come up, working out what you can and cannot interact with, or using inventory slots was totally baffling and frustrating 😅

However, once I had worked out which button does what and discovered the wiki, I became completely obsessed and very much enjoy being able to memorise pages of nicely-formatted information hnnngggg… I have since tried to play other games but they simply aren’t as good (and I am a creature of habit and repetition by nature).

My husband jokes about how, when I have had a rough day, I should go and ‘farm dopamine’ as that always makes me feel better. That bloopbloopbloop noise when I harvest ancient fruits with my iridium scythe does good things to my brain.

The Valley is genuinely really important to me though, and so is the online community around the game. The Stardew subreddit is one of the most wholesome places on the internet and the game’s creator Concerned Ape/Eric Barone, has a wonderful creative mind, having built the entire world himself, down to writing the music in the game.

A few months ago I went to the Stardew symphony when it finally arrived in Glasgow and I spent the entire overture openly weeping at how amazing it felt to be in a concert hall with all my fellow villagers, listening to the beautiful melodies that are so familiar.

I was feeling particularly emotional as it’s been an insanely rough last year or so for me, enduring brutal cancer treatment and other horrible life things happening too, so I have been living at 100000% stress levels. (Everything is a lot better now and I kicked cancer right in its stupid, malignant face!)

During the first piece, I whispered ‘THE VALLEY IS REAL, IT’S RIGHT HERE!’ to my husband a little too loudly and the guy next to me looked over and smiled so gently. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like not everything is awful and cruel. There isn’t only horror, there is hope and kindness too.

It’s so much more than a game to a lot of us, it’s a place to feel safe and take comfort from a community of other farmers 💖

I have nearly 2000 hours in the Valley and sometimes things do get a little samey though, even for me, so to placate the part of me that does enjoy novelty I started doing little challenges. And being an ex-librarian who enjoys graphic design, I also made little graphics to showcase my challenge and themed farms, which I have collected onto this page. I hope they inspire you to do one of the challenges or spruce up your farm!

Colour runs

Using the colours for dyeing cloth and clothes in the dye pots/sewing machine, I did 6 themed colour runs, where the challenge was to make 1 million gold but only being allowed to sell items with those colours. Some were much easier than others, so I have indicated a difficulty rating and a score out of 5 serpents…