Stardew Valley players are arranging Green Day and more with flute blocks

polygon.com:

Stardew Valley’s charming farm decorations include two unique little blocks that play a flute note or a drum sound when players run by them. Though they’re cute, I never quite figured out how to arrange them. Mine were typically consigned to gather dust in a random chest somewhere in a dark corner of my farm.

But in the hands of the right player, flute and drum blocks transform into something incredible: walking tracks that play complex classical melodies and popular tunes. And in the past six months, talented Stardew Valley players have created masterful flute block arrangements of dizzyingly complex songs like Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca (Turkish March),” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” the Pokémon battle theme, and of course, Toby Fox’s “Megalovania” from Undertale (in which the character even looks like Papyrus).

On Reddit, clips of players walking these musical paths have garnered tens of thousands of upvotes, and it’s easy to see why. These walking tracks are mesmerizing — like a video game equivalent of a vintage music box, one of those slowly rotating cylinders where each protruding metal tab makes a gentle plink. You can look at them and know this took some time to make. The arrangement of “Megalovania,” for example, took six hours to plan, followed by five hours of placing blocks, creator Yaramy wrote in the Reddit post. And this is someone who has made quite a few.

Arranging music is challenging, even with the best tools, and doing it in Stardew Valley takes a combination of Excel wizardry and furious clicking. It also involves some very specific hurdles: There’s the limitation of sounds that can be played at any given time; a sprite’s walking speed, which augments the tempo; and the challenge of finding a big