Stardew Valley – The Pursuit of Perfection

Stardew Valley rocketed back into the gaming zeitgeist in March 2024 by releasing the much-awaited Update 1.6, which famously ballooned from its “minor quality-of-life patch for modders” beginnings when first announced. Like many players, I’d loved the game back in the day and created many fond memories in the valley, but new releases and the neverending search for novelty had pulled my attention to different (if not always greener) pastures. But the promise of fresh content brought me back, first to prepare my farm by whittling down my in-game bucket list, and second to save on Spring 1 of the upcoming year since ConcernedApe had cheekily warned us that “a new save file” will let you see everything in context. Unfortunately I was far too attached to the farm I’d been building on and off since 2016, especially since, after eight years of slowly chipping away at everything the game had to offer, I started seeing Perfection in sight.

Perfection as a mechanic was added in 1.5, meant to serve as a sort of ‘win state’ for those who want to truly experience most everything the game has to offer. It requires collecting/catching/shipping pretty much every single item, maxing out all the various skill trees, and earning tens of millions of gold. It was never something I’d honestly expected to reach; I remember unlocking the Walnut Room and thinking, “Nice, you know I feel like I’ve probably done about all there is to do,” just to find the Perfection tracker at a measly 34%. There were three obvious places my default playstyle was holding me back; Crafting/Cooking, Skull Cavern, and earning Money.

Money

Now it’s kinda silly to say anyone can be bad at earning money in Stardew Valley, as even a casual player will rack up millions easily enough. I was sitting at around 4.5 million at the time I started chasing Perfection, and that’s more than enough to do anything you like if you’re happy with your status quo. But Perfection requires much more tactical and optimized shipping pipelines, since you’re gonna need ten million just to buy the mandatory Gold Clock, and as I’ve just noted, I hadn’t reached half that in almost eight years of playing a single save file.

My farm was a pretty typical ancient fruit farm, just using the Speed-Gro and agricultural perks to cycle those weekly harvests into dosh, but my sluggish rate of earning finally spurred me to start learning the various ways to kickstart profits by converting my raw materials into artisan goods. Ancient fruits could become wine, which I could further age in caskets for vintage value multipliers. I started turning milk and eggs from my animals into cheese and mayonnaise, lava eel roe from my fish ponds into Aged Roe, truffles from my pigs into truffle oil. Before long I had a convoluted network of Factorio-worthy product pipelines snaking throughout my farm and operating day and night. But even then, this fiscal goalpost took longer to reach than all the others, and the $10,000,000 Gold Clock was the last checkmark I completed on my run.

Cooking/Crafting

Before hunkering down and getting serious, my overreliance on raw goods had also left me seriously bereft in crafting the various appliances and dishes in the game. At the moment I unlocked the Perfection Tracker, I’d crafted only 12% of cooking and 16% of crafting recipes. This was a major problem, as many of them required ingredients that were seasonal or hard to obtain, and I spent over a year in-game just juggling fishing, mining, mob-farming, and frequent caravan visits slowly accumulating the various items needed to craft all these curios. (If you plan to do this, ticking the “Show Advanced Crafting Information” box in your game options is mandatory, as it shows you which items you haven’t crafted yet at a quick glance.) The hardest component for me to get was radioactive bars, since their ore only spawned in hard-mode dungeons and, as previously mentioned…

Skull Cavern

…I’d never actually reached the bottom floor of the Skull Cavern, much less done so with Qi’s ‘Dangerous’ modifiers active. I knew you could cheese it with staircases, but I felt morally obligated to do it properly, which is a tough order as the monsters hit like a truck and you’re heavily-reliant on luck (both coded and cosmic) to maintain the pace needed to descend 100 floors in one day. In the end, I needed a vampiric Infinity Hammer, two iridium band/lucky combo rings, and the godly Perfect Ice Rod trinket to regularly delve deep enough to complete the various Qi Challenges and farm enough radioactive ore for the late-game recipes. The penultimate Perfection parameter I popped was killing 50 Pepper Rexes, those dinos did not spawn very frequently and I suspect I’m not the only one who got stuck on them.

In the end, the extreme grind (of all these requirements) really added a level of satisfaction to finally pulling it off, to seeing cutscenes reserved for the hardest-working farmers and tying a neat little bow on the many adventures and ordeals I’d undergone in Stardew Valley. Honestly, if you’ve ever been considering doing a Perfection run of your own, I think you’ll find the road long but fulfilling. These screenshots all show my stats as of the day I finally reached the summit, so you can see you’ll become well-familiar with every facet of this game, though truthfully most of it was unlocked without me even noticing. Stardew Valley somehow makes every moment feel fun, and there are a dozen different systems in place to keep anything from getting too punishing or tedious. This really is a one-of-a-kind game, well worth the many accolades it’s received, and you should really go experience its pixel-pastiched perfection for yourself, even if that isn’t with a capital P.