Let's all de-stress for a minute by looking at beautiful Stardew Valley farms
Soothing pixels.
This article was originally published in November 2018. We're republishing it today in case you need it, and because they're nice farms.
Sometimes life's pretty stressful. In times like those, nervously tapping your foot for 10 hours doesn't quite shake the stress out. It's almost enough to make you want to drop everything and go buy a farm. Alternatively, you can look at pictures of artfully composed, perfectly manicured videogame farms, sigh, and feel slightly at peace for the next three minutes of your life.
Years after release, Stardew Valley remains one of the most played games on Steam. A lot of those people are likely playing Stardew Valley in mulitplayer, but for others I think it's more zen, as they set out to realize the perfect farm layout they've meticulously designed before even starting a game. Thanks to the Stardew Planner, you can draw a farm in your browser, and the candy-colored designs people come up with and post to the FarmsofStardewValley subreddit put my heart at ease. Then there are the actual in-game creations people post to upload.farm, a repository of more than 136,000 farms.
Let's just look at some really nice farms for a minute.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).