Eric Barone says he …
Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone can’t help himself. The long and glorious journey of Stardew Valley development was supposed to be capped off with the major 1.6 update, which in Barone’s words this April left the game in “a good place”—so good he wouldn’t be “working on Stardew Valley until I’m done with Haunted Chocolatier.”
But then in August our green-fingered hero announced he was going back… for one (point seven) last job.
Barone managed to keep away for four whole months, before speaking at a live concert of Stardew Valley music and blurting out that 1.7 was gonna happen. “Okay, I revealed this at the concert last night and now the cat’s out of the bag,” Barone followed-up on X. “So I will confirm for everyone: There will be a Stardew Valley 1.7 update. No release date, no estimate. But it’s happening.”
Our man then answered the question most would want asked: Yes, it will slow down work on his next game Haunted Chocolatier, “but not as much as you might think.”
That’s because, surprise surprise, such a massive hit now has a team working alongside Barone to maintain it: even if this bucolic Willy Wonka “need[s] my hand to touch every piece of new content,” he’s still spending plenty of time in the (haunted) chocolate factory.
Stardew Valley does seem like one of those games that, for whatever reason, just appeals across generations. I loved it way back when I first played it, which would be almost a decade ago now, and was delighted when it was the first game my eldest kid really clicked with: and fascinated by how differently she played the game to me, and how it accommodated and rewarded that different approach. Perhaps that’s why it is, from the horse’s mouth, “still so popular (in fact, still growing) that it’s hard to just stop improving it.”
In a new response to a fan request for a “sneak peek” Barone says “More will come. I just don’t want too much hype at this point. It’s going to be a while before the update is ready.” The only other thing Barone added to this was an assurance they’d try to avoid the six-month gap between the PC and console release of 1.6: “I will do my best to minimize the delay between the two so as not to have the same problem as last update.”
Avoiding the hype is impossible: too many people love Stardew Valley, to the extent that Barone and co. could probably push a 1.7 update that added a new vegetable, and we’d all go bananas. But then it is, by the most objective metric on the planet, the ninth-best game ever made.