Stardew Valley – Upload.Farm

The extremely well-named Upload.Farm website is designed to allow players of the extremely popular Stardew Valley game to upload their saved game files. The site then extracts information about the state of the game and farm and creates a number of web pages with that.

For example, you can see the current status of my Stardew Valley game here, including a complete map of my admittedly lame farm at the moment. Very cool.

 

Stardew Valley Map

Stardew Valley–Take A Screenshot Of Your Entire Farm

PC Gamer has a nice tutorial explaining how to take a screenshot of your entire Stardew Valley farm.

Since the farm in the game is so big and there is no in-game function to screenshot the entire farm, this requires installing a utility, GeDoSaTo, that is designed to modify how game graphics render.

Using GeDoSaTo, PC Gamer explains how to run Stardew Valley at a whopping 8K resolution and then downsample that so the image is viewable on whatever resolution you’re actually running the game at. From there, GeDoSaTo will let you take a full 8K screenshot of the entire farm.

Stardew Valley Farm Planner

One of the great things about Stardew Valley is the huge area players have to build and customize their farm. The size of that area, however, can also make it a challenge to plan large-scale farms.

Enter the Stardew Valley Farm Planner, a web-based tool that lets people lay and plan their farm before building it in-game.

It includes all the equipment, buildings, crops, and other elements in the game to make it possible to design the perfect farm

 

Stardew Valley Mod–CJB’s In-Game Cheat Menu

Stardew Valley is an amazing game, especially considering everything in the game was created by a one-man development team. There are, however, a couple of aspects that I don’t like about the game–I detest the fishing mini-game, which doesn’t seem to fit in with the other activities at all, and I’m not a fan of the degrading fences (especially since fence gates, etc. don’t seem to degrade).

Fortunately, Stardew Valley is eminently moddable ,and even though the game has been out for less than a week, there are already dozens of mods available for it. CJB’s In-Game Cheat Menu is hands-down the best mod available for tweaking pretty much any aspect of the game.

To use the In-Game Cheat Menu mod, first you need to install the Stardew Modding API which is available at Github. Download the zip file containing SAMPI and copy the files to your /Stardew Valley/ folder. To use mods, from now on you will need to start the game by clicking on the StardewModdingAPI.exe file. That will launch the modding tool and then, in turn, will automatically launch Stardew Valley.

Next, create a Mods folder in your main Stardew Valley directory, download the CJB In-Game Cheat Menu, and copy everything in that zip file into the \Mods\ directory.

Then restart Stardew Valley using the StardewModdingAPI.exe file. Once you are in-game press “P” to bring up the cheats menu.

The thing I appreciate about the In-Game Cheat Menu mod is how thorough it is. I only want to be able to auto-fish and prevent my fences from degrading, because that really fits my particular play style.

Want to focus on building relationships with the other characters in the game? Fine, just enable the “Always Give Gift” in the Relationships area. Or choose to Freeze Time either everywhere in the game, only when inside, or only when inside caves. Or toggle time on and off with the “T” key.

 

CJB In-Game Cheat Menu Screenshot

 

Steam’s Ridiculous Handling of Music Purchases

I had been waiting for Stardew Valley’s release for several months now, and when I finally played the game I was especially impressed with how good the music was. So impressed, that I paid $4.99 to purchase the Stardew Valley Soundtrack on Steam.

Steam Stardew Valley Original Soundtrack Screenshot

 

Okay, so I purchased the music, but how do I actually listen to it?

Well, first I tried clicking “Play” on the screen above, but that simply launched the game itself.

Hmmm. So then I remembered that there was “Music” option in the Steam Library. So I head over there, but there’s no Music in my Steam library at all.

 

Steam Library Music Screenshot

So I clicked on the Music Library settings option, but that screen left me scratching my head. Since Steam didn’t give me any indication of where it might have put the music (and it isn’t showing up in my library), I’m not sure what I need to do here.

Steam Library Music Setup

After a Google search, it turns out that Steam “helpfully” puts music in a subdirectory under the main game installation directory. So, if a game like Stardew Valley is installed here:

/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley/

then the soundtrack is located here:

/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley/StardewValleyOST/

Eventually my Steam client restarted for an update and it automatically added the soundtrack when scanning at startup. Apparently if I had clicked the “Scan Now” button, that would have likely added it to my library.

This. Is. Stupid.

I buy almost all of my video games through Steam because it is so easy to use and works well at keeping everything organized. My experience buying music from Steam, however, was a visit to frustration-ville.

The product page for the soundtrack should at a minimum include a clickable link that will open up the directory where the music is stored on the local machine, and I cannot for the life of me understand why Steam doesn’t automatically add any music I’ve purchased and installed from Steam onto the music list automatically. I shouldn’t have to restart my client or click through configuration screens to find a button to rescan my music collection.