Challenge
Between me and two of my friends, it was decided that existing tools to aid players in optimizing gameplay for the award-winning farming simulator game, Stardew Valley, were insufficient.
Solution
We created three dashboards using Observable Plot to act as at-a-glance guides for the various qualities of in-game items. Item lookup is now much more efficient than navigating the widely-used Stardew Valley Wiki.
Contributions
Research, Dashboard Concept and Front-End Development
Research, development, and design decisions were also contributed by Rachel Fung and Anita Guo.
Game-related imagery (buttons, item sprites, map, etc.) were borrowed directly from Stardew Valley, made by ConcernedApe.
Data Organization
For this project, we created tidy datasets for each item type (crops, fish, animal products) by referencing Stardew Valley Wiki for relevant metadata about each item. For example, for crops, we collected the following information:
- Crop name
- Crop type ( fruit, tree, vegetable, forageable, flower, other)
- Season availability (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter)
- Seed price
- Days to initial harvest
- Days to regrow (for multi-yield crops)
- Yield per harvest
- Maximum number of harvests per season
- Harvest frequency under different fertilizers: Speed-Gro, Deluxe Speed-Gro, Hyper Speed-Gro
- Impact of the Agriculturist profession on fertilizer-enhanced growth rates
- Base sell price by quality: Normal, Silver, Gold, Iridium
- Tiller profession price multipliers by quality
- Keg product output (Juice, Wine) and:
- Base and Artisan profession prices by quality
- Preserves Jar output (Pickle, Jelly) and:
- Base and Artisan profession prices by quality
- Dehydrator product (Dried Fruit, Dried Mushroom) and:
- Base and Artisan profession prices by quality
We made deliberate decisions about which data to include and exclude. While our datasets are rich in numerical detail, we chose to omit broader global multipliers, like general profession-based price boosts, from most visualizations to avoid distorting trends across categories.
For use in the dashboard, the data is fed in by parsing the JSON in which it is stored and accessed further through key-value pairs. The charts and graphs of the dashboard change in accordance to the selected item.