The polish on indie titles can often mean the difference between a game being labeled shovelware or a game hitting the heights of indie darling like farming and town simulator Stardew Valley. For most of the time that players will interact with Stardew Valley, it has an expert coat of polish that helps keep the player, NPCs, and animals feeling like they are alive on the screen.
One player, however, has found a strange bug that gave a brief glimpse at what Stardew Valley might have looked like if it didn't have the intense amount of care and attention put into it during development. It makes for a funny little moment where the farm animals in particular act very awkwardly in a way that most don't often see when tending to their farms.
In the video, the animals can be seen scrolling across the screen as they make their way across the farm, with the added detail that they are all facing forward the entire time they are moving. This winds up giving the farm the look of a conveyer belt more than an animal pen, as each one is carted off by some invisible track that takes them from one end of their enclosure to the other in an awkward looking cycle. Many of the comments on the original post for the video equate the strange formation to Stardew Valley performing a dance with the various farm animals present.
The reality of the situation, however, is that this is just a simple bug where the animals are attempting to pathfind into grass, but they are stuck in an infinite loop because there is none on the inside of the pen. Combine the infinite pathfinding with a lack of animation because the animals are supposed to be sleeping, and their sprites become frozen facing forward. This is what gives these Stardew Valley animals such a strange appearance as they glide across the screen looking for somewhere to begin their normal cycles.
With all the systems in Stardew Valley that keep the game running smoothly, it isn't strange to see that a very specific circumstance like this might be able to make for a weird little video. Then there's the amount of players that have purchased and are playing the game, which gives tons of opportunities to find strange moments like these animals shuffling from side to side. In fact, with as much attention as the game gets, it might not be long before someone splices in some music and goes viral on Tiktok with this clip.
Stardew Valley is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
