AStardew Valleyplayer has shared a little-known secret for identifying the contents of artifact spots before you dig them up.Stardew Valleyis famously arcanewhen it comes to tutorials, or the lack thereof. It’s all too common for players to rack up hundreds of hours without even discovering the most basic features, leading to breathless Reddit posts and thousands of concurring comments when they finally do.
This is one such case: Reddit userloverlanerecently posted a thread discussing two different types of dig spots, wondering if they were different. As it turns out, commenterLobsterFew4672observed,they had unearthed an easy way to tell which dig spots contain valuable artifacts, and which contain slightly less valuable seeds. Slightly shorter, more spaced-out, lightly colored worms, such as the ones on the left side in the picture below, tend to spawn artifacts. The longer, darker, straighter ones on the right give you random seeds and books.
How Artifact Spots Work In Stardew Valley
Dig It
InStardew Valley,you can randomly find a wide variety of items buried in the soilthroughout Pelican Town (and the desert and Ginger Island, too). These items are usually, though not always, marked by little wiggling brown worms poking up through the dirt. Smash them with your hoe, and an item will spawn.
Artifact spots are much easier to spot during winter, when they stand out against the white snow.
Digging up random plots of dirt will usually reward you with clay, which is useful, if not particularly rare or valuable. But finding one of these artifact spots will grant you some more interesting items: random seeds for the darker worms, and artifacts for the lighter ones.The seeds are always plantable in the current season- or, if you’re close to the end of it, the next one.
Artifacts are a lot more random, and show a lot more variety.Most of them can bedonated to the museumin order to obtain various rewards.A couple of them can actually be usedon their own, including Prismatic Shards and Dinosaur Eggs. Finding four Dwarf Scrolls will unlock the ability to speak with various dwarves around the game, at which point you may purchase a number of unique items from them.
That said,most players just smash up any artifact spots they come across- it’s hard to distinguish between them at a glance, and the rewards usually come in handy anyway. As commenterUnnieAntoniaput it, “300 hours in, I never realised there was a difference.” But they may not be entirely at fault for not noticing; userold_soul1999points out that this feature was only introduced in the 1.6 update last year.
Stardew Valley Keeps Players Guessing
300 Hours Is Nothing
But really, this kind of thing is all too common.Stardewgenerally eschews lengthy tutorials in favor of encouraging player experimentation and discovery. This creates many such moments, in which players discover certain features 100, 500, oreven 1,200 hours in.
That makes it all the more interesting to play, though. These things aren’t secret, per se, but you’re constantly noticing more of them every single time you play through the game. The sense of discovery givesStardew Valleynear-infinite replay value, and keeps it fun year after year.
