Stardew For Two

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #185. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.

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This Christmas, Jacob and Peter Marrone received, among many other gifts, two new Nintendo Switch joy-cons.

That brings the household hoard to the rather mundane total of four. That’s just enough for a full, rousing circuit of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, in which three barely-proficient players race to save face while the other, Peter, gets continually lapped, obstinately refuses to cross the finish line – and zooms backwards into various pits as peals of laughter become frustrated yelling then peals of laughter again.

But Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is not the reason the boys asked Santa for a second pair of remotes. The gift has more to do with the Feast of the Winter Star than any of the more traditional December holidays.

The second pair is now used, almost exclusively, for co-op Stardew Valley. And what at first seemed like an amazing father-sons bonding opportunity has quickly turned into a pixelated nightmare.

Let’s rewind a bit. All three Marrone males have their own farms. Dad’s is a thriving, end-game affair. Jacob’s is, well, bounding with potential. Peter’s is a total mess; its central resident has long frowned upon actual farming while claiming to be too scared to enter the mines.

The latter two farms, for all their charms and demerits, have lain dormant ever since Dad fixed the boat to Ginger Island. For weeks, his farm was the only one anyone wanted to play. In fact, when Mom and Dad went away for a 10th anniversary trip to Buenos Aires, young Peter took advantage of Grandma’s indulgence by logging onto Dad’s account and doing God knows what for hours on end as the farm itself fell into a state of near-ruin.

During all of this, there was, shining in the distance, the glorious promise of co-op. When the joy-cons arrived, we would team up to build a thriving farm together, from scratch, to balance out our strengths and weaknesses, to restart our disparate journeys amid the new features of version 1.6 – and create something majestic. We even named our main character Marrone Kings.

Marrone Kings, with his farm named with our initials, sat there in digital space. Waiting.

And then, inevitably, came Christmas.

In the months since, Stardew Valley co-op has been a clash of strategies:

• Dad plays to make money and build the farm.
• Jacob plays to make friends in the neighborhood and spend Dad’s hard-earned money on paintings for the house, new pets and other non-essentials.
• Peter plays until he dies (or it’s too late to get home in time), paying Harvey 1,000 gold and, like his older brother, erasing any profits Dad made that day.

Other fun co-op moments:

• At the town Fair, Dad fished his way to a Stardrop. He then had to take Jacob’s remote – Jacob had been eating free hamburgers and winning a single star token at a time doing the test of strength – and fish him to a Stardrop, too. It stopped being fun for everyone about two-thirds of the way to Stardrop No. 1.
• Peter convinced Dad to let him use precious family resources to upgrade his watering can. He has since declined to water a single crop, although when winter came he was seen on the beach randomly watering snow.
• Despite having a trailer home for Player 2 that Jacob insisted on, everyone wants to sleep in the main house, in the same bed. Jacob becomes annoyed when Dad gets into bed on “his” side.
• Our pet dog mysteriously disappeared. Still can’t explain that one, but running away sounds like a reasonable option.
• For a while, there was a fun bug that made NPCs love any gift given to them. Jacob and I are close to bagging sisters Haley and Emily as our girlfriends, respectively, having only given them tree sap and, at times, literal trash.

At any rate, our bonding-time mostly consists of Jacob pleading with Peter not to die, Dad begging Jacob not to give away expensive items, and Peter chopping at Dad’s avatar with his virtual axe while Dad tries to fish. Oh yeah, there’s also a co-op bug that causes the game to randomly crash, wiping out any progress we’ve managed to actually make since the last time we slept.

In other words, perfect. Stardew Valley turned 9 late last month. Here’s to 9 more.

Editor’s Note: Here’s one last thing from Matt!

It’s Happening Again …

As most of you know, we recently lost David Lynch, one of the great American filmmakers. As my reader knows (hi, how’s it going?), I am a big Lynch/Twin Peaks nerd who has written about both for Unwinnable but also writes for a print magazine about those topics. Well, to honor Lynch, that magazine – The Blue Rose – is releasing one final issue. I have one piece in there, breaking down 11 crucial minutes of Inland Empire, but there are actual things of value in it, including an interview with Kyle MacLachlan, who knew Lynch about as well as anyone. So, if that interests you, click here to order a copy!

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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.