Stardew Valley briefly broke itself after performance hotfix crashed the game

(Image credit: Eric Barone)

Stardew Valley managed to break itself this week after a hotfix intended to repair performance issues caused the game to repeatedly crash.

The patch introduced a memory leak problem which was making it perform progressively worse over longer play sessions. The hotfix went out on December 7, but players quickly began reporting that their game was crashing within minutes of booting up. Anything from entering a chicken coop to watering plants seemed to break things entirely, making it impossible to play.

As always, creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone was on the ball pretty quickly. "Alright, it's been brought to my attention that the hotfix broke the game," he tweeted out a mere two hours after the initial update. "We'll fix this ASAP. Sorry about that." It took less than three hours for a further hotfix to come out, with ConcernedApe confirming things were sorted in a follow-up tweet. Everything seems to be a-okay now, and players were quick to thank him for the speedy fix.

Barone has been a busy bee lately. As well as continuing to pump out small updates for Stardew Valley including last week's Update 1.5.5 and working towards modding support, he recently announced that he's working on a brand-new game called Haunted Chocolatier.

Mollie spent her early childhood deeply invested in games like Killer Instinct, Toontown and Audition Online, which continue to form the pillars of her personality today. She joined PC Gamer in 2020 as a news writer and now lends her expertise to write a wealth of features, guides and reviews with a dash of chaos. She can often be found causing mischief in Final Fantasy 14, using those experiences to write neat things about her favourite MMO. When she's not staring at her bunny girl she can be found sweating out rhythm games, pretending to be good at fighting games or spending far too much money at her local arcade.