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Stardew Valley 1.5 brings beach farms and “advanced game options”

"If you're a seasoned player thinking of starting a new farm when 1.5 comes out, I'd like to highlight a couple of new features"

Last month, Stardew Valley creator Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone announced that the farming game’s upcoming 1.5 version was “in the home stretch” of development. There’s still no word on an exact Stardew Valley 1.5 release date just yet, but the dev has now highlighted some of its new features – which include a new farm type and menu option for game tweaks.

“If you’re a seasoned player thinking of starting a new farm when 1.5 comes out, I’d like to highlight a couple of new features,” Barone says on Twitter. “There will be a new farm type, ‘Beach Farm’, and a new ‘Advanced Game Options’ menu, from which you can adjust some aspects of the game.” There’s no screenshot to take a peep at of the new farm type just yet, but this’ll surely be exciting news for fans keen to branch out from the base simulation game’s more rural offerings and try a whole other flavour of farm.

We do get a description, however: “Good foraging and fishing, and tons of open space,” the screenshot reads, and it sounds like we’ll be able to make use of flotsam and jetsam being that close to the big blue, too: “Sometimes, supply crates wash up on shore”. However, there’s an element of challenge in that sprinklers won’t work on a beach farm’s sandy soil – plus, there’ll be “some regular soil, but not much”. Grass will grow on the sand, though. Sweet.

In the tweet, we do get a brief glimpse at the new advanced game option menu, too, as you can see below. Features you can adjust include mine rewards (set to ‘normal’ in the preview), as well as things like enabling or disabling monster spawns on your farm. In the replies, Barone expands on this in relation to the game’s wilderness farm: “The wilderness farm now has a higher chance of spawning wilderness golems than any other farm. Wilderness Golems drop mixed seeds and rice shoots, making them pretty valuable in early game”.

There’s also a toggleable “guarantee year one completable” option, which means that a red seed cabbage needed to complete a particular bundle will definitely show up in your game’s year one. Previously, the chance to encountering one was random.

Plus, the dev explains the “remixed” bundles option you can see in the preview is “a randomised mixture of some brand new bundles and also old bundles”, adding that “sometimes the old ones have variations – for example they might require different crops or fish”. However, if you set this option to ‘normal’, you’ll just have the set of bundles in the “classic” version of the game.

It’s not clear when Stardew Valley 1.5 will arrive just yet, but in the meantime you can take a peek at our lists of the best Stardew Valley mods as well as a new offering that turns Studio Ghibli’s Totoro, soot sprites, and more into critters. Lovely stuff.