elaborate vineyards, as oil and wine were two hot commodities in the ancient world. Sadly, the player is unable to grow olives in Stardew Valley. Wine, however, is widely considered as one of the most profitable products in the game, as the selling price is three times as great as the value of the source fruit. Cato is purely concerned with the production of grape wine, though, and in the world of Stardew Valley, this doesn’t fare particularly well. Throw an extremely valuable fruit in a keg, such as a starfruit or a melon, and you have liquid gold on your hands. Throw in some grapes, one of the least valuable fruits in the game, and you have a waste of time. Cato seems to be really confident in his trellises of grapes, though, so I’ll see this one out.
Something rarely visited in the world of Stardew Valley is religion, which is understandable since that could get really controversial really fast. On the other hand, Cato doesn’t seem worried by this in the slightest, as he advises the reader to “offer to Jupiter Dapalis a cup of wine of any size you wish.” I didn’t really know how to do this in the world of Stardew Valley, so I just kind of dropped a bottle of wine on the ground on top of the mountain and walked away. Hopefully this will get me some brownie points with the gods. The next day one of my grape trellises was struck by a lightning bolt and burned to the ground, so I guess that whole sacrifice thing was garbage.
My sad attempt at a sacrifice.
My farmer lost in a sea of bok choy.
I need a hobby.
As if Cato wasn’t crazy enough, he spends multiple pages near the end of the manual praising cabbage as a crop. Since he seemed so into the idea of cabbage, I decided that I would fill as much space as I could in my crop fields with cabbage. Sadly, cabbage is not available to be planted until the second in-game year, so I instead turned to bok choy as an alternate. It’s basically cabbage, right? As I stood among my newly planted army of bok choy, I had this unshakable feeling that maybe I was taking this too far. This feeling quickly faded as I got distracted by a mushroom I found on the ground. Man, I really need to get my priorities straight.
In the end, how does the advice of an ancient Roman farmer translate (literally and figuratively) to a modern virtual farm? I had an absolute blast playing through this game with Cato’s advice. I feel
written by Thomas Donohue, Thomas Jefferson High
School for Science and Technology
like this exercise embodies a large portion of the appeal of the classics for me, as I experienced something I’m very familiar with through a completely different lens. It really encouraged me to try new things and explore some facets of the game I wasn’t familiar with. I will say that while Cato’s advice provided a lot of fun, I'd suggest you stick to the Stardew Valley Wiki for advice from now on.
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