Ten years ago, Stardew Valley launched on Steam as a one-man farming sim that nobody expected to eat the entire genre. It now has 41 million copies sold, sits at a 10/10 on OpenCritic, and its creator just spent his anniversary stream revealing that yes, you will soon be able to marry Clint.
To mark the occasion, Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone teased a treat was coming earlier in the week, then delivered a 22-minute retrospective covering everything from Stardew's scrappy 2012 prototype, then called Sprout Valley, all the way through to what's coming in the 1.7 update. The headliner: two new marriage candidates. Sandy, the Oasis shopkeeper out in the Calico Desert, and Clint, Pelican Town's perpetually single, perpetually awkward blacksmith.
Sandy makes sense. She's been locked inside the Oasis since launch, has a small but devoted fanbase, and her never leaving the desert creates a genuinely interesting marriage dynamic that the writers can play with. Giving her a full romance arc is the kind of addition players have been asking for since around the 1.4 era.
Then There's Clint
Clint is a different conversation entirely. If you've spent any time on r/StardewValley, you know his reputation. He has an unrequited crush on Emily that the game does nothing to resolve, and if you marry Emily yourself, Clint has a scene that reads as genuinely wounded. For years, players have oscillated between feeling sorry for him and finding him unsettling. ConcernedApe is now handing you the option to fix him through romance, which is either the most generous possible reading of his character or an elaborate joke. Possibly both.
The screenshot from the anniversary stream showing Clint listed alongside Sandy as a marriage candidate is already making the rounds, and reactions have been predictably split between genuine excitement from players who always wanted to give him a proper storyline, and everyone else staring at the screen in disbelief.
Beyond the spouse reveal, the retrospective itself is worth watching for any fan of the game. Barone walks through builds from 2012 through to near-launch 2015, including a fully scrapped underground Goblin Village and a version of the mines that required digging into walls to find ore. He called that particular system "too ambitious for the scope of this game" and noted it probably should have been its own title. The 2013 build, where the art style snaps into something recognisably Stardew, is the most striking moment in the video.
No release date for 1.7 was given. Barone also made no new announcements about Haunted Chocolatier beyond the recent note that development has been "very productive lately." For now, the farming sim community has something more immediate to debate: whether you're a Sandy person or, for reasons only you can explain, a Clint person.
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