Stardew Valley fan sleeps for 1,000 years, breaks Switch doing it

Stardew Valley begins with a letter from your grandfather, who is concerned that you might have lost sight of what matters most in life. In an effort to save you from yourself, grandpa gives you a ranch. He hopes that a homestead life will help you connect with nature and other people. One Stardew Valley player was willing to run their Nintendo Switch endlessly over three weeks had a different idea in mind.

Stardew Valley features a day cycle where time passes as you play, and some activities and seasons will only happen during specific time segments. Though you can stay up late to try and squeeze in another action or two, your character will be less energized the next day — and they’ll be a little poorer to boot. Every Stardew Valley player needs to sleep, but there’s not much incentive to sleep for long stretches of time.

Redditor Holozard, however, was curious about what would happen if they skipped 1,000 in-game years in one go. To do it, the player says that they began a save file on Switch where the only thing the protagonist was allowed to do was sleep. The tenacious player kept at this for weeks, undeterred by how laggy the game became in the process. Not only did their Switch crash nine times in their pursuit of a Rip Van Winkle status, the controller itself got mangled in the process.

“I used a controller with a turbo button to hit ‘A’ repeatedly, and a hair tie to walk right automatically,” the player described. “That also gave my controller horrible stick drift lol.”

On the other end of the big sleep awaited a surreal version of the Ferngill Republic. The land was overtaken by tall red mushrooms that prevented the player from taking more than a couple of steps at a time. The world had been blasted by so many meteor showers during their doze that the land was now full of purple space rocks. It took the player three entire seasons to cut down the overgrowth.

In other ways, Stardew Valley kind of treated it as if no time had passed at all. Holozard had let their chickens out of the coop before sleeping, and awoke to the news that they were now 1,000 years old. “Huffy looks grumpy,” Stardew Valley informed Holozard.

Why would someone do this? Well, Holozard had already attempted sleeping in Stardew for both 100 and 500 years before. After posting about those experiences, other Stardew fans encouraged Holozard to sleep for even longer just to see what would happen. This means that Holozard has spent hundreds of hours doing nothing in Stardew Valley.

Though a controller was sacrificed in the process, Holozard doesn’t consider it a big deal. It was a third-party controller, and they’ve owned a Switch for long enough that stick drift is nothing new. Plus, after selling off all the mushrooms, Holozard is now an in-game millionare.

“I’m the grandpa now,” Holozard joked.