This year Stardew Valley Update 1.6 introduced many things to the hit indie game, including frogs, desert festivals, and green rain. This is all very exhilarating, but with the latest update comes something else that will potentially turn the game upside down. In the latest version of Stardew Valley, you can pay for perfection.
For those who don’t know, Stardew Valley has an Excellent rating, and if you reach 100%, you unlock the final game-ending cutscene. To get there, you have to craft everything, make friends with everyone, find all those pesky golden walnuts and Stardrops, and generally complete every task the game throws at you. It sounds like a lot of effort, and I can say that it is, as someone who has done it before. So I thought, what if I just skipped all that and finished the game doing as little as possible? What if I paid for perfection?
To the uninitiated, this may not seem like such a crime, but as someone who has loved Stardew Valley for years, I feel like this might be the worst thing I’ve ever done. You see, this game presents you with a relatively binary choice from the very beginning: you can restore the community center and bring Pelican Town back to life by working with the magical Junimos, or you can surrender to the great beast of capitalism and sign all the way to Joja Corporation – like Amazon or Walmart – to work with Morris, the local JojaMart manager, to turn the dilapidated center into a Joja warehouse. In all these years, I have never once chosen the latter option.
It’s just not finished yet. To complete the community center, the game forces you to try fresh things: fishing, mining, or obtaining occasional items. If you go the Joja route, all you need to do is earn enough money to support Joja, and you can do this by simply growing the most lucrative crops and never talking to anyone in Pelican Town other than Pierre, who is almost depressingly unaware that Your actions contribute to the development of his greatest rival. It turns a game that is essentially a celebration of anti-capitalist ideals into something that would make Jeff Bezos smile in delight while sitting atop his ivory tower.
Despite my natural inclination to support Pierre, Mayor Lewis, and the rest of the Stardew Valley characters, I thought I’d try the fresh route to perfection to see what effect it would have on me. I think I already knew the answer to this question, but in the name of science, I started a fresh save, skipped all the tidbits about how to get to my grandpa’s farm, and started making money. Thus began my depressing search.
The initial part of the Joja Perfection Trail is quite uncomplicated. All you need to do is earn 135 kg of gold to complete all of Joja’s community development projects, which in turn repairs the local bus, the quarry bridge, the mine cart system, and the farm’s greenhouse, while also demolishing an obstacle in the river that allows you to swim for the treasure . Then comes the first demoralizing cutscene. Once everything is ready, you join Morris to celebrate the completion of the warehouse facility. It is worth noting that there is no one else from the city.
Already at this point I felt like I had never felt before while playing Stardew. I felt a bit like a traitor. As I explain in my Stardew Valley review, this game means a lot to me, and I’ve known characters like Gus, the local bartender, and Clint, the lonely blacksmith, longer than some of my closest friends. So turning my back on them and celebrating the opening of the warehouse with Morris and his lackeys Joja felt like a betrayal. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning, and it only got more and more complex.
The next step was to reach Ginger Island. The tropical island that arrived as part of the 1.5 update is a substantial deal in the Joja run because it contains the final two pieces of the puzzle. The first is the Golden Parrot Joja. Normally, you’d have to collect 100 golden walnuts to unlock Mr. Qi’s Walnut Room, where you can track your perfection level before finding the final 30. However, with Joja’s Golden Parrot, you can simply donate 10,000. gold for every walnut you don’t have, and the bird delivers it overnight. So, after spending over a million zlotys, I had all the walnuts.
Then it was time to meet my latest partner and representative of Joja’s Special Services Department, Fizz. After unlocking Mr. Qi’s nut room, you will receive a letter from Fizz asking you to visit him in the water cave on Ginger Island. This is where the magic happens. For 500 thousand Gold Fizz can enhance your Perfection Rating by 1%. So it’s no surprise that when I first encountered shady Rep. Joja, I was only 4% complete, which meant I’d need to gather 48 million gold pieces to clear the final hurdle.
So I went into industry. I used all the available land on the Ginger Island farm and greenhouse to grow Starfruit, the most profitable crop in the game, and worked for several seasons to make it happen. It wasn’t as labor-intensive as when I first started because I had the resources to make countless sprinklers, but it was tedious. The procedure involved planting hundreds of starfruits at bedtime for 13 days, harvesting and repeating. I probably could have done it faster, but the exhilarating part of this experiment was basically over.
After weeks of sleeping in the game, I made it. I ran to Fizz, transferred 48 million and went back to bed. The next day I strolled along Ginger Island Beach one last time, not even bothering to pull the sprinklers out of the ground, and checked the Perfection Tracker. 100%. At last. All that’s left to do is return to Pelican Town, head north and climb to the top, a secret area of the game that only other perfectionists and YouTube spoilers can see.
So how did I feel climbing to the top to watch the legendary, 100% perfect Stardew cutscene? No wonder I didn’t feel good, not good at all. Worse yet, the game blatantly encourages you to take Joji’s route in the final moments and rub salt into the metaphorical wound. Sure, technically I had accomplished something, but I felt empty. For hours I just farmed and farmed and farmed, ignoring almost everything that makes this one of my favorite games of all time and turning it into something more monotonous and soul-sucking.
However, while achieving perfection in this way did me no good, it only did so for a moment. After the substantial reveal of the final cutscene, I just went back to the title. From there I jumped back into the save file where I had a farm full of cute animals, where I created a home in Pelican Town for Pam to rebuild her life, and even my Stardew Valley kids that I admittedly had. I didn’t miss much, but nice to know they are there. Yes, mastering it the Joja way has allowed me to rejuvenate and appreciate all that Stardew Valley can be and what it means to me.
Ultimately, I understand why ConcernedApe has allowed us to achieve perfection this way. This works towards Stardew Valley’s overarching message and, I think, a particular view of how to live: doing things the difficult way, but in a way that makes you feel good, is almost always more satisfying than the more comfortable alternative. On one route you learn a few lessons, make friends, and maybe even find a sense of community, on the other you sleep, work, and that’s it. Besides, in the case of the latter, your only real friend is Morris; Let’s be truthful, we hate Morris.
So if you want my advice, don’t pay for perfection in Stardew Valley. Whether ConcernedApe intended the mechanic to offer a philosophical dilemma, as I interpreted it, or simply to give a chance to those desperate to complete the game, is unclear, 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 ancient cliche about the real treasure being the friends we make along the way, but in this case it’s true. And who wants to be friends with Morris?
Here’s my experience with paying for perfection in Stardew Valley. If you’re looking for more games like the indie farming hit, 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 to try out some Stardew Valley mods on, check out our list of the best Steam Deck alternatives.
