Anyone find the silver/gold/platinum star quality items an annoying mechanic?

[aaroncarsonart]

I've had this thought in previous farming games, like transitioning from Harvest Moon 64 to Friends of Mineral Town.

While this mechanic adds more complexity and nuanced game-play with fertilizers and festivals, in many ways this breaks immersion and adds some stress to the game. For one, having to maintain multiple stacks of various quality items makes one item take up to four slots in my backpack. The added selling value is not worth this trade off to me. I'd prefer a simpler game where an item has a single quality and selling price and I'd have to balance less variables in my head. (Or alternatively, they get merged into a single stack with a detail view that shows how many of each quality you have). More complexity does not always translate to better gameplay.

If anyone knows if a mod exists to remove the item quality mechanic from the game, I'd happily prefer to play this way. Not sure I'm up to the task of making a mod myself. But some ideas:

- The previous silver/gold star item info can translate into an increased chance of harvesting +1 or +2 of that item.
- Fertilizers increase the chance of harvesting extra produce from each crop, and more hearts with animals increases the change of harvesting extra animal products.
- Festivals/bundles which previously required you to produce a gold-star quality item could instead require that you have produced x number of said item, such as 100. A sufficient challenge to achieve early game.
- The more of an item you've produced, the better you get at it, and so the more likely your produce would win the Stardew Valley Fair, or the soup at the Luau.

[Pixel Peeper]

Yes. In fact, in my opinion, it's this game's biggest flaw.

Being able to carry 50 of one item in one stack but have to spend four inventory spaces on that same item when each is of different quality is very, very silly, and exceedingly inconvenient.

Removing all quality levels entirely sounds a bit drastic to me, but I suppose it could work out if done properly.

At the very least, Silver quality should be removed from the game. It's not really tied to any mechanics and the value difference isn't big enough to really matter.

[piehop7]

I think that they should be able to stack but maybe it would show how many of each star you had somehow.

[firebird21]

I don't hoard items. I like the different quality items. Games such as Rune Factory are probably why I do. I'm not sure if there is such a mod for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if one came out.

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by piehop7:

I think that they should be able to stack but maybe it would show how many of each star you had somehow.

That was my first thought. I immediately saw a Parsnip icon with three numbers at the bottom, inside of stars of different colors.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough space at the bottom of icons to show three (or four, as the game currently stands) different numbers that could all reach up to 999.

Really, the only easy and pratical way I'm seeing right now is to eliminate Silver-quality. Far from perfect, but definitely a huge improvement over the game as it currently is.

[The Y'All Of Us]

Another way to tackle this would be to implement the option to 'not sort'- basically allowing the player the choice of combining their stacks but sacrificing the quality star and treating the 'better' thing as just more of the same thing you've already got.

The quality stars really make harvesting a field of flowers impossible, given that you split the flowers into six or eight different colors with four quality options... Bluh.

[aaroncarsonart]

Sounds like a good compromise change (if a drastic removal of the entire quality system wasn't undertaken) might be some combination of:

1. Remove silver quality items
   
2. Collapse different quality item stacks into shared stacks

To remove some of the current absurdity of situations like this:

Originally posted by Charlotte:

The quality stars really make harvesting a field of flowers impossible, given that you split the flowers into six or eight different colors with four quality options... Bluh.