Development

Barone aimed to give players the feeling of immersion in a small farming community, stating that he wanted Stardew Valley to be entertaining while also designing it to have "real-world messages". In contrast to earlier Harvest Moon games, which could end after two years of in-game time has passed, Barone kept Stardew Valley open-ended so that players would not feel rushed to try to complete everything possible. During development, Barone recognized that some players would attempt to figure out mechanically how to maximize their farm's yield and profit through spreadsheets and other tools, but hoped that most players would take the time to learn these on their own. To that end, he designed the cooking aspect of the game purposely not to be profitable, but instead to pay back in bonuses that aided exploration, farming, mining and fishing skills. Barone also opted not to include the butchering of farm animals for meat products, encouraging players to name and tend to each animal individually in staying with the feeling he wanted for the game. The animals cannot die but stop producing products if not tended to.

Stardew Valley originally began as a modern fan-made alternative to the Harvest Moon series, as he felt the series had gotten "progressively worse" after Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. Unable to find a satisfactory replacement, Barone began to create a game similar to the series, stating that his intent was "to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon" and that "no title in the series ever brought it all together in a perfect way". Barone was also inspired by other games, including Animal Crossing, Rune Factory, Minecraft, and Terraria, adding features seen in those games such as crafting, quests, and combat. He was the sole developer on the game, creating all of the game's pixel art, music and sound effects, and story and dialogue.

Initially, Barone considered releasing Stardew Valley on Xbox Live Indie Games due to the ease of publishing on that platform, but found early on that his scope for it became much larger than originally anticipated. Barone publicly announced the game in September 2012, using Steam's Greenlight system to gauge interest on the game. After the game was shown a great deal of support from the community, Barone began working on it in full, engaging with Reddit and Twitter communities to discuss his progress and gain feedback on proposed additions. Shortly after the Greenlight period in 2013, he was approached by Finn Brice, director of Chucklefish, who offered to help publish the game on release. Chucklefish took over many of the non-development activities for Barone, such as site hosting and setting up his development wiki. Barone decided not to use Steam's early access feature for development, as he felt that it was not well suited to Stardew Valley. Barone spent four years working on the project, redoing it multiple times and frequently spending 10 hours or more a day working on it. He originally programmed it in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework, but later migrated to MonoGame in 2021, which, according to Barone, "futureproofs the game and allows mods to access more than 4 gigs of RAM".

Barone aimed to give players the feeling of immersion in a small farming community, stating that he wanted Stardew Valley to be entertaining while also designing it to have "real-world messages". In contrast to earlier Harvest Moon games, which could end after two years of in-game time has passed, Barone kept Stardew Valley open-ended so that players would not feel rushed to try to complete everything possible. During development, Barone recognized that some players would attempt to figure out mechanically how to maximize their farm's yield and profit through spreadsheets and other tools, but hoped that most players would take the time to learn these on their own. To that end, he designed the cooking aspect of the game purposely not to be profitable, but instead to pay back in bonuses that aided exploration, farming, mining and fishing skills. Barone also opted not to include the butchering of farm animals for meat products, encouraging players to name and tend to each animal individually in staying with the feeling he wanted for the game. The animals cannot die but stop producing products if not tended to.

Release

In April 2015, Barone announced he intended to release the game only once he felt it was feature complete, refusing to put the game onto the Early Access program, or accept any pre-sale payments. The game was released for Windows on February 26, 2016. Following its release, Barone continued to work on the game, taking feedback from the community and patching bugs, and stated plans to add in additional features at a later date. Barone anticipated adding in more end-game content, as well as ports for other platforms. Barone had stated that he initially planned a four-player cooperative mode to be released in the game at launch. In this mode, Barone planned that all players would share a common farm, enabling players to all do different tasks related to it, such as one player mining while others tend to different parts of the farm. The multiplayer feature supports both local area network and remote online connectivity. Barone had planned for public beta testing of the multiplayer feature in late 2017 for the Windows version, but was still working to improve the network code by early 2018. The multiplayer beta for Windows was released in April 2018, with it officially launching for all PC platforms on August 1, 2018. In December 2018, the multiplayer update was released for the Nintendo Switch.

Mobile versions for iOS and Android were developed with help of The Secret Police, with the iOS version being released on October 24, 2018, and the Android version being released on March 14, 2019. Both versions include the ability for Windows, macOS, and Linux users to transfer progress to their device. In 2018, Barone stated his desire to assemble a team of developers to help continue further development of the game. By 2019, all versions of the game, except on mobile, were self-published by Barone. Stardew Valley has also seen an active modding community, with players adding various new features to the game.

In December 2019, Stardew Valley was added to the Tesla Arcade, a Linux-based video game service incorporated within most models of Tesla electric cars. A cooperative board game adaptation, Stardew Valley: The Board Game, was released in February 2021.