Stardew Valley famously opens with a poignant letter from your grandfather, expressing a fear that you might eventually lose your way amidst the crushing weight of modern life. His solution is an ancestral plot of land—a chance to rediscover your humanity through the soil and the community. While most players use this opportunity to build a thriving agricultural empire, one dedicated Nintendo Switch owner decided to take the concept of “resting” to a hardware-straining extreme.
The core mechanics of Stardew Valley revolve around a strict temporal rhythm. Time dictates the seasons, crop cycles, and social events. While burning the midnight oil is possible, it comes at the cost of physical exhaustion and financial penalties the following morning. Consequently, sleep is a necessity, yet few players see a reason to linger in bed beyond the required recharge. However, a Redditor known as Holozard wondered what the valley might look like after a literal millennium of neglect.
To satisfy this curiosity, Holozard embarked on a mission to skip 1,000 in-game years in a single, continuous stretch. This was no small feat; the process required the Nintendo Switch to run for three consecutive weeks. The sheer data accumulation caused the game to stutter and lag significantly, resulting in nine system crashes during the ordeal. By the time the thousand-year hibernation concluded, the player’s hardware had suffered as much as the digital farm.
“I rigged a controller with a turbo function to spam the ‘A’ button and used a hair tie to force the character to walk right automatically,” Holozard explained. This makeshift automation came at a price, as the mechanical stress resulted in severe stick drift on the controller.
When the protagonist finally awoke, the Ferngill Republic had transformed into a surreal, alien landscape. The once-manicured farm was entirely choked by towering red mushrooms, so dense that movement was nearly impossible. Furthermore, centuries of celestial activity had pelted the property with countless meteorites, leaving the ground scarred with glowing purple ore. It ultimately took the player three full in-game seasons just to clear the ancient overgrowth and reclaim the land.
Slept for 1000 years straight
by u/Holozard in StardewValley
Intriguingly, the game engine handled the passage of time with a mix of logic and oversight. Holozard had left their chickens outside before the long sleep began. Upon waking, they found their livestock still alive—though now a millennium old. The game succinctly noted the psychological toll of this immortality, informing the player that their chicken, Huffy, “looks grumpy.”
This wasn’t Holozard’s first foray into chronic laziness. The player had previously experimented with 100 and 500-year skips. Encouraged by a fascinated community, they pushed the experiment to the four-digit mark, effectively spending hundreds of real-world hours doing absolutely nothing in-game.
Despite the destruction of a third-party controller, the player remains unfazed. After clear-cutting the forest of mushrooms and selling the massive haul, Holozard found themselves an instant in-game millionaire. Reflecting on the bizarre state of the farm and the ancient creatures inhabiting it, Holozard quipped, “I’m the grandpa now.”
Source: Polygon
