Stardew Valley: In-Game Farm Planner

• Overwhelmingly Large Tasks
• Burnout and Fatigue
• Immersion Breaking Third-Party Programs

Something that has always been a barrier for me when playing Stardew Valley, and other games of a similar genre, is how overwhelming the overarching goal(s) feels. The start of a Stardew Valley playthrough always feels motivating enough because there are a lot of short term goals: clean up the messy farm, meet all the people, get a basic source of revenue, etc. But when it comes time to start leveling up the farming operations (while still factoring in for aesthetics and vibes, of course) it gets a little daunting.

Currently, players who want to optimize their layouts must rely on external, third-party web tools. While these tools are powerful, they create a jarring "tab-hopping" experience that breaks immersion. Players are forced to manually translate coordinates from a browser to their game, leading to frequent errors, wasted in-game days, and the "finicky" frustration of managing two separate interfaces.

By integrating a planning tool directly into the game’s UI, we can bridge the gap between aspiration and execution. My goal was to design a feature that feels native to the Stardew Valley experience—one that allows players to blueprint their dream farm without the cognitive load of leaving the game world.

Brainstorming and Low-Fi Wireframing

I began by imagining what this interface might look like in game and what sort of features are going to be visible alongside it. By taking inspiration from an active third-party farm planner, stardewplanning.com, I place the UI to the right of a large, zoomed out version of an empty Stardew Valley farm. I blocked out areas for essential features: name of the active farm plan, an area for filtering the type of item you want to place down, a grid to display said items, and a save and exit button. The resource calculator feature was an idea I developed from my own habit of adding up all of the resources and items I will need to complete a project in any given sandbox game.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframing

Once I was satisfied with the layout after a few iterations, I moved on to color palettes and some more artistic design choices. The next obstacle was making this interface fit into the world of Stardew Valley, so I opened up the game to look at the current interface designs and artwork. I decided to base my designs off of that of the in-game inventory UI. I color picked the main colors and started adding them to my lo-fi wireframes, while iterating and updating the layout as I went.

Hi-Fidelity UI Mockup

The bulk of this project was spent in Aseprite, my choice of pixel art software. Here I built my interface panel pixel by pixel, all the while referencing my in-game screen captures to make sure I was remaining true to the game’s art style. The only pixels not handplaced by me was the lettering in the “Farm Plan #1”, “Cancel”, “Save and Quit”, and the sprite icons that I pulled from the Stardew Valley Wikipedia.