Between the game’s seasonal crops, time-locked fish, and pressure to keep up relationships with townspeople, most Stardew Valley players wouldn’t think of wasting a single in-game day by going to sleep early. Squeezing every possible hour of productivity out of the workday might just be the difference between completing the game’s Community Center and having to wait another in-game year to finish the challenge. However, one player has now done the unthinkable and slept through…an entire 1,000 in-game years.
Late last week, Reddit user Holozard shared screenshots of their absolutely ridiculous farm, which they left unattended while sleeping in-game for what has to be a record-breaking stretch of time (thanks, Gamesradar). To put Holozard’s 1,000-year slumber into perspective, I’ve probably only gone through five or six years across all my farms despite putting hundreds of hours into the game.
Holozard apparently accomplished the absurd task by running their Switch for three weeks straight. The process involved wrapping a hair tie around the joystick to get their farmer to walk toward their bed automatically and using a controller’s turbo function to hit the rest button.
Their screenshots show off the most abandoned farm I’ve ever seen. Predictably, it’s absolutely overgrown and covered in rocks, grass, and trees. But it’s also covered in some pretty neat spawns that most players have never seen.
Most of Stardew Valley’s random events work overnight, meaning every time a player sleeps, the game has a chance to select a random event. Some of these events are pretty rare and have less than a 1 percent chance to occur (and even if one of these rare events does happen, the game might still randomly select an incompatible tile, causing nothing to actually show up).
But it turns out, if you sleep for 1,000 years, even the game’s rarest events become common. Holozard’s screenshots show a farm littered with meteorites, mushroom trees, and stone owls, all rare items that have impressively low chances to spawn. Looking at these screenshots and trying to parse everything is like playing a messed up version of Where’s Waldo, but it looks like 1,000 years still wasn’t enough to land them the strange capsule item, another rare spawn that I can’t see anywhere in the screenshot. Maybe their farm became too overgrown before the item had the space to spawn?
While poor Holozard had to go through a pretty tedious cleanup process (they said it took them three entire seasons to chop down the mushroom trees alone), it was apparently pretty profitable. “I now have lots of cool purple rocks all over my farm, and made almost half a million in mushrooms, so I’m happy,” they wrote in a Reddit comment.
Holozard’s technique is quite the niche way to collect cash, but I guess if you’re desperate to fund your farm and have a spare hair tie and turbo controller, maybe sleeping for a while and crossing your fingers is worth a shot. You just might want to save plenty of time to clean up your farm before bringing either of the game’s two new marriage candidates, which ConcernedApe plans to reveal later this month, home.