Eric Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, recently released the mammoth patch 1.6 across the mobile and console versions of Stardew Valley, bringing the game up to parity with the PC version. Unfortunately, that upgrade has brought with it some fairly crippling performance issues across the board. One of which can be solved by, er, removing hats from your beloved pets.
News in brief
- Stardew Valley's new patch is causing some performance problems
- Barone is scrambling to fix, but has pointed out he's only one man
- The temporary reprieve involves making your pets less stylish
Patch 1.6 is a momentous one for Stardew Valley, as it introduces a lot of new content to the game. However, it's not had the smoothest rollout for players, as the latest patch, rolled into patch 1.6.9, has caused some serious performance issues across the board. A fix is being worked on, but thankfully, there's also a workaround to stop your game from seriously lagging out. The downside? It involves making your pets an awful lot less stylish.
"PSA: if you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets," Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone posted on Twitter (X). "We will address the problem as soon as possible."
Bugs happen in video games, so this isn't something to get worked up about. Barone has proven himself reliable where the game is concerned, so it's worth keeping cool and doing what he says. Unfortunately, little foibles like putting hats on your pets is a big part of Stardew Valley's charm. Amusingly, Barone has supplied an in-universe reason for the hat-ocalypse.
"There's rumors of a strange rash affecting pets' ears in Zuzu City and we just want to make sure those ears can breathe for a few days."
This falls in line with the previous bug which made chickens invisible — his lore reason for invisible chickens disappearing was invisible coyotes carrying them off.
