By David Futrelle
Is Stardew Valley just a miniature version of the infamous Harper Valley of Jeannie C. Riley’s classic song, a hotbed of debauched infidelity in which the residents secretly swap a lot more than yams?
Players of the popular farming role-playing game have been wondering aloud about the secret lives of some of the inhabitants of their little valley for some time. Questions have been raised about the real father of one of the main characters, and one seemingly innocent female character has been discovered climbing another man’s tree, wink wink, nidge nudge, knowwhatImean?
A couple of years back, one poor player turned to the Stardew Valley subreddit for relationship advice, fearing that his beloved game waifu was cheating on him. (I’ve removed her name so as not to spoil anything.)
I married [Waifu] and everything seemed fine at first.
But after a few days, she would be in the kitchen every morning. I’d talk to her and she’d say “I’m going to town! Eat a healthy lunch! Bye!”
That’s all fine and good. She deserves to get out and have some fun. But what worries me is she doesn’t come home at night.
Uh oh.
I’ve stayed up until midnight waiting for her. Most nights she just never comes home. And when I go into town, I never see her. I’ve been in the museum and Pam’s trailer many times; I’ve looked under the tree where she read books when we were dating. No sign of [her].
Oof. Not looking good for you, my man, not looking good.
[She’s] at full hearts and I hug her and give her a blueberry every day.
Dude. Someone else is giving her something other than a blueberry every night.
And not even the arrival of a baby was enough to change her ways.
Sometimes when I talk to her, she says “Everything is different now that we have a baby,” but nothing is different. I come home around 6:00, Penny is nowhere to be found, and the baby is in his crib completely unsupervised. I go to bed alone most nights.
I think there is another man. To be completely honest, I’m not even sure the baby is mine. What should I do?
Well, now one mod-maker has a solution, of sorts, for every player who feels there’s just too much of this sort of cuckery going on in and around their little farm.
The “Stardew Valley Cuckoldry Removal Service” mod, uploaded on NexusMods earlier today, changes some of the dialogue in the game to remove several subtle hints of infidelity.
“[T]his game is hella cucked,” the mod-maker, Havitner, writes in the game’s description, noting that his own enjoyment of the game had been tarnished one day when,
while casually browsing the wiki, I found out that it’s heavily implied that [a female character] cheated on her husband and tricked him into raising another man’s kid for ~20 years. My comfiness levels suffered a catastrophic decline.
Not knowing [Stardew Valley developer] ConcernedApe’s home address or how to rig a goat carcass to explode, I had to settle for making a mod.
The new dialogue is designed to match the tone of the original, without the depressing cuckshit.
And while he was at it, he also removed some hints that another female character regrets not boning more dudes in her younger years. Because to some dudes this somehow also counts as cuckolding.
In vanilla, [she] casually tells the player that she regrets marrying young, because she didn’t get to enjoy her youth and freedom.
Protip: When a woman talks about ‘enjoying her youth and freedom’, that means exactly one thing.
Playing Stardew Valley until 3 AM? Nah. Riding the pixelated cock carousel.
I suspect that this mod might turn out to be quite popular with the sorts of dudes I write about regularly on this blog, who think that every time any woman has sex with someone other than them they’re being cuckolded, and that this somehow also applies to imaginary pixel ladies in video games.
H/T — Thanks to longtime WHTM commenter @pecunium for pointing me to this amazing mod.
BONUS: Here’s the original Harper Valley PTA song, in case you wanted some reminders of what was going on in THAT little Peyton Place.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!