Stardew Valley Is Now An Esport With A $40,000 Tournament Cup Announced

Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley, has announced the official Stardew Valley Cup, creating an eSports competition for the farming simulator. On Twitter, Barone announced that the competition would consist of four teams of four, each featuring different streamers and speedrunners. Teams will compete to see who can earn the most points by completing different challenges in-game. The winner will take $40,000 USD worth of prize money. Barone is holding the competition in collaboration with Zach “Unsurpassable Z” Hartman, a Stardew Valley content creator.

In an announcement video, Hartman detailed the one hundred challenges that the teams will be aiming to complete in a three-hour timespan, all starting on a beach farm. The challenges range from completing the different rooms in the community center to reaching the lowest level of the mines. Each challenge is worth a different amount of points based on how difficult it is to complete. Hartman said that teams will have two weeks to make a game plan ahead of the competition, however, Hartman will introduce hidden challenges during the cup to entice competitors to abandon their plans.

The event will take place on Hartman’s Twitch channel on September 4 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET, where he and Barone will be commentating on the event, but all of the individual competitors will be streaming their own viewpoints. The competition will last three hours of real-time and there is no limit on how many in-game days players can go through. The $40,000 prize, provided by Barone, will be split between the four teams, with the winning team getting $28,000 to split between the four members.

Stardew Valley has been immensely successful, selling over 10 million copies as of January 2020, so it shouldn’t be surprising that people want to turn it into a competition. It was also recently announced that Stardew Valley is coming to Xbox Game Pass later this year.