The yearly charity speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick is in progress this week, allowing players from all sorts of games to show off their fast game strats. This year's Stardew Valley speedrun category was completing the town community center with glitches—and oh boy, the hacks sure did flow.
Speedrunner Olenoname was the Stardew runner this year, and he rightfully preceded his playthrough with the warning that "This run's gonna move pretty fast and it's gonna get started really quickly, so I hope you're ready." Then he blew the absolute hell out of his farm.
Olenoname started Stardew in pretty much the opposite way us normal folks would. He immediately deleted a bunch of his tools, magically spawned a ton of items in his inventory, and then started throwing bombs all over his farm. It's certainly much faster than chopping all those trees one by one.
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As Olenoname and his co-commentators explained, this glitched speedrun hinges on abusing one particular trick that might catch your eye on the character creation screen before he begins playing.
Often in Stardew Valley, your friendly neighbors will stop by your farm and gift you different items. The process of receiving items during a dialogue, Olenoname explains, is controlled by item codes hidden inside that dialogue. By naming his character with a very, very long list of item codes, he can trick the game into giving him the same very, very long list of items if an NPC addresses him by his name. Some of those items are Mega Bombs, hence the aggressive tree clearing technique.
Despite all that item glitching, Olenoname does in fact spend some time growing some of his own crops and raising a few chickens. It is a rather quick run, coming in at just over 17 minutes, which you can catch from the beginning in the video above.
In case you missed it, you can watch more Stardew done fast in the Stardew Valley Cup that its developer Eric Barone co-hosted back in September.
