Player sleeps 1,000 years in Stardew Valley, breaks Switch

Stardew Valley opens with a letter from your grandfather and a ranch meant to reconnect you with nature. One player took a different approach: over three weeks they left their Nintendo Switch running to see what would happen if the protagonist slept for 1,000 in-game years.

Redditor Holozard started a save where the only permitted action was sleep, using a controller with a turbo button to mash A and a hair tie to walk right automatically. The Switch crashed nine times during the experiment, and the controller suffered severe stick drift in the process.

When the player finally woke, the Ferngill Republic had become a surreal landscape of tall red mushrooms that limited movement and a world littered with purple space rocks after repeated meteor showers. It took three full seasons to clear the overgrowth, and some things felt unchanged: chickens left out before the sleep were now 1,000 years old — "Huffy looks grumpy," the game noted.

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