Stardew Valley Xbox One + PS4: Known Issues & Fixes (Patch 1)

No start New game. I Lost my 2 saves. 50 hrs.. and.. 100 hrs.

 

I am having this exact same problem. Stardew Valley is one of my favorite games, and when I went to play at 70 Central Time, my game starts loading and shows the XB1 controller, but the crashes and goes back to the main menu. I am on day 4 of fall year 1, and have 20+ hours logged. I really don't want to reset my game. Please try to patch this as soon as possible

 

I'd like to start off by saying, Stardew Valley is one of my all time favorite games. When I heard it was coming out on console, I really wanted to get it to get back into the game, as my PC file has 150+ hours.

On my console version (I'm play XB1) I have 20+ hours logged. I'm currently on day 4 of fall, and when I went to play tonight at 70 central time, my game kept crashing. I would click on my save file, and it would go to the XB one controller screen, and then crash and go back to the Chucklefish screen. Please try to fix this glitch as soon as possible.
Thanks

 

No, sorry, that logic doesn't hold up and I'm done giving developers a pass for things like this.

I'll be polite in my criticism of it. I'm not going to verbally attack or insult the people at Chucklefish / Sickhead Games. But I think the video game community has become way too passive in terms of holding developers and publishers accountable for releasing a broken game and then trying to patch it up later -- if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, they simply don't bother (I'm looking at you, Square Enix and Bethesda and BioWare and EA).

This is a systemic problem that's really marred the Xbox One / PS4 generation for me. Games are constantly released in horrible shape with the promise of patches -- which is a real kick in the stomach if you live somewhere with a flimsy internet structure -- and so we're left at the mercy of the developer's good intentions after having spent our hard earned money on something we expect to function properly right out the gate. That's not an unreasonable expectation, by the way, and I'm exhausted by people trying to normalize the practice.

When games never got fixed during the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, people waved around the cost of patch certification as justification for games not getting sorted out. But it happened less as a result, because developers knew that releasing a busted game would cost them big, either financially, in mind share, or both. If the rumors are true and Microsoft and Sony have dropped the patch fee, that would go a long way in explaining why so many games have been released in appalling shape over the last three years.

I expect them to find a glitch like that by actually paying a QA team to thoroughly test the game. If you have a team of testers playing the game for ten hours a day on retail consoles under actual playing conditions -- other games installed on the system, connected to the Internet, et cetera -- then it only takes a couple of days to hit these bugs. Some of them pop up within hours. The broken music & sound effects, for example. I hit that particular bug on my second in-game day, so less than an hour of real world play time. Or the PS4 Pro issues with the OS, which you can run into without playing at all. You simply have to boot up the game, close it, and then try to do literally anything else on the console.

I wish I had that kind of faith. But the industry has spent the last 9 years beating it out of me.

I'd love to play some other games in the meantime. Let's examine some of them, shall we?

I'm really keen to get back into Final Fantasy XV -- but oops, it suffers from some seriously awful frame pacing that makes me motion sick on PS4. This is an issue that isn't present on Xbox One and only shows up on PS4 Pro if you play in 4K, and which probably won't be fixed by Square Enix because they never bothered to fix it in Dragon Quest Heroes, Dragon Quest Builders, and it has shown up in the pre-release footage shown for Dragon Quest XI a few days ago.

I could always just play Skyrim: Remastered instead. But wait: the sound in the game is broken on PS4, with sound effects (Dragon roars in particular) cutting off half way through, the dynamic direction of 5.1 sound is backward, NPCs keep disappearing -- apparently, a "gap" in the geometry in Breezehome ate my children -- and several quests in the main storyline remain broken. But I'll just keep waiting and hoping for Bethesda to fix it. It was only originally released five years ago. No big deal.

I've thought about diving back into Fallout 4 instead, but then remembered the hours and hours of footage I've recorded of the game breaking, chugging, and being generally unplayable in the wake of downloading the season pass content.

I'd love to play Darksiders on PS4. But whoops: the sound falls entirely out of sync with the cut scenes, causing the cut scenes to end prematurely but allowing the dialog and sound effects from the cut scenes to continue playing over gameplay, thus breaking the story entirely. The game released nearly 2 months ago and the developers have said nothing about the issue despite numerous bug reports and videos on YouTube showing off the problem. Still waiting for a fix.

I could always hop back into Just Cause 3... but it suffers from some of the worst frame rate issues thus far seen on PS4, dropping into the sub-teens whenever there's an explosion on screen, and some of the patches that were meant to improve performance actually made it worse. 13 months later, still waiting on Square Enix to fix it.

Batman: A Telltale Series is just begging me to come back -- that Episode 1 cliffhanger was great -- but d'oh, that's right, I can't get past the end of episode 1 due to a black screen bug that prevents my progress being saved or uploaded to the Telltale servers. I've been waiting nearly two months for Telltale to reply to my support ticket, but I'm beginning to suspect that I may as well have just set light to a $20 bill rather than buying the season pass. It would have amounted to the same in the end.

Seriously sick of the state of video game releases right now, and exhausted by all the justifications people make for it.

 

Thank you for the update, mollygos. Despite my frustration, a little bit of communication from the team goes a long way. It is appreciated.

 

(Xbox one) Hey I've been having an issue with my game where as soon as I leave my house it tries to load a cutscene but instead it crashes and returns to the Xbox dashboard. It has just become year 3 and I tried skipping a day but it still keeps crashing. Please fix this I really miss playing and I refuse to start over.

 

I think playing on console might be your biggest problem lol. Or maybe your PS4 in particular. I play primarily on my pc and most games have zero issues.


I will admit though that I initially bought Stardew Valley for pc but it wouldn't boot without crashing. ConcernedApe couldn't figure out what was wrong, so he sent me an xbox code. Skyrim plays great on my pc, so does Darksiders. Every single game you mentioned is on PS4. However I understand your frustration and appreciate your "polite" response.

 

Hah! Bethesda is too busy creating more new content to sell to us ESO players for astronomical prices rather than fix the bugs that have been issues since release on any of their games.

It is becoming the sad truth... So many developers of big titles just continue to release new content/DLC rather than fix the bugs that arose with the last crap they put out. Bethesda with pretty much everything, Treyarch/Sledgehammer/Infinity Ward with COD, Rockstar with GTA and RDR, EA with everything... A lot of popular games have ridiculously stupid bugs that are quite annoying to the player, but the developers have no reason to fix since they aren't "gamebreaking" or perhaps experienced by enough people to seem worthy of fixing. Furthermore, no matter how many people report those bugs, you'll never hear the dev team acknowledge their existence. Super annoying.

Of course, we have only heard back from Chucklefish regarding gamebreaking bugs and not necessarily smaller issues like the horse's stupid skipping (although I find it amusing), music problems, or the issues brought on by the unnecessary cursor - as far as I know, anyway. Hopefully when all of the major issues are dealt with, the smaller ones will be addressed too. Then the game will be perfect! (Until the next patch.) I haven't lost hope yet, but that may be because I only found out about SDV when its console port was announced at E3 and because I love playing a HM-esque game on Xbox. ;P

 

Not sure if it helps, but the fertilizer bug happened to me so I captured what led up to it. PS4 Pro here.

 

So two things I'm seeing. Most, if not all, of the Title Screen saves happen in Year 2. And the other thing which will need clarification on, it happens when you are still in bed after saving and manually exiting to main menu and not dash boarding out of the game. I always got out of bed to check the TV and then would dashboard out or exit to main menu if Queen of Sauce wasn't on so I could take a quick break. When the glitch happened to me it was the only time I ever Exited to main menu while still lying in bed.

 

I own over 600 games across Steam, Origin, and Uplay. I could create a monumental list of aggravating issues there too -- like modern drivers rending Mass Effect unplayable, The Sims 3 suffering from massive un-patched memory bleed that they finally "fixed" by suggesting you just don't install your DLC, The Sims 4 not allowing you to marry your girlfriend because the game thinks she works for you and that makes the relationship in appropriate, Darksiders II becoming utterly unresponsive if you alt-tab out and ignoring the controller, Final Fantasy XIII barely functioning on PCs that far exceed spec, Resident Evil 4 HD randomly going into slow motion because the engine is terribly optimized for PC, BioShock Remastered suffering from unpatched frame pacing, and so on and so on -- but I focused on PS4 in my previous post because we're discussing console related issues with Stardew Valley.

I've put around 350 hours into the PC release of Stardew Valley. I've experienced problems with it, too, but nothing quite so game breaking as what's going on with the console version. And I'm genuinely willing to give it a little more breathing room on PC because it was developed by one man over the course of 5 years, who wouldn't have the same resources as Chucklefish / Sickhead Games to QA the thing (game testers are paid to try and break games in ways that developers might not consider, that's the entire purpose of their job).

Incidentally: the "maybe it's just your console" thing is a bummer, too. I remember fending that one off for months shortly after Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim released on PS3. Those were fun days.

 

That's really my major issue: a complete lack of communication, or such vague communication that you've no idea what's going on.

I appreciate that we've gotten some communication from Chucklefish in this thread, but they're still not addressing certain issues that I find frustrating (like the broken music/sound effects, or why the controller support was in no way altered for the console release despite refined controller support being one of the bullet points talked about by ConcernedApe when he announced the console version early last year).

This is an issue in the PC release too, and it still hasn't been fixed, so I'm guessing it'll remain in the console version.

These are my major issues with the console port, and they've basically been ignored.

The broken music/sound effects have made it so I don't even want to play with the sound anymore, I've just started listening to music/podcasts instead.

And the cursor issue... I'm sick of trying to click on something right in front of me and interacting with things under the "hidden" cursor instead. The entire controller interface was basically an afterthought for the PC version -- ConcernedApe has acknowledge that its functional but poorly refined -- and I'm still scratching my head as to why he announced that the console version would be getting a new control scheme yet they just ported it directly over from PC instead. You should be able to navigate around menus with the D pad or thumb stick, you shouldn't have to rely on a cursor that can't seem to make up its mind if it's super sensitive or super sluggish.

No console game should be so heavily reliant on an on-screen mouse cursor. It's un-initiative and slipshod.

 

My save that's not loading has been broken from before the first patch, but it was in year 1 and exclusively exiting to dash rather than exiting to title. I can see why this is hard to trouble-shoot because, reading through the comments here, I don't see any clear patterns regarding how deep people are in the game and the choices they've made during play. I don't remember about being in bed or not, since the save's been broken a while now, but it's probably 50/50 whether the character was in bed at time of exit, and definitely was to the dash.

Also had the crash to dash just prior to saving overnight today at about 20 pm AEDT today (Wednesday local time). The game has the current patch installed. This glitch happened pretty frequently prior to the patch and this is the first time it's happened post-patch. Year 1 15th of Fall, I remember I shipped 1111 worth of fish plus some other things (probably some eggs, mayonnaise, cheese, and milk, I don't think any crops were harvested). Hope that info helps!

 

Well, just a bit of advice for those suffering from the game crashing when trying to load your saved game.

Don't make another... It's just a matter of time before that one will break as well.

I just want to say I love the game! But, I too suffer from not being able to play it anymore due to crashing when trying to load my game. You can tell that they pretty much ported the game from PC to the consoles without really troubleshooting anything. That being said, I can't help but think I paid 15 dollars to be a beta tester. Shouldn't you guys be paying us?

Well either way. Here are my observations thus far. The game was loading fine before the last patch (can everyone else confirm this?). And it mostly happens in year 2. Was there not an issue before the last patch that people couldn't play past year 1? This could be a possible area of attention.

Anyways, I hope we see a patch soon!

 

All of the comments and my own playing around with the saves really makes me think that the return to title bug is due to a bad internet connection when saving and bad programming when it comes to the save. Now that I think about it, we were having issues with our internet when my save borked. My husband and I figured out that our bad internet was the result of poor IPv6 support on our ISP. Once we disabled IPv6 on our router, boom. Internet connection improved.

And my husband didn't seriously start playing until after that, and he hasn't had any issues. He also has a ritual that after the save, he gets up and takes a quick look at the farm (watch TV, talk to wife) before quitting to title, dashboarding and then telling the XBox to quit the game.

Which is where the bad programming comes into play - since Microsoft autosyncs saves in the cloud, I think SDV is implementing the save API in a poor manner and unless we as players give the game and Microsoft a little extra time before quitting, things can get out of sync in the cloud.

I'm also wondering if they are attempting some form of hidden save information similar to Animal Crossing that pays attention to things that happen after you save. Not sure why they would do it, but my husband had checked on the state of his farm before quitting and his wife had watered some of his crops. He quit, came back on in the evening and reloaded. His wife didn't mention watering the crops this time, instead talked about going for a nature walk. But guess what, his crops were still watered.

So something is being saved even after the save screen. I realize this kinda contradicts my husband's quitting ritual and not getting the crash to title bug, but it also reinforces my bad internet theory...

 

Nope, sorry to burst your bubble, but they're not talking about that bug. That one they still haven't been able to reproduce. See mollygos's response to my question a little earlier in this thread. I asked specifically for clarification if that bug was fix, and so far it's not.

 

This is the sentiment I'm seeing from disillusioned gamers in the PS4 / Xbox One generation of gaming on the whole, and I think it will be what's most remembered about it. Pretty much every single game that hits the market -- regardless of developer or publisher -- feels like a Steam Early Access title. It's actually a little heartbreaking on top of frustrating, particularly if you've been at this video game lark for nearly 30 years.

 

I think the vast majority of players aren't having major issues. The achievement percentages from Xbox alone show high percentages of people getting the toughest achievements. Anyone posting here has most likely had the issue or some other bug, which is why it would appear to be more prevalent to anyone browsing here. I have not had the problem (yet). I have experienced a couple of glitches, but they have already been reported and addressed.

I'm sure you are angry, which is understandable, but new games come with bugs. SV is graphically simple but large by other standards. It's not a realistic expectation for a team of this size to release a game completely bug free. Even Nintendo releases games that have to be patched later (Looking at you, Mario Maker).

You are justified if the issues are ignored, but this team is providing progress reports regularly. I think the best thing you can do it be patient and help where possible. Otherwise, go get that refund. Blowing up the forum with complaints isn't going to produce a fix more quickly.

 

I'm not sure what you mean about the achievements, according to TrueAchievements (which only tracks hardcore people who want to be tracked), .05% of people who have played the game have gotten all achievements. 16 people out of 4,563 have gotten every stardrop. I was getting close until my save got messed up

That being said, I agree people providing thorough reports is the best solution right now. I have also gotten in on the complaining but at this point I'm sure it's obvious many people are upset and justifiably so - if people can provide the information requested by the developers maybe we can finally get back to playing this game.

 

Chucklefish will have to understand that after not being able to load my save after two weeks of waiting, I'm not exactly jumping for joy to hear that a patch is fixing a bunch of bugs that a) won't actually help me play again b) in all honesty, should never have made it to the retail copies in the first place.

I'm just speculating but if this "let's use our paying customers as beta testers" is the real case then this is what we in HR refer to as amoral calculators. They knew fully well that there were faults, but they released it regardless to cash in on the pre-Christmas period and they decided the benefits outweighed the risk. You know, just like the major car company from Fight Club. It's either that or blazing incompetence, which is the one that I'm hoping is the case but that still doesn't really change the end result: we've been screwed and we're getting screwed every day this isn't getting fixed. At least ConcernedApe had the basic decency to apologise on his twitter for the issues rather than this wishy-washy "yeah, bugs have happened, fixes are coming, but we dont know when but we do know you're not supposed to say anything mean to us" codswallop we've been fed since the end of 2016.

And before anyone labels this as unhelpful, try to think of it as a reflection of a person who feels helpless, frustrated and disappointed every time he logs onto this forum in the hope that the supposedly "top priority" issue will be satisfactorily dealt with. I mean for crying out loud, would you be happy with a Monopoly board that stuck together and refused to unfold after you've played it five times? No, you wouldn't, do not pass Go, do not collect your $200!