Stardew Valley 1.6 update smashes Steam player record

It should be no surprise: Stardew Valley, despite being released in 2016, is still wildly popular. In fact, it’s more popular than ever. Following the Stardew Valley 1.6 update published yesterday, the farm-and-life simulator hit a peak Steam concurrent player count of 147,612 — that’s more than double the peak concurrent players at the game’s launch in 2016. Stardew Valley’s previous Steam record was just under 100,000 players after the 1.5 update launched in late 2020, according to SteamDB. Stardew Valley is the eighth most played game on Steam at the time of writing, just a few thousand players below Grand Theft Auto 5.

Crucially, this doesn’t include people that own the game through GOG, or the people who intend to play on Windows PC through Xbox Game Pass. (Stardew Valley players on console have to wait a bit longer for the update.) Though we don’t have exact numbers for all players, it’s clear that Stardew Valley is bigger than ever.

So what’s in the update that’s got everyone heading back to the game? The patch is actually bigger than expected, and the patch notes are very long. There are new festivals, a new farm type specific to animals, new quest lines, a bookseller, and hundreds of new items. That’s not the mention the doubled multiplayer spots, balance changes, bug fixes, and the secrets and Easter eggs that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the patch notes.