An early version of Stardew Valley’s mines featured an ‘underground goblin village’ before ConcernedApe scrapped it

While I’m sure acknowledging this will inflict some amount of psychic pain, today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Stardew Valley. To commemorate the occasion and the steady degradation of our joints and bones, Stardew creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone aired a celebratory 10-year anniversary stream, covering his gigahit life sim’s history—some of which we’re seeing for the first time.

Barone’s retrospective stretched back before Stardew’s release date, showing some early development builds demonstrating planned features that never came to fruition. And there’s a particularly wild one among his scrapped plans: At one point, Stardew was going to feature an underground goblin society that’s now lost to development history.

In the section of the stream covering his development progress during 2013, Barone showed an earlier version of Stardew’s mining mechanics—or as he called it, “the era of the procedurally generated mines.” Initially, he said, he intended Stardew’s mining to be like a topdown Terraria, where players would mine their way through procedurally generated levels by digging through the walls themselves to find ore and other hidden goodies.

Unfortunately, while he thought it was “a cool idea,” Barone said he had trouble making it feel worthwhile, and the procedural generation was the source of bugs and frustration.

“It just ended up being too complicated. It was maybe beyond my ability,” Barone said. “Or maybe another way to think about it is that it was too ambitious of a concept for the scope of this game. This should have been an entire game on its own.”

As a side note, he said he’s essentially describing what developer Pugstorm eventually released with Core Keeper, so there’s a game waiting out there for you if Barone’s original mining pitch sounds promising.

Ultimately, Barone said he made “the hard decision to scrap all of it” in favor of the pre-authored mine layouts we see in Stardew today. Mine biomes and enemies were cut alongside the procgen levels, as he demonstrated with footage of a particularly harsh loss: The Goblin Village.

In Barone’s clip from 2013, a Stardew farmer is spelunking through mine tunnels that connect little goblin rooms, complete with little goblin furniture like little goblin chairs around little goblin dining tables. A little goblin warrior, outraged by the intrusion into his little goblin home, attacks the farmer with a little goblin knife before a few sword swings send him to a little goblin grave—an act that undoubtedly produced its share of little goblin grief.

As you might expect, it all looks very charming. But while my heart breaks for the collective goblin experiences we were all denied, Barone said he doesn’t regret scrapping the procgen mining.

“Just because something sounds cool—just because the idea is cool—doesn’t mean that it’s going to be fun or it’s going to be the right idea in practice,” Barone said.

The dangers of scope creep are a harsh truth of game development. And while I don’t blame Barone for leaving the goblin villages on the cutting room floor, it did feel slightly cruel when he went on to ensure none of our remaining goblin hopes went undashed by clarifying that “by the way, underground goblin villages are not canon. Anything you see here from previous builds is not considered to be canonical Stardew Valley.”

Fine, Eric. That’s fine. But now, whenever I can’t look at the Witch’s goblin Henchman without a vague sense of tragedy, that won’t be because of me. He had a people once, Eric.

Oh, well. Maybe some modders will provide their own goblin-themed supplementary material. We can only hope.