This Terraria build paying tribute to Stardew Valley is so clever that it’s still breaking my brain a little bit. While there’s a lot of parallels to be drawn between the soothing gathering, building, and organising of two of the best sandbox games on PC, there’s an obvious huge difference in their perspective. Yet exploring Lady Forestia’s latest Terraria creation, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were instead looking at the top-down world of Stardew Valley.
Terraria fan and artist ‘Lady Forestia’ has previously created some clever, intricate builds that make Terraria look more like a 3D game than its actual 2D layout, but this new zone takes things to another level by perfectly capturing the perspective of Stardew. Using Terraria Echo coating to carefully hide blocks and ledges from view, this build lets the player actually walk around town in much the same top-down fashion as you’re used to playing Stardew Valley.
Those of you who’ve spent some time with Terraria since its Labor of Love update might know that there is actually an official Stardew nod in the game, with a couple of items included that let you glimpse a little taste of Stardew Valley in Terraria. However, this custom map takes things to the next level, with a full town that you can wander around with shops, houses, vegetable plantations, and more.
Despite having spent some time wandering around Lady Forestia’s previous creations and marvelling at the handiwork, it still throws me to walk around the paths of this Stardew Valley-inspired village and be able to go up and down vertical paths. It’s not completely flawless – you’ll occasionally have to do a little jiggling to get out of a stuck spot – but it’s remarkably robust for something that the game wasn’t actually built to do.
Lady Forestia says the full project took around 50 hours to complete over the span of three weeks, and explains, “This is my way of showing my love and eternal gratitude towards our lovely community, the game, and its creators.” The passion that’s gone into it certainly shows!
Helpfully, Lady Forestia has also uploaded several small glimpses of the creation process in action – it doesn’t give away everything, but if you’re curious about putting together something similar yourself then be sure to check out her full YouTube channel for other such tricks, along with some of her other builds including a beautiful, touching tribute to Terraria developer Jason ‘Leinfors’ Parker, who passed away earlier this year.
If you want to explore Lady Forestia’s creation – which includes the Stardew Valley zone (located in the dome just to the right of the spawn area) along with all her previous work – you can get it for yourself via the Steam Workshop. Note that if you’ve previously created a world using her model, you’ll need to re-import a fresh version to get the newest updates.
After that, you could go one step further and check out the best Terraria mods to mix things up even more dramatically. Or instead, check out the new additions coming in Stardew Valley update 1.6 and look forward to the potential of a Terraria Shimmer squirty gun that looks set to arrive with update 1.4.5, whenever that may be.