When farming sim Stardew Valley first came out back in 2016, most of us saw it as a modest indie hit, offering charm, wit and a beautiful little world. Ten years later, this tiny indie has sold nearly 50m copies. If you haven’t played it yourself, you’ve probably seen someone playing it on the train (or, in the case of one of my musical theatre castmates, in the dressing room between scenes). As we discussed on the Tech Weekly podcast shortly after its launch, this calming game about tending crops and animals and relationships with neighbours rejuvenated the entire farming/life sim genre. To this day, I still get press releases promising that some upcoming cosy game or another is the next Stardew Valley.
While developer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone now has a small team to help with periodic updates, the original game – his first – was all his own work, from the distinctive pixel art and animations to the soundtrack that has since toured the world in concert. Unable to get a job after university, he’d started his own project inspired by the Harvest Moon series (now called Story of Seasons). One notable addition was the inclusion of queer romance options. The ability to pursue a romantic relationship with other townsfolk is a key part of the game’s popularity – as demonstrated by the thousands who tuned in to a video from Barone revealing the identities of two new marriage candidates – and the fact that all potential spouses are available to the player character regardless of gender has helped the game garner a dedicated queer fanbase.
“In a game where you’re role-playing an idyllic life, you should be able to marry the person you want,” says kcspace, a member of the thriving Stardew Valley modding community, who create new features and stories for the PC version of the game and distribute them online. For her mods, she was inspired by a feature from the Story of Seasons games named Rival Marriages, which allowed players to encourage non-playable characters to marry each other – something that’s not possible in Stardew Valley. But while the Story of Seasons games at the time only supported heterosexual relationships (though the series has since improved its queer representation), kspace’s Stardew Valley mod Starcrossed introduced straight and queer NPC pairings.
“I really wanted to see Alex and Sam as a couple,” she says of two Stardew Valley characters who are relationship candidates for the player. “I feel like their personalities compliment each other in a really fun way, and I think Alex’s story arc (when you marry him as a male farmer) really lends itself well to a relationship with another man.”
This is something I have found as a player. Encounter sporty Alex as a female farmer and his casual misogyny – “If you weren’t a girl I’d ask you to play catch” – is pretty off-putting, but marry him to your male farmer and you get a queer-specific story in which he reveals he was confused about his feelings, and his grandfather George’s struggle to overcome his homophobia.
“I love that even though it’s really small subtle details, those considerations are still there,” says non-binary crochet artist Jack Evil. “You don’t completely feel like an afterthought, even with how open-ended so much about the game is.”
Evil’s current project is a huge dedication to Stardew Valley: a crochet version of the in-game map that they’ve been crafting row by row since April last year. Their weekly video updates have received hundreds of thousands of views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube; and longtime viewers have noticed changes to more than just the map: “I started taking testosterone about two months before I started this series,” says Evil. “So you can really hear my voice change, probably within the first five updates that I did. I’ve had so many people remark on it in a very positive way, talking about how part of the joy for them is watching my transition alongside the map progress.”
Aside from the inclusion of queer stories, and the relative safety of games deemed to be “for women”, Evil theorises that Stardew Valley is popular with queer players because “there is something within the game that is such a core piece of it, and that’s its inherently anticapitalist message”.
In Stardew Valley, the deed to your farm comes from a grandfather in an envelope to be opened “on a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life”, characterised by your character suffering a desk job at a corporation called Joja. When you do flee corporate life to the titular Stardew Valley, it turns out that Joja is there too, with a supermarket that rivals the little town shop. Players can even buy a Joja membership that lets them use their in-game earnings to fast-track town upgrades rather than unlocking them via engaging with the full range of in-game activities – foraging, farming, fishing, mining, etc – but that’s clearly not Barone’s preferred path.
Lizard Leigh, a YouTuber with more than 200,000 subscribers, also appreciates the anticapitalist message. It’s “profoundly on the nose”, they say in a video about their cosplay based on Stardew Valley’s Emily, “but I accidentally learned all these lessons about how I can reconnect to what I love about cosplay while working on a cosplay from a game that is about recovering from burnout.
“Emily was my immediate favourite in the game,” Leigh adds. “I’ll always be drawn to a sewing-themed character, and I love her earnestness and enthusiasm.” But the biggest motivation was comfort. Leigh made this cosplay at the height of summer, in temperatures suboptimal for binding their chest as they would have done with their other cosplays. But physical comfort didn’t come at the cost of comfort with their gender presentation: “Cosplay is about transformation. No one expects you to look like an anime protagonist or a Disney princess when it’s late at night and you’re out of cosplay. Having that separation where I didn’t need to have the affect and vibes of a ‘role’ outside of it was so integral to discovering my own transness.”
The resulting outfit is a summery interpretation of Emily’s blue-haired coral-dressed sprite, which includes twill tape with a measuring tape design (because she sews), a crocheted headband (self taught for this cosplay) and a rainbow quartz bracelet (because she likes crystals, “and she’s also a lesbian, and that’s a fact in my reality that I live in”). Crafted over many days and seen by tens of thousands of peoople, Leigh’s cosplay is just one of many tributes to this 10-year-old game whose designer cannot possibly have predicted the art it would inspire and the community it would create.
It’s important to recognise, after its 10-year anniversary in February, that there’s more to Stardew Valley than cosy escapism – it has supported identities and creativity, and presented an anticapitalist, non-heteronormative vision of a community that has inspired many of its players.
“The thing about queerness,” says Leigh, “is that because it’s an identity you have to develop in relation to other people … queer people are always going to seek out community in a big way. And Stardew Valley really is a community.”
