Earlier this year, ConcernedApe announced he was making a minor, less content-focused update for Stardew Valley, primarily to focus on adding modding support.
Still, if there’s anything Terraria has taught me, indie devs get carried away with minor updates, and now Stardew 1.6 is packed with a ton of new content that will excite pretty much everyone.
This is no small update, adding a major festival, challenge areas for each skill, new sprites for every villager, more players in multiplayer, and a ton of minor additions to make the game much more polished.
It’s not as huge of an update as 1.5 was, but it’s something to get excited about, and I think it’s time we dive into everything it’s adding.
What’s in the Stardew Valley 1.6 update?
Luckily for us, ConcernedApe has shared a complete list of everything this update will contain; though we don’t know what some of it means yet, I’ll give my best guess and try to give you a good idea of how it will go.
Either way, everything here excites me and means I can’t wait to jump back into Stardew Valley as soon as this drops.
- A New Major Festival is something ConcernedApe has teased before, and we still don’t know exactly what that entails, other than it being on the level of the Fair or Winter Star festivals.
- Two New Mini Festivals will be smaller festivals on the Festival of Ice or Flower Dance level, mostly just adding things to help fill out the calendar more.
- New Late-Game Content That Expands on Each of the Skill Areas is a super interesting one on this list. I think areas on Ginger Island will test your Farming, Combat, Mining, etc., but I have no clue how you’d even make something like that for fishing and foraging; we’ll have to see.
- New Items and Crafting Recipes is pretty self-explanatory; with new content comes new stuff to support that content, and in the image, we can see a new Warp Totem, Purple Coffee, and a Quiver?
- Joja Alternatives to Some of the End-Game Quests presumably refer to things on Ginger Island. If I had to guess, they’d take you there instead of Willy, starting their capitalism-fueled conquest on the tropical island.
- 100+ New Lines of Dialogue is a bit vague, but I presume we’re getting more friendship events and some extra filler dialogue for most characters to spice things up when you’re talking to them.
- Winter Outfits for the Villagers changes up their sprites, presumably for the entire month of Winter, and we can see two great examples at the bottom of the image with Jas and Sebastian.
- New Type of Reward for Completing Billboard Requests is, again, vague, but I assume we’ll get a new type of currency when doing these tasks that we can spend on a new shop; either that or it’s just a good item.
- Support for 8 Player Multiplayer on PC is fantastic. At the same time, it’s sad that consoles and mobile don’t get to do this; it’ll be enjoyable hopping on a Stardew farm and getting things done incredibly quickly with seven other people.
- Many Small Additions and Adjustments is vague, but we can expect a few quality-of-life things here and there.
- New Farm Type is an exciting addition. We don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll probably be massive and attuned to 8-player multiplayer.
- New Secrets & More probably refers to more items you can find at certain times, like the Junimo Plush.
Overall, it is a massive update that I cannot wait to dive into. Unfortunately, as ConcernedApe said in this post, there is no release date yet, and everything is still in development, but you can probably expect to see news on that release date in a few months, and I would wager that PC will get it first.
Further Reading
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