Stardew ValleyThe farm’s charming farmhouse consists of two unique mini-blocks that emit flutes or drums as the player runs through them. Although they are cute, I never figured out how to arrange them. Mine is usually tasked with collecting dust in a random chest somewhere in a dark corner of my farm.
But in the hands of the right player, flute and drum blocks transform into something unbelievable: tracks that play complex classical tunes and popular tunes. And in the past six months, talent Stardew Valley players have created amazing flute arrangements of dizzyingly complex songs like “Mozart’s.”Rondo Alla Turca (Turkish Journey)“Green Day”American idiot,” the Pokémon Battle Themeand of course, “Megalovania” are from Undertale (where the character even looks like Papyrus).
On Reddit, clips of players strolling these musical streets have garnered tens of thousands of upvotes, and it’s easy to see why. These walking tracks are mesmerizing – like the video game equivalent of a classical music box, one of those slow-rotating cylinders that each protruding metal clatter makes a soft hum. You can look at them and know this took a while to do. The “Megalovania” arrangement, for example, took six hours to plan, followed by five hours to place blocks, creator Yaramy writes. in the Reddit post. And this is someone who has earned quite a bit.
Organizing music is a challenge, even with the best tools, and do it in Stardew Valley has a combination of Excel wizards and angry clicks. It also involves some very specific barriers: There is a limit to the sound that can be played at any given time; sprite walking speed, which increases the tempo; and the challenge of finding a big enough position on Stardew Valleymap to lay it all out. Capturing the essence of a song is hard – but it’s still possible! – even with this little toolkit.
“One of the basics of recording is that you have all of these tracks that you can use,” PK Levine, who did “American Idiot,” told Polygon over the phone. “In Stardew you have two, because at least your farmer can run two flute blocks at the same time in continuous sequence. There are exceptions to that rule, but they are difficult. ”
Levine is a multi-instrumentalist who can play guitar, piano and drums. Green Day’s national anthem hit is clearly an iconic choice, but Levine specifically chose it because the song primarily alternates between guitar and vocals, which allows him to make it sound.” drive, exciting and fun” with a flute and a drum track. Levin explains that no rock song would work without those drums. Even then, it’s still an uphill battle, as “with drums, you can hit up to three drums at once and often have heavy flips,” says Levine.
Redditor NetWarrior FM who created Mario Overworld Theme and John Williams'”Duel of fate“(Star Wars Theme) in Stardew Valley, explaining that flute blocks also have a limited color palette. Over email, he told Polygon, “you have to get a little creative and go an octave higher or lower and try to make the best notes.”
No masterpiece is created overnight. Levine began her arrangement by doing a detailed spreadsheet in which he sketches out the notes – flute blocks that can be played an interval of 24 – during reference Stardew Valley wiki page and the song’s melody and vocal compilation. The flute block row alone required 16 columns, equivalent to two 8/8 bars, Levine explained.
“The number of flute blocks you will run through in a given time is fixed,” says Levine. “So you can’t really be complicated with rhythm. Basically, a 4/4 measure of the music goes directly to eight flute blocks”.
Drums can be more complicated. There are seven values, but they are quite subjective. For example, you have to identify the difference between bass and bass, and it can be difficult to tell the difference. Some players think the bass drum is zero click, but for Levine the bass is four clicks while zero click sounds like a bass tom. Many creators have explained that it will be trial and error.
“I basically laid out 16 drum pads and went through them constantly — I just kept editing and editing until I could cram it into those 16 pads,” says Levine. “It’s not until you listen to it together that you understand, Is this effective?”
The player can change the pitch of each flute and drum block in Stardew Valley by left clicking repeatedly. A flute block defaults to C, and 12 clicks will get you to C in a higher octave. If you’re not a music fan, this basically means a lot of clicks to get a simple “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, let alone “Turkish March” or the drum line of ” American Idiot.”
Levine is playing the game in multiplayer with mods Stardew Valley Expanded and CJB Item Spawner installed – to spawn flute blocks – and it took about four in-game months to complete the Blue Day track. He did that in his multiplayer game, even though it didn’t allow players to pause, because he “liked playing with [his] friends” and just” want to do this organically. ” The larger Calico Desert of the expanded Stardew Valley also gives Levine ample space; in a pre-arrangement of Gravity reduction theme, Levine used the vanilla game, and the cactus kept getting in the way.
To play the song, his writer weighs a cup of coffee, then jogs over. Base player speed is five; Drinking a cup of coffee increases it up to six. So drinking flavored coffee changes the tempo of the song, though that also happens to match the aesthetic – if I have to run through a maze of music, I’ll drink coffee too. This is closer to the faster tempo of “American Idiot,” according to Levine, and is not unusual to see in other arrangements. In Levine’s next project, he’s planting grass on the path to slow his character’s walking speed because the track is slower paced.
NetWarrior FM took a different approach, using the CJB Cheats Menu mod to pause the game and so his character doesn’t have to sleep as often. It also allows him to adapt to his player speed. He doesn’t “plan ahead on where to place the blocks” but prefers to “just go with it”. NetWarrior FM also uses item spawn mods, but just discovered a flute block mod that allows players to change instruments (toy pianos being one of the options). He is currently using it to arrange “Let It Go” from frozen.
Every time one of these arrangements crosses my feed, I pause to look at it. I’ve seen enough to be able to “read” the shape of a song: You can tell which bars repeat when they appear like a closed loop. the player can walk a full circle, with branching paths leading to other movements or from a chorus to a verse. Thirteen years of playing classical piano and I can’t play anything I’ve ever been able to play, but I can obviously parse Stardew Valley flute block music. Go find numbers.
They are proof of incredible hard work and creativity, just like a beautiful structure in Minecraft or a perfect terrain Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island. They are a rendition of a song distilled into simple melodies and drum lines, pieces of music history that fans would recognize even without all the bells and whistles. I wonder what they will adapt to next.
