I always fashioned myself as a captain of industry while roleplaying as a newfound farmer trying to rehabilitate his grandpa’s dilapidated farmstead in Stardew Valley. My main goal was to amass as much of a fortune as possible — at the cost of socialization and other familiar hindrances.
But during a recent playthrough, I decided to finally buckle down and engage with the locals, and maybe even fix up that old, broken-down community center so we could drive the Jo-Jo Mart out of business once and for all. It ended up taking me about two in-game years to put a bow on that task, which was less than I had imagined. Through sheer drive and perseverance, I was able to fix that old gray mare up and rally the community around my efforts; I was their new lord and savior.
Along the way, I realized that I had managed to build up a decent amount of goodwill with the local blue-haired hippy-dippy pixie, Emily — so much so that romancing her seemed like a pretty solid option with very little effort. Having never been married (in Stardew Valley, or heck, in real life for that matter), I figured I’d see where this leads me. Before I knew it, we had tied the knot and then welcomed our first child: a baby girl.
I was nervous, sure, but I felt that I had the acumen as a reformed-captain-of-industry-turned-Johnny-Q-Citizen. Turns out, it was actually a pretty easy job being a parent. All the baby did for the first month or so was sleep, wrapped up tight like a human burrito. I was beginning to call foul on the stories of woe bandied about by my real-world friends that have children.
Heck, even when she had graduated from a lump to a crawling little scamp, there really wasn’t much work required to keep her alive. But that’s where my less-than-flattering assessment of my parenting skills come in. Because our baby is seemingly so self-sufficient, we just leave her alone all day, in a huge house with two constantly burning fireplaces, for hours on end. I never feed or change her, nor does Emily. There is even an open staircase leading down to my cellar, which is a winemaking operation to rival even that of Château Picard. Hell, in the baby’s room there is a massive fish tank ripe for catastrophe.
And yet, no one bats an eye. No Child Protective Services, no calls for action by an alarmed citizen that sees me in the fields all day and the mines all night while Emily is off ohm-ing in the yard or slinging glasses at the saloon. We are textbook negligent parents, but no one seems to care much.
Of course, it could be argued that during the first month or so of her life, our daughter was in a continuous cocoon-swaddled state in something akin to a coma. So it wasn’t like we had to watch her — let alone even feed her, apparently, since I never did and never saw Emily do it.
We do have a cat, for whatever that’s worth. So it wasn’t like the baby was totally alone. But as she aged and started crawling, those two active fireplaces kept on cooking all day and all night, with no barrier to speak of.
I guess this is just how things are done in Stardew Valley. I’ll be curious to see how old the child gets, and for that matter if Emily or I will also continue to age and become old fuddy duddies. I sure hope not, because the cycle of neglect will certainly continue if our child has to watch us. There will still be plenty of farming and mining to do, and she will have to pick up the mantle, leaving us to wither and rot unattended.
