Stardew Valley has received a major update. Version 1.6, released just 24 hours after its release on PC, has raised the game’s popularity to staggering heights. According to SteamDB, this cozy farming simulator has reached 146,159 simultaneous players on Steam, breaking the game’s previous record.
Stardew Valley’s previous high for simultaneous players on Steam was reached back in January 2021, shortly after the release of the 1.5 update. Back then, the game attracted 94,875 users. Interestingly, the new record is also higher than the number of simultaneous players for the new popular game Palworld, which was demonstrated over the past week. This is quite an impressive result for an indie RPG from almost a decade ago. Developer Erik «Concerned Ape» Barone revealed some of the content of the new 1.6 update on X ahead of yesterday’s patch release, which likely helped attract new and existing fans to the game.
Among the most interesting innovations of Stardew Valley 1.6 update are a large new Meadowlands farm optimized for animal breeding, the ability to move the farm to a new location, new pets (including turtles and new breeds of cats/dogs) and support for multiple pets, as well as many new NPCs with dialogs. The developer has also prepared a few surprises – he did not add some new features to the release notes of Stardew Valley 1.6. Therefore, these surprises can only be discovered during the game.
Stardew Valley 1.6 update is currently available on Steam and GOG. Patch 1.6.1 has also been released to fix several bugs. However, the developer has not announced when the update will be ready for consoles and mobile devices. Stardew Valley is currently on sale at a discounted price of $11.99 (183 UAH on Steam).
Source: The Verge