Forget the watering can — your best Stardew Valley tool is a guidebook

polygon.com:

Stardew Valley is known as a cozy game, an experience that lets you settle into the repetition of tasks like tilling soil, planting seeds, and watering crops. The game’s split into 28-day seasons — and you’ve got to be in bed by 2 a.m. each night — but there’s otherwise no real time limit. You’re free to go about your day as you please. You don’t even have to farm; plenty of players spend their days fishing, exploring Stardew Valley’s deep mines, or tending to flocks of sheep. But for all its coziness, Stardew Valley isn’t a casual game. After you get sucked into the idyllic nature of farm life, it’s easy to be enticed further by the hardcore nature of getting everything done as efficiently as possible. There’s a lot to keep track of: When’s the best time to plant eggplant seeds? What are Shane’s favorite gifts? How many more fish do I need to catch?

That’s why, for lots of Stardew Valley players, the most important tool is not a gold hoe or iridium trash can. It’s a guidebook.

Stardew Valley was released in February 2016, and the official Stardew Valley Guidebook, published by Fangamer, was released later that year, after the 1.1 update. It’s like The Farmer’s Almanac, but for Stardew Valley. Designer and artist Kari Fry was tapped to illustrate and design the book after publishing some fan guides and art books for other games, she told Polygon via email. Her partner, Ryan Novak, does the data and writing. Together, they’ve updated the guidebook four times, and they are now working on a fifth version that accounts for the new 1.6 update.

“It’s wild thinking about how much has been changed and added since the original version,” Fry said. “Size-wise, it started at 224 pages, and now it’s a cool 300 pages. Over the last eight years, Eric has added big things like Multiplayer, new festivals, the Movie Theater, Ginger Island, with tons of smaller changes and updates sprinkled in between. It’s fun keeping up!”

Liz Richardson, a journalist and longtime Stardew Valley play