beating Stardew Valley the wrong way

This year’s Stardew Valley 1.6 update introduced a lot of things to the smash-hit indie game, including frogs, desert festivals, and green rain. This is all very exciting, but something else arrived with the latest update that potentially turns the game on its head. In the latest version of Stardew Valley, you can pay for perfection.

For those who don’t know, Stardew Valley has a perfection rating, and if you get to 100%, you unlock a final cutscene to round out the game. To get there, you need to craft everything, befriend everyone, find all those pesky golden walnuts and Stardrops, and generally finish every task the game throws at you. That sounds like a lot of effort, and I can tell you, as someone who’s done it before, it is. So, I thought, what if I just bypassed it all and completed the game while doing as little as possible? What if I paid for perfection?

This might not seem like such a crime to the uninitiated, but as someone who’s loved Stardew Valley for years, it feels like it could be the worst thing I’ve ever done. You see, this game presents you with a relatively binary choice right from the outset: you can restore the community center and bring Pelican Town back to life by working alongside the magical Junimos, or you can give in to the great beast of capitalism and sign up to the Joja Corporation – think Amazon or Walmart – to turn the dilapidated center into a Joja warehouse alongside Morris, the local JojaMart manager. In all my years, I’ve not once opted for the latter option.

It’s just not the done thing. To complete the community center, the game forces you to try new things: fishing, mining, or foraging rare items. If you go the Joja route, all you have to do is make enough money to contribute to Joja, and you can do that simply by growing the most lucrative crops and never talking to a soul in Pelican Town outside of Pierre, who is almost depressingly unaware that your actions are contributing to the growth of his biggest rival. It turns a game that’s essentially a celebration of anti-capitalist ideals into something that would make Jeff Bezos grin with delight from atop his ivory tower.

Despite my natural inclination to support Pierre, Mayor Lewis, and the rest of the Stardew Valley characters, I thought that I’d give the new route to perfection a go, just to see how it made me feel. I think I already knew the answer to that question, but in the name of science, I started a new save, skipped through all the warm fuzzies about how you find your way to Grandpa’s farm, and got to making money. Thus my disheartening quest had begun.

The early part of the Joja perfection route is pretty easy. All you have to do is make 135kgold to complete all the Joja Community Development Projects, which in turn fixes the local bus, the quarry bridge, the minecart system, and your farm greenhouse while also demolishing an obstruction in the river that allows you to pan for treasure. Then comes the first demoralizing cutscene. Once everything is finished, you join Morris to celebrate the completion of the storage facility. Notably, no one else from the town is present.

Already at this point, I felt a way I’d never felt before while playing Stardew. I felt a bit like a traitor. As I make pretty clear in my Stardew Valley review, this game means a great deal to me, and I’ve known characters like Gus, the local barman, and Clint, the lonely blacksmith, longer than I have some of my closest friends. So, to turn my back on them and celebrate the opening of the warehouse alongside Morris and his Joja lackeys felt like a betrayal. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning, and it was only going to get harder from here on in.

The next step involved getting to Ginger Island. The tropical island, which arrived as part of the 1.5 update, is a big deal in the Joja run as it holds the two final pieces of the puzzle. First is the Golden Joja Parrot. Normally, you’d have to collect 100 golden walnuts to unlock Mr. Qi’s Walnut Room, where you can track your perfection rating before finding the final 30. However, thanks to the Golden Joja Parrot, you can simply hand over 10k gold for every walnut you don’t have, and the bird delivers them overnight. So, after spending well over one million gold, I had all the walnuts.

Then it was time to meet my final accomplice and Joja Special Services Division representative, Fizz. Once you’ve unlocked Mr. Qi’s Walnut Room, you get a letter from Fizz, who asks that you visit him in Ginger Island’s watery cave. This is where the magic happens. For 500k gold, Fizz can increase your perfection rating by 1%. Unsurprisingly, I was only at 4% completion when I first met the shady Joja rep, meaning I’d need to put together 48 million gold to clear the final hurdle.

So, I went industrial. I used all the free land on the Ginger Island farm and in the greenhouse to grow Starfruit, the most lucrative in-game crop, and toiled for several seasons to make it happen. It wasn’t as labor-intensive as the early part of the run, as I had the resources to craft countless sprinklers, but it was dull. The routine consisted of planting hundreds of Starfruit crops before sleeping for 13 days, harvesting, and repeating. I could have probably done it quicker, but the exciting part of this experiment was essentially over by this point.

After weeks of in-game sleeping, it was done. I trotted along to Fizz, handed over the 48 million, and I went back to bed. The next day, I strolled down Ginger Island’s beach for the last time, not even bothering to pull my sprinklers out of the ground, and I checked the perfection tracker. 100%. Finally. All that was left to do was return to Pelican Town, head north, and step up to the summit, the secret area of the game only seen by fellow perfectionists and those who’ve spoiled it for themselves on YouTube.

So, how did I feel stepping up to the summit to watch Stardew’s fabled 100% perfection cutscene? Unsurprisingly, I did not feel good, not good at all. Worse still the game blatantly calls you out for taking the Joja route during the final moments, rubbing salt in the metaphorical wound. I’d technically achieved something, sure, but it felt hollow. For hours, I just farmed and farmed and farmed, ignoring almost everything that makes the game one of my all-time favorites and turning it into something altogether more monotonous and soul-sapping.

Still, while achieving perfection this way made me feel nothing good, it was only for a moment. Following the big reveal of the final cutscene, I simply returned to the title. From there, I jumped back into the save file where I have a farm full of adorable animals, where I’ve made a home in Pelican Town for Pam to rebuild her life, and even my Stardew Valley kids, who, admittedly, I hadn’t missed all that much, but it’s nice to know they’re there. Yes, taking the Joja route to perfection has given me a rejuvenated appreciation for everything Stardew Valley can be and what it means to me.

Ultimately, I can understand why ConcernedApe made it possible to achieve perfection this way. It works towards the overarching message of Stardew Valley, and I suppose a certain view of how to live your life: doing things the hard way, but the way that feels right, is almost always more rewarding than the more convenient alternative. With one route, you learn some lessons along the way, make some friends, and might even find a sense of community, with the other, you sleep, work, and that’s about it. Also, with the latter, your only real friend is Morris; let’s be honest, we hate Morris.

So, if you want my advice, don’t pay for perfection in Stardew Valley. Whether ConcernedApe intended the mechanic to offer the philosophical dilemma I’ve interpreted it as or just to give those desperate to complete the game an out isn’t clear, and I don’t know him so I can’t ask. Either way, it’s not worth it. It makes me think of that tired old cliche, about how the real treasure is the friends we make along the way, but in this instance, it’s actually true. And who wants to be friends with Morris?

There you have it, my experience with paying for perfection in Stardew Valley. If you’re looking for more games like the indie farming hit to play, be sure to check out our guides to the best cozy games and the best games like Stardew Valley while you’re here. Or, if you’re looking for a console where you can try out some Stardew Valley mods, see our list of the best Steam Deck alternatives.