In Now Playing articles PC Gamer writers talk about the game currently dominating their spare time. Today Phil shuns the world in Stardew Valley.
I came to Stardew Valley as a cynic. I d seen screenshots, I d seen praise, I d seen it topping the Steam chart. It s a sickeningly cheerful RPG about farming, I thought. Can it really be that good?
Yes, it really can. I ve now played for over 25 hours, and I m creeping towards the end of my first year in Pelican Town. After the initially overwhelming introduction to Stardew Valley s many activities, I gained an economic foothold via the fishing minigame. It s a pleasant time waster, and easy enough that I could haul in a decent catch in a day.
That s when the numbers started growing, and everything became compulsive. Fishing gave me money that I invested in seeds. Weeks later, the seeds became vegetables, and money started to pour in at a steadier rate. By summer, I d made enough to buy chickens. By autumn, cows.
At this point I was a full-time farmer, hand-watering rows of crops, brewing pale ales, and creating artisanal cheese and mayonnaise. I became the hipster s hipster, supplying the town with all the raw materials of gentrification without any of the downsides. Even homeless hermit Linus has his tent.
It s winter now, and I m tidying up the wilder edges of my farmland. I m investing in upgrades, new buildings, and finding more valuable resources in the mines. It s all with a goal of increasing production in year two. Come spring, it all begins again this time, with the benefit of tens of hours of experience. I m using an external tool to map the ideal layout. Stardew Valley has its tendrils in me, and it s not letting go.
A few remnants of my cynicism remain. Stardew Valley asks you for a few basic details on character creation. As a result, I m the proud owner of Atrocity Farm. When I find an energy-boosting stardrop fruit, I m told that my mind is filled with thoughts of petrol bombs. It s like having a friend who teases your latest hobby, but instead it s my past self mocking me through time. And for good reason. As much as I m obsessed with the game, I can t quite deal with how gosh darned nice it is.
Pelican Town feels sickly sweet. Its inhabitants are mostly unfailingly polite, even when they don t much care for you. Living in Stardew Valley is like being indoctrinated into a cult, only without the underlying tragedy. It s the version of the countryside people who ve never lived in the countryside dream of moving to. I did live in the countryside. It was boring and full of jerks and cow shit. Not necessarily a higher percentage of jerks than you d find anywhere else, but when there s less people around they tend to stand out. Rural life is full of gossip, and polite, silent judgement. Here, I can t even tell people about the mayor s fling with the ranch owner.
I ve come to admire and embrace the few dark edges that exist in the game. I ve almost entirely ignored the NPCs, because I can t bring myself to join their saccharine community. My favourite character is Haley, because her borderline disgust at my appearance and work feels honest. I ve embraced the life of an embittered loner in protest at the townspeople s anodyne pleasantries. I ve taken to rummaging through bins as characters walk by. It grosses them out, which I find funny. Plus, I once found a pufferfish that someone had thrown away. I sold it for 200 gold.
Stardew Valley has given more than a million players the chance to trade guns and explosives for crops and livestock, and a glance at its Steam reviews show players with dozen (and often hundreds) of hours invested. But farm life isn't all idyllic, and after those dozens or hundreds of hours, most players hit the same roadblock: a lack of endgame.
Like its sword & sorcery RPG counterparts, much of the joy of Stardew Valley is in the journey, not the destination. And just as over-leveling your characters to mow through enemies can take the fun out of RPG combat, there reaches a point a relatively easy one to reach, at that in Stardew Valley where money is no longer an objective, and many players have found reaching that point makes the game no longer enjoyable.
Even the Community Center bundles, one of the game's only clear "objectives," can be completed in the first game year with a little planning. Once that task is done and the money is flowing regularly, you might start to feel like there's nothing more to do in Stardew Valley. Developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone says he has ideas for future content that will keep players interested well into years three, four, five, and beyond, but Barone is a one-man operation, which means that content is probably a long ways off.
While we wait for Stardew Valley's planned updates, including more endgame content and online co-op, we've come up with a few ideas for "arbitrary goals" to set for yourself to keep the game interesting for seasons to come.
Many Stardew Valley farmers don't do much planning when they first start reclaiming their farm from the wilds. Well, I didn't, anyway. But that's okay, because beautifying your farm into something with a little organization can be extremely rewarding (not to mention time-consuming perfect for endgame!) Check out our gallery of farms for some inspiration. And don't forget that mods can be used to further overhaul your farm's visual appeal.
If simply getting things organized isn't enough, another thing you can do is rebuild your farm with a single purpose. You could pretend you're a rancher and focus only on raising livestock. Or burn everything down and turn your farm into a winery. We've got a handy guide for that one.
With such a focus on turning your farm into a well-organized, finely-tuned operation, it's easy to forget that your farmhouse can also be customized. Hit up Robin's shop to buy new wallpaper, floor patterns, and furniture.
You can also put non-furniture items like produce, gemstones, and pretty much anything else on tables and other flat surfaces, further expanding your decorating options.
The Skull Cave found in Calico Desert is home to Stardew Valley's most fearsome enemies, but its depths promise the riches of iridium ore and super-rare gemstones.
It can also be used as a sort of battle arena challenge. Instead of stocking up on food to restore your health and energy, see how deep you can get without bringing any restorative items. You can use a mod to slow down or turn off the passage of time, then set limited-item challenges for yourself, seeing how deep you can reach with minimal resources.
Pretend you only have a limited timeframe to rebuild your farm. Set challenges for yourself and see if you can complete the community center, reach a certain gold threshold, or successfully build out a pre-planned farm layout before your time is up.
Instead of min/maxing by only growing the most profitable crops each season, pretend you're working toward a community center bundle that requires 50, 100, or more of each crop to complete gold quality only if you're up for it.
Bonus points if you limit your use of sprinklers and do all the watering by hand.
Sure, collection pages for every item already exist in game. But let's be honest, have you really caught them all? I didn't think so. Now get to it.
The denizens of Stardew Valley can take quite a while to woo into your good graces. For an added challenge, restrict yourself to only giving one gift a week.
If all else fails, pick a really, really, ridiculously large arbitrary number and try to earn that much gold. Imagine you're trying to pay off some sort of exorbitant, Tom Nookian life-debt and the only way free is to hand over hundreds of millions of Bells I mean gold. What game are we playing again?
In all seriousness, Stardew Valley is what you make of it. Set for yourself whatever challenges you like. As has been seen by Pokemon players undertaking the "Nuzlocke Challenge," adhering to self-imposed rules can be extremely rewarding, so set whatever challenges you like and keep the farm dream alive.
Eric Barone has been understandably busy these past few months, but after a short break to play Final Fantasy IX (among other games), he s ready to talk about Stardew Valley s future. The biggest talking point is that cooperative multiplayer is definitely coming, and it might not take too long either: Barone has agreed to let publisher Chucklefish handle some of the more finicky programming duties.
There s obviously a huge amount of work involved to achieve all this, and I am just one person, Barone wrote in the update. I know in the past I ve been very adamant about doing everything myself, and I still am when it comes to game design and content. However, I ve decided to seek outside help for some of the more technical things listed above.
In addition to cooperative play, localisation for other, non-English speaking countries is on the cards. In the more immediate future is version 1.1, which will roll out a bunch of new gameplay additions and changes, such as:
More late-game contentNew farm buildingsNew cropsNew artisan goodsNew advanced farming/producing mechanicsShane and Emily will be marriage candidates. They will also have more events and dialogue as a result.More marriage content for all spousesMore events for the non-marriage NPC sImprovements/Additions to mining and combatAbility to move buildings and other convenience featuresMore bug fixesMore secretsMore small, fun touches to the world
Have you played Stardew Valley yet? At least a million other people have, and according to our reviewer it s definitely worth your time.
Eric Barone has been understandably busy these past few months, but after a short break to play Final Fantasy IX (among other games), he s ready to talk about Stardew Valley s future. The biggest talking point is that cooperative multiplayer is definitely coming, and it might not take too long either: Barone has agreed to let publisher Chucklefish handle some of the more finicky programming duties.
There s obviously a huge amount of work involved to achieve all this, and I am just one person, Barone wrote in the update. I know in the past I ve been very adamant about doing everything myself, and I still am when it comes to game design and content. However, I ve decided to seek outside help for some of the more technical things listed above.
In addition to cooperative play, localisation for other, non-English speaking countries is on the cards. In the more immediate future is version 1.1, which will roll out a bunch of new gameplay additions and changes, such as:
Have you played Stardew Valley yet? At least a million other people have, and according to our reviewer it s definitely worth your time.
Since Stardew Valley launched in February 2016, millions of players have given up the harsh daily grind of the city for the peaceful, idyllic farmer lifestyle. But there's a lot to do in Stardew Valley, and without a clear farm plan in mind, it can feel like some goals are a long way off, even when you're progressing steadily and avoiding passing out in the street at 2 am.
For farmers who've taken up hoe and axe for several seasons but still feel like they have a ways to go, here's a clear plan explaining how to transform your farm from a run down mess into fine-tuned operation.
1. Start with a blank slate
One of the most daunting tasks for new Stardew Valley players is the absolute mess of a farm you start the game with. Left to the wild will of mother nature, your new farm is overgrown with trees, grass, rocks, and all manner of other detritus a far cry from some of the immaculate creations in our gallery of farms. Cleaning the whole thing up not only gives you a great sense of accomplishment, it gives you a nice blank canvas to start with. But cleaning up your farm is not just a good move for new players it's also a good idea for players who haphazardly placed their first few farm buildings and are now left with a disorganized, inefficient system to manage.
As with any large-scale overhaul, it's easier to start fresh and build anew than fix a broken system piece by piece. It might seem like moving backwards, but the best way to start planning out a well-organized farm is to detach from emotion and burn it all to the ground. Chop the trees, bust the rocks, sell off your animals (having to tend to daily feed, love, and milkings is just another distraction), and destroy all the buildings. The fresh slate of an empty farm is now our canvas.
2. Farming things other than crops
Stardew Valley is, quite obviously, a game about farming. But there's quite a few items you're going to need especially for our goal of total domination here a lot of which can't just be planted and grown. Wood and coal are two of the most valuable resources in building the machines than transmute your crops and other items into high-value artisan goods. And since the machines take time to process, having more to run at once is better. Wood okay, that one can be planted and grown, but I suggest doing so with a bit of purpose rather than letting nature run wild. I've found a grid trees with two spaces between them works best. It allows for high tree density while still leaving space for your horse to run in between.
Stumps don't regrow into trees (thanks Emma for pointing that out!) so feel free to chop'm to the ground and plant afresh. You can use any seeds you like for your tree farm, but be sure to dedicate a section of Oak Trees for Tappers. We're going to need a lot of Oak Resin later on, so start collecting it now.
Coal is the next thing you'll need for crafting machines and smelting metal bars (we'll need a lot of those too). But since it drops only sometimes from busting up rocks, it can be tough to farm efficiently. One method, of course, is to simply buy coal in bulk from the blacksmith. But you're going to need a lot, and money might be tight on your farm. Your best bet is to delve into the mines, as the Dust Sprites that appear on levels 41-79 have a 50 percent coal drop rate and they usually appear in swarms.
Take the elevator down to level 50 (if you're not there yet, we'll cover that shortly) and wreck through the next five or ten levels (collect iron ore along the way we need that too) then hop back in the elevator at level 60 or 65 and repeat the process. As an added bonus, the Adventurer's Guild reward for killing 500 Dust Sprites earns you the Burglar's Ring which doubles the drop rate of items from monsters, speeding up the process even further.
3. Digging deep into the mines
Not every farmer is a great swashbuckler, and for some the mines are a vast, untapped land. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to quickly forge a path into their depths. Before you do, though, spend a few days upgrading your pickaxe, as a golden one will help you blow through the early mine levels. Gold ore doesn't appear until level 80, though sounds like a catch-22, right? This is a time when you're going to want to spend a bit of cash now for a long-term payoff. Buy enough ore from the blacksmith for five of each metal bar and use them to upgrade to a golden pickaxe.
The increased rock-destruction power of your shiny new toy will make short work of the rocks in the early mine levels, making it far easier to surge down to the depths where those Dust Sprites and, yes, gold ore itself can be found. Another important thing is that the deeper you go, the better the weapons unlocked in the guild. This is critical for coal farming, as an overpowered weapon helps you shred through those level 50 enemies nice and quick.
We're going to need money to bankroll this farm overhaul, and berries are the place to be. Also, wouldn't it be nice to do some actual farming in this farming game?
At the beginning of summer, carve out a massive swath of land (be sure to keep any clay you dig up!) and plant as many blueberry seeds as you can afford. Be sure to hit them with fertilizer (use all the sap from your tree farm above) for a higher chance at silver and gold crops, and wait for the money to roll in. Blueberries take 13 days to mature, and keep producing three to four more berries every four days after that (don't be tempted by the quick-growing Tiller skill—you want to be an Artisan for our next step). Plant within the first few days of summer and you're looking at four harvests and a nice payday. (And since they keep growing all season, we don't have to worry about losing time to replanting.
Do the same with Cranberries in Fall, and soon you'll have enough money to fund our plans. For watering, buy (or mine) the ore necessary to craft Quality Sprinklers (toss Quartz you find in the mines into the furnace for the Refined Quartz you need). Since Blueberries don't have a chance to mutate into super-sized crops, there's no need to plan them in 3x3 grids. With the berry operation automated, you can spend all your time in the mines farming coal, copper, and iron ore.
By now your farm should be a relatively finely tuned operation, but to really bring in the riches, it's time to get into the wine business. Kegs take around seven days to turn a fruit into wine, but doing so triples the value of the input fruit (even more if you take the Artisan perk). This means we need a lot of kegs to deal with the long turnaround and keep up with our fruit production. Each Keg takes 30 Wood and one Clay, Copper Bar, Iron Bar, and Oak Resin. This is where all that material farming pays off.
You now have a number of options for fruit inputs, depending on your overall game progress and degree of Scrooge McDuckery. The first step is to simply keep with the Berry operation and start cranking out enough Blueberry wine to send Ben Wyatt home in a stupor. But Blueberries shine for their multi-crop harvests and return on investment—not due to a high selling price. Since Kegs take so long to process, using higher-value inputs results in greater overall profits, even if the initial seed is more expensive. If summer is coming soon and you've completed the Community Center bundle to repair the bus to the desert (use some of your berry money for that), Starfruits from the Oasis shop result in an incredible return on investment. The seeds are expensive (400g a pop) but the resulting wine sells for 2400g (3600g with the Artisan perk).
But Starfruits are only good in Summer, and even with the Greenhouse repaired, there's a more efficient option. Ancient Fruit Wine. As soon as you find the Ancient Seed artifact, plant the resulting seed (so long as it's before fall) and wait. It's a long growth period—28 days—but keeps producing fruit each week for all of Spring, Summer, and Fall. The trick here is every time a fruit is produced, toss it in the seed maker and replant. (Deluxe Speed-Gro is your friend here). Soon (okay maybe like months later) you'll have a field of Ancient Fruit crops. The end goal here is to fill your Greenhouse with the lucrative crop (so, y'know, get that done). Ancient Fruit Wine sells for slightly less than Starfruit, but the extended crop cycle means time saved on replanting, as your plants will last forever inside that wonderful glass house.
Each plant produces a fruit every seven days, matching up perfectly with the Keg's long production cycle. There's 120 plots in your greenhouse. Subtracting four for Iridium Sprinklers (layout your crops like this, that's 116 Ancient Fruit Plants. So 116 Kegs is your target goal. (Aren't you glad you farmed all those materials now?)
Once that operation is running smoothly, you can expand with more kegs supported by Fruit Trees. Redditor OrinMacGregor has a nice writeup breaking down how many Kegs per Fruit tree you need.
It's a lot of work, but the result is a self-sustaining money-printing operation. Just don't get so burnt out along the way that you feel the need to quit it all, move to the country, and run your Grandfather's old farm. Oh, wait...
It's possible to get married in Stardew Valley, but for a long time it's not been particularly satisfying. Have you noticed, for instance, that your spouse does not stand next to you during the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies? What cheek! Now he or she will, thanks to a long list of new fixes and additions coming to Stardew Valley.
Other spouse updates include unique dialogue during festivals, and their parents and relatives will actually acknowledge your existence now (whether for good or bad you decide). Oh, and spouses won't go walkabout on rainy days anymore, unless they have to go to work.
Other, more inanimate objects will undergo changes too: fruit trees yield higher quality fruit over time, and lightning strikes will now have a "unique effect" on them. Other aspects of lightning have changed as well: it's more likely to hit trees and crops, for example.
The full list of updates in 1.07 is over on the Stardew Valley community forum. It follows 1.06, which also contained a whole lot of adjustments to the way marriage works. It's fun to get married in Stardew Valley.
I recently spent an hour clicking on pictures of rocks and logs to make them disappear. I was cleaning up my farm in Stardew Valley, but that friendly little narrative aside, I was really just clicking on things to delete them. And I was happy to do it. Toiling in the fields with my click-axe, pulverizing rocks, cutting down trees, and slicing up weeds is weirdly pleasant in the mindless way picking pills off a sweater can be. I wondered why, so I asked a psychologist.
Jamie Madigan, who holds a Ph.D in psychology and writes about
the science s intersection with games, tells me that the pleasantness of tidying may be related to the broader joy of finishing what we start. There's a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect, Madigan wrote, where incomplete tasks create a mental tension that is released when we finish.
Madigan also pointed out that studies—including Zeigarnik s—have shown that we remember more about tasks which have been interrupted than those we ve completed, presumably because we need to recall where we left off if we re to return to the project. And that sense of incompleteness weighs on us.
Leaving things unfinishe-
time warp
Incomplete tasks are also shown to have a lengthening effect on perceived time duration. In a 1992 study by Noah Schiffman and Suzanne Greist-Bousquet, participants were either given 10 or 20 anagrams to descramble. Those who were given 10 were allowed to complete the entire set, while those who were given 20 were interrupted after solving the first 10 (which were the same problems the other group was given). Both groups were then asked how long they d spent solving the anagrams. The group that was interrupted felt more time had past.
Zeigarnik found that participants who were interrupted in the middle of a task could be very unhappy about it. It s easy to empathize. The experimenters timed interruptions to break the subjects concentration when they were most engrossed in the task, and I m frustrated just by reading the example: The subject is moulding the clay figure of a dog; he has reached the point where something four-legged and dog-like is appearing, but there is still grave danger that his dog will become a cat before he is through.
Horrifying. It s like the teacher saying pencils down while you re halfway through writing a sentence. In 1953, Samuel Beckett's famous play Waiting for- . Just awful.
I surmise from all this that one of the reasons I clean is simply to get the clutter off my mind. To complete a task like tidying my farm, or some sub-goal in that effort, is to allow myself to forget about it—a relief even if the task itself is simple and repetitive.
The feeling applies broadly to games. For instance, I suffered the one more turn effect of Civilization acutely last Sunday afternoon as I attempted to conquer Japan. I was forced to leave my conquest in an unfinished state, with only two of three cities captured, to take my puppy to training class. When I got home, even after an hour of failing to make a bark monster look at me, I could still recall my troop formations and thought about the scenario a few times until I got back to my desk to take care of Osaka. Likewise, visualizing a plan for my Stardew Valley farm and not being able to complete it is bothersome. Be it chopping down trees or forcefully annexing cities, what is started must be finished.
How can I stop now?
Cleaning up
But what about
cleaning itself? Why, specifically, does clicking on rocks to make them disappear feel satisfying? That s what I set out to discover, but my research on the subject of tidying was frustrating, turning up pop psychology stories about how to unburden your refrigerator door for a healthier life and 10 ways to find your Zen by reorganizing your closet. I can t wait to create a bottle opener hierarchy to determine which deserves to stay in my kitchen drawer.
But maybe all the life hackers are onto something. Article after article says that clutter increases stress, and though I've had trouble finding a lot of hard evidence, it is accepted that we can only process so much visual information at a time. And yet many of us hold onto clutter despite the disarray impeding our focus. We tend to value things we own more just because we own them, making it hard to toss even trivial things. But what if I need it later?
A game, however, can lay that disarray into a grid—some squares pristine, others clearly marked as unsightly junk (which you've never really owned)—and all you have to do to restore order is click. Perhaps deleting virtual clutter is pleasant because it lets us enjoy tidying and organizing in a space cordoned off from our real belongings. We get to remove stressful visual noise without the stress of actually throwing out our decaying t-shirts or those bad oil paintings we did in college (using examples from my own life, here).
The Gestalt Principles
looking for group
The composition on top is in disarray. Its elements can be grouped by similarity and proximity, but not in a very meaningful way. It's ugly. The figure on the bottom, while not rigidly gridded or spaced, is a more pleasing abstract composition, even though it uses the same elements. I suspect that if the clutter in a game is arranged in a pretty way, it won't be as effective as it can be at motivating 'cleaning.'
From a visual design perspective, Gestalt psychology can also help explain our negative feelings toward clutter. The Gestalt laws of grouping are set of principles (observations, really, but useful ones) regarding how we perceive images and scenes, and are commonly applied to graphic design and fine arts.
According to the Gestalt school of thought, the 'whole' we perceive when looking at a scene is not just the sum of everything in the scene. We simplify. A cross is not four lines meeting at the center, for instance, but two lines intersecting each other. And when we look at a pile of potatoes, we don t think about each individual potato s relationship to all the other objects in the scene. We see the potatoes as a group, because they re similar to each other and they re next to each other, and then think about how that pile relates to other groups in the scene.
If all those potatoes are scattered around with intentional discord, we'll still group them, but the scene becomes unsightly and difficult to process. It's just bad composition. A still life painting in which all of the objects are roughly equidistant from each other would be a terrible still life painting by most accounts. Painters divide small objects into masses, creating pleasing designs through the relationships of large shapes, just as music composers don't treat notes as independent from each other, wildly banging on pianos (unless that composer is H. Jon Benjamin).
Ugly compositions like the Stardew Valley screen below stress me out. I want to rearrange it, to create some order—just a bit of decent landscaping. And I ll happily do it if a game gives me the tools. I may even want to fix the scene despite not being all that interested in the rest of the game—just by running Stardew Valley to take a screenshot of my cluttered farm I risked becoming absorbed by cleaning.
These rocks and bushes are scattered fairly evenly, so the eye is drawn all over the scene with few large, distinct groupings rest on.
It all stacks up
The visual discomfort caused by chaotic scenes combined with the Zeigarnik effect, which prods us to complete tasks we start, may be what turns a quick Stardew session into an hours long rock smashing marathon. We re attacking stressful disorder while observing clear progress toward a goal, motivation and reward neatly coiled together.
The act of removing junk and restoring order is present throughout videogames of all types. Tetris doles out satisfaction with the deletion of lines, open world Ubisoft games have us wipe the markers off maps, and Viscera Cleanup Detail takes it literally, having you clean up the gory mess left by other games. It s not even that big of a conceptual leap to see how ticking down the number of Zeds in Killing Floor 2 is a more complex method for deleting rocks. Take a nice scene and fill it with turmoil, and we're compelled to clean it up. Apparently, we actually like cleaning quite a bit.
Apparently, we actually like cleaning quite a bit.
And yet there are three empty coffee mugs on my desk I haven t touched in days—dang. Madigan suggests my lack of motivation in real life may be because the rewards of tidying aren t as neatly packaged out here. You get concise, specific feedback about what you do in games and you can usually see progress towards a goal and get larger tasks broken out into quickly achievable sub-goals, he wrote. Cleaning your house, getting a promotion, or getting fit don't offer that kind of feedback.
So while there may be three coffee mugs on my desk, along with a twist tie, a piece of pizzle (which I recently discovered is the nice word for bull penis, something puppies love to chew), three USB drives, a crumpled plastic wrapper, a plate and fork, six pennies, two dimes, a quarter, sixteen small nails that got stuck to my speakers when I shipped them, and a Cammy Heroclix, my Stardew Valley farm is starting to look awfully tidy.
Stardew Valley has taken steps toward improving marriage in the game with the recent launch of the 1.06 update, which aims to ensure that spouses retain a lot more of their unique 'personality' after they get hitched. Each spouse now has his or her own unique dialogue, and will leave the house at least once a week to go to town, or maybe to just take a walk.
The changes will only impact items created after the patch is installed, so anything made prior to the match will retain its old price and/or edibility. There will be more marriage improvements to come, developer Eric Barone, he of the most epic "Show Us Your Rig" ever, wrote. Hope you're having a nice weekend.
You too, Eric—thanks for the patch. And since we're talking about ways to make Stardew Valley even better, be sure not to miss our list of the best Stardew Valley mods, which includes pet replacements, anime portraits, and the annoying dog from Undertale, right here.
This week on the Mod Roundup, Stardew Valley gets a Pokemon-themed infusion thanks to a number of texture replacements. Also, you can add new sights and encounters to your randomly generated Advent maps in XCOM 2. Finally, a mod lets you play through Doom 2 as Duke Nukem along with his signature weapons.
Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.
This isn't a single mod but a collection of of links to Stardew Valley texture replacements that turn your various farm animals into Pokemon. You cat becomes Meowth and your horse becomes Ponyta, and you can transform cave monsters into Zubats and Digletts. Just to be up front with you, I know exactly jack about Pokemon, but if you're a fan of both it and Stardew this seems like a great way to combine them.
Looking for more mods for the smash-hit farming game? Tom's got you covered with his picks for the best Stardew Valley mods.
I love mods that mash two different games together, and it's hard to imagine a better match than Duke Nukem and Doom 2. Now you can play through Doom 2's levels as Duke, along with his weapons like the Shrink Ray and Freezethrower plus plenty of classic Duke one-liners. It works with tons of custom Doom levels as well.
If you're still enjoying XCOM 2, and maybe thinking about taking a new run through it, you can enhance your experience with a mod that adds a bunch of new parcels and PCP's to the game's map generation pool. Currently focusing on Advent maps, you'll be treated to a new Advent landing pad, checkpoints, traffic stops, new house raids that will make your maps more varied and interesting.
