Stardew Valley’s upcoming 1.6 update finally launches tomorrow, March 19, and its developer has been prepping us for the occasion by sharing a spoiler-free line from his patch notes daily. The lead-up to the patch’s release has been momentous for the devoted Stardew Valley community, which has endured after a years-long drought of little to no content, but are transfixed by the game and its upcoming update, even with the drip-feed of information they’ve been getting about it. It’s a testament to the game ConcernedApe built that the series of innocuous changes he’s announced haven been met with absolute uproar. He continued his daily transmissions over the weekend and unsurprisingly, the obscure tweaks 1.6 will introduce have set the community ablaze again.
ConcernedApe’s two weekend updates included a change to the color of items such as jellies, wine, and pickles, as well as a tweak to how players can interact with mayonnaise. The former update seems a little more practical: Stardew players could craft these items using fruits and vegetables that we identify with their colors, like red tomatoes or purple grapes. However, the game would churn out the same-colored goods regardless of the item used to craft them in the first place. Now, players who use color coordination to keep things organized can let their neat freak flags fly, since these crafted goods now correspond with the color of their base ingredient.
This color consistency issue seems, at the very least, aligned with the rest of the updates ConcernedApe has provided on 1.6 so far. It all began with an obscure fix to fruit trees, before eventually confirming a long-suspected harvesting theory and a promise to tweak it. Then, the developer addressed a longstanding issue with the effectiveness of downward swings with weapons or tools, and a problem players were having with their in-game pets that often blocked their path. The funniest of them all targeted a glitch that caused newlywed spouses to spiral into depression during the first week of marriage. Every one of the changes ConcernedApe has outlined to this point has been a minor issue in the game, while simultaneously being a huge thing for the most zealous players. However, there was one more update provided that I can’t make sense of.
As of 1.6’s launch tomorrow, Stardew players will now be able to drink mayonnaise. I’ve been seething since I first read it. Why? Why would you enable the worst kind of people? There’s validity to every other line from the patch notes but this one. What fan is this servicing? What tremendous ill of the game is this action correcting? This is like opening Pandora’s Box, but it’s a shitty jar of mayo, which is a million times worse. It’s happening though, whether I like it or not, so I guess I should be happy for y’all. I won’t be.
Tomorrow’s launch of Stardew’s 1.6 update will however be cause for celebration. The long-awaited patch won’t just arrive with a bunch of obscure changes, it’ll also feature fresh content. Chief among it all are new dialogue opportunities, another festival, and secrets that ConcernedApe has still not divulged. The update will also seemingly make the game easier to mod, which was the intended goal for 1.6 before the dev started adding new content. Once it drops, the developer will be shifting focus to mobile and console ports of the 1.6 patch, as well as their spiritual successor, Haunted Chocolatier.
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