[UPDATE 1] As some members of the Stardew Valley community have pointed out there are some errors in the article.
1. There are no "large" duck eggs. That was just an error, which has been amended to just duck eggs.
2. George is Alex’s grandpa and not father. That has also been amended.
Original story
When your 8-year-old daughter is sobbing and shedding tears of real sorrow you know it must be something bad. “Have you hurt yourself?” I ask, though the pained expression on her face tells me that this is something much deeper. After wiping the tears away, and with a bit of prompting, she announces: “Alex has left me.”
Alex is a character in Stardew Valley, the immersive indie farming simulation game on PS4 and other platforms. We’ve played well over 100 hours of Stardew Valley together and experienced the joys of winning the Spring Egg Hunt, giggled together watching the delightful Dance of the Moonlight Jellies, and remember with great fondness the moment we caught our first legendary fish.
But there’s a lot more to Stardew Valley than sunshine and happy days. The cast of colorful characters also hide some dark secrets, and aren’t always as pleasant as they first seem. I knew the first time we met Alex that he wasn’t good enough for my daughter (her character, Maria), but she was insistent he be the one that we stalk to get enough hearts to marry him.
Alex was always fairly arrogant, fishing for compliments about his new haircut, generally obsessing about the way he looks, and spending silly amounts of time mastering his physique in his home-built gym. She’d opted purely for looks rather than taking into account his personality, and I can only hope she learns from the harsh lesson that was dished out.
You only had to take one look at Alex’s grandpa, grumpy George, to know that he wasn’t marriage material. He’s horrible to his wife, who has a sunny disposition and wheels him around the town to various events, but he just complains about everything. However, my daughter was intent on Maria marrying him.
Anyhow, one sunny Autumn day, after making Alex copious amounts of Complete Breakfasts (no idea how he keeps the weight off) to keep him happy, and giving him a bouquet of flowers and a mermaid’s pendant to seal the deal, they got married.
30 annoying things about Stardew Valley that I wouldn’t change
Life was good. Maria worked hard on the farm and extended the house to two floors with an extra bedroom. Meanwhile, Alex would make her the occasional pancake or hash-brown in the morning, but would generally just laze around at home all day pumping iron. He’d even take the piss and go outside on a summer’s day with his top off and lift weights on the farm, while my daughter (I mean Maria) was breaking her back watering crops. Still, she never complained, and every morning my real-life loved one would ensure Maria would get up and give him a hug before doing her daily chores.
Then Penny came along. Baby Penny was born in the Summer, and the delight on my daughter’s face when she saw her cute little face crawling around the floor was a sight to behold. Things were going well. Yet despite this extra level of responsibility, Alex was still obsessed with himself, choosing to spend his time disappearing with his mates into town, beefing up his biceps, and totally ignoring Penny on a daily basis. Then the world fell apart.
My daughter woke up one morning, and Alex was nowhere to be seen. He’s usually in the kitchen, gym or just outside the house, but he had vanished. Penny was just crawling around the place, alone (social services would have taken her into care!). If she would have fell down the stairs or wandered outside, Lord knows what would have happened.
After frantically checking around the farm, confused about where lazy Alex might have gone, she checked her friendship scores to discover that the heart metre had dropped from 12 hearts to just two. Next to Alex’s name in brackets was the word ‘ex’. The bastard had left in the middle of the night, and not even left a note.
Ignoring the crops that needed picking, (and the baby who was now home alone) my daughter commanded Maria to jump on her horse and then sped around to his parent’s house to confront him and find out what was the matter.
“I thought we had something special… I guess I was wrong,” was his answer to the person he’d just left as a single mother. That was it! He gave absolutely no explanation as to why she was dumped, but she simply wasn’t having it. After attempting to give him a duck egg as a present to try and win him back, he refused to take it, so she jumped back on her horse and headed back to the farm.
Grabbing a sword from the chest next to the bed, I sensed this was payback time. She headed back over to his mum and dad’s house riding with the gusto of the lone ranger, attempted to bribe Alex for his affections with another present (unsuccessfully), and then swiped the sword like a mad lady through his midriff (see the proof in the video below!) “Why would he just leave like that?” she asked me. “It’s just a game,” I said, “I told you not to keep gifting him Void eggs, he hates them,” but I understood her misery. Rejection is never fun, not even in a farming simulator.
The dreadful situation has calmed down a bit now. My daughter has gone on the search for the next likely person on her friendship list, which happens to be Emily, who seems much more happy-go-lucky. Penny has grown up too into a lovely little toddler, the farm is flourishing and at least she no longer has to cook for that moron.
While my daughter has learned that life can be cruel and being rejected is harsh, I’ve come to the realisation that I’m a protective dad who just wants the best for his daughter. Stardew Valley has the power to do that to you, taking you on a journey that those who have experienced it will likely never forget.
[UPDATE 2] Breaking news! Our in-game daughter has now gone missing. Will the drama ever end?
The mystery of our missing child
Things have gone from bad to worse in Stardew Valley. Since Alex left us, we befriended Emily in an attempt to marry her but foolishly turned up too late to meet her on the planned camping trip and now she’s not interested. However, life got worse.
Coming to the end of winter, we went to bed after checking Penny, our young toddler. She was safe in her cot (see first few seconds of video below). The next morning we woke up, and my 8-year old daughter was in control of her character while I was in the kitchen cooking (in real life!).
"Penny has gone missing", she announced. You can see the confusion and panic in the video around 11m 30s when she stops playing to come and tell me. I ran in and immediately saved the footage from the PS4 before we went on a mission to find her. What I discovered after checking the video was that she failed to check on Penny when she first woke up and spent the day milling around Stardew Valley.
She went to bed that day without checking on Penny. As you can see from the video, she then woke up the next morning (the drama starts from 12 minutes) and went straight to her room. She’d gone. She checks around every room frantically, and then I take over on a hunt around the town.
Fast-forward to 12 minutes in the video to see the day we woke up to find our daughter missing.
Note: We uploaded the video via PS4 shareplay after splicing three seperate saves together. No idea why the quality of the second half of the video dropped.
Our first thought was that Alex had taken her, but we can’t find him, or that now she’s a toddler she’s managed to open the front door and go wandering.
At the end of a day of searching sheds, the bat cave, the beach, as well as the houses of residents of various people in Stardew Valley, we decided to call it a day in the hope that maybe Penny would return if we go to sleep the next morning.
Much to our delight, Penny was now tucked up in bed! Where had she been? What if she goes missing again? How can we go to bed knowing that our child may be stolen, or escape in the night? Oh, the drama! If anyone knows anything about the case of our missing child please let us know. If there’s a kidnapper in Stardew Valley we need to find them.
Stardew Valley is available now on PS4, Xbox One and Windows PC. It’s also coming to Nintendo Switch when it launches later this year.
If you’ve been affected by this article and seek help, please let us know your wonderful Stardew Valley stories in the comments below and we’ll do our best to respond.