Gaming: Early Version Of Stardew Valley's Mines Featured An 'underground...

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While I'm sure acknowledging this will inflict some amount of psychic pain, today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Stardew Valley. To commemorate the occasion and the steady degradation of our joints and bones, Stardew creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone aired a celebratory 10-year anniversary stream, covering his gigahit life sim's history—some of which we're seeing for the first time.

Barone's retrospective stretched back before Stardew's release date, showing some early development builds demonstrating planned features that never came to fruition. And there's a particularly wild one among his scrapped plans: At one point, Stardew was going to feature an underground goblin society that's now lost to development history.

In the section of the stream covering his development progress during 2013, Barone showed an earlier version of Stardew's mining mechanics—or as he called it, "the era of the procedurally generated mines." Initially, he said, he intended Stardew's mining to be like a topdown Terraria, where players would mine their way through procedurally generated levels by digging through the walls themselves to find ore and other hidden goodies.

Unfortunately, while he thought it was "a cool idea," Barone said he had trouble making it feel worthwhile, and the procedural generation was the source of bugs and frustration.

"It just ended up being too complicated. It was maybe beyond my ability," Barone said. "Or maybe another way to think about it is that it was too ambitious of a concept for the scope of this game. This should have been an entire game on its own."

As a side note, he said he's essentially describing what developer Pugstorm eventually released with Core Keeper, so there's a game waiting out there for you if Barone's original mining pitch sounds promising.

Ultimately, Barone said he made "the hard decision to scrap all of it" in favor of the pre-authored mine layouts we see in Stardew today. Mine biomes and enemies were cut alongside the procgen levels, as he demonstrated with footage of a particularly harsh loss: The Goblin Village.

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In Barone's clip from 2013, a Stardew farmer is spelunking through mine tunnels that connect little goblin rooms, complete with little goblin furniture like little goblin chairs around little gobli

Source: PC Gamer