Stardew Valley Dashboard

Transforming 100+ wiki pages into 3 compact and concise dashboards

Data Visualization

Challenge

It was decided that existing tools to aid players in optimizing gameplay for the award-winning farming simulator game, Stardew Valley, were insufficient.

Solution

We created three dashboards using Observable Plot to act as at-a-glance guides for the various qualities of in-game items. Item lookup is now much more efficient than navigating the widely-used Stardew Valley Wiki.

Process

Research and User Testing

Initially, this project focused on crop pricing. We conducted EDA to establish trends in availability and effects of gameplay mechanics such as processing to increase in-game profits.

We preseted charts created in Tableau to three participants and asked them a series of question to guage understanding. All participants were Stardew Valley players with varying levels of experience, ranging from newbie to advanced. Participants were selected via professional and academic networks, with the intent of capturing a representative cross-section of target users. Participation was voluntary, and each participant signed an informed consent form prior to the session. This form disclosed the scope of the study, confidentiality provisions, and confirmed whether the session would be audio/video recorded.

Participants

Participant 1 Participant 2 Participant 3
Age Early 20s Late 20s Mid 20s
Familiarity with Stardew Valley First played a year ago 5 years of experience First played about 2 years ago
Expertise (Self-Reported) Newbie Advanced Casual
Tools Used Previously Stardew Valley Wiki Stardew Valley Wiki, YouTube guides Stardew Valley Wiki, Stardew Valley Planner

Our participants were all college-educated women with various experience with Stardew Valley and familiarity with in-game farming mechanics. Furthermore, they have all employed third-party tools help make gameplay decisions.

Test Measures

During the usability testing, we measured several key metrics to understand users’ perception of our design:

  1. Time on Task

    We recored how long it took each participant (in seconds and/or minutes) to complete tasks such as finding the most profitable crop in a given season while using our infographic versus an existing external wiki guide in order to quantify how intuitive and efficient our dashboard was to use. A shorter time generally indicated that users could quickly understand and navigate the interface.

  2. User Satisfaction

    During each session we used Likert-scale questions and open-ended questions to gauge users’ overall satisfaction with our design. This included whether the dashboard was frustrating to use or if they would use this dashboard when they play Stardew Valley. Other feedback included suggestions for iterations that would increase overall user satisfaction.

  3. Comparison to other tools

    Since Stardew Valley players often rely on external guides such as the Official Stardew Valley Wiki to access detailed in-game profits information, we asked participants to compare our dashboard to the wiki by completing the same tasks with both tools. We wanted to know whether they found our dashboard more visually appealing and easier to navigate in comparison to finding the same information through the wiki pages.


Overall the participants struggled to interpret some of the labels of the graphs and the overall structure of the visualizations including unclear axis titles and terminology. Less advanced players expressed more confusion and less certainty over the purpose and functions of the visualizations. All participants spoke their questions aloud while working through tasks, suggesting persistent ambiguity around how to get started or interact with the data effectively. One participant was unsure if clicking would reveal more information and didn’t initially realize the dashboard was interactive. Another initially missed that the visualizations required scrolling and expected immediate results from clicking the icons.

Despite initial confusion, none of the participants found the visualization difficult to use overall. Participants 1 and 3 expressed enthusiasm for the tool’s potential future uses of the visualization. Participant 3 specifically mentioned that using the visualization for information was preferable to using the Stardew Valley Wiki. All participants expressed a desire for the visualizations to have additional context and data available. Participant 3 suggested information for other items in the game. Interestingly, it took participants a minute longer on average look up information via Stardew Valley Wiki than it did our visualization for the purposes of crop comparision despite prior familiarity with Stardew Valley Wiki.

Changes Made

After conducting the usability tests, we decided to significantly modify our designs to better align with our vision and satisfy user needs. Instead of embedding Tableau graphs, we switched to Observable, which offers greater flexibility and a wider variety of visualization options. This change was also motivated by the issues participants encountered during testing, particularly when using Tableau’s default filters, which caused confusion.

In addition to updating the visualizations, we introduced a fixed side column that displays relevant key information, allowing users to quickly reference essential facts without needing to view the charts. This was a direct response to participants’ desire for quicker access to important crop-specific data, such as the number of harvests per season. Both the basic facts column and the selection column remain fixed on the screen, while the graph section is scrollable. This limited scrolling enables users to explore data in detail while still keeping the broader context in view, addressing participants’ difficulties in navigating between crop comparisons.

After presenting the current version of the dashboard to the same participants we tested with prior, although it was not done in a formal setting, the same tasks as before were completed almost instantaneously. Participants also expressed much excitement in using and exploring this version of the tool.

Data Organization

For this project, we created tidy datasets for each item type (crops, fish, animal products) by referencing Stardew Valley Wiki for relevant metadata about each item. For example, for crops, we collected the following information:

  • Crop name
  • Crop type ( fruit, tree, vegetable, forageable, flower, other)
  • Season availability (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter)
  • Seed price
  • Days to initial harvest
  • Days to regrow (for multi-yield crops)
  • Yield per harvest
  • Maximum number of harvests per season
  • Harvest frequency under different fertilizers: Speed-Gro, Deluxe Speed-Gro, Hyper Speed-Gro
  • Impact of the Agriculturist profession on fertilizer-enhanced growth rates
  • Base sell price by quality: Normal, Silver, Gold, Iridium
  • Tiller profession price multipliers by quality
  • Keg product output (Juice, Wine) and:
  • Base and Artisan profession prices by quality
  • Preserves Jar output (Pickle, Jelly) and:
  • Base and Artisan profession prices by quality
  • Dehydrator product (Dried Fruit, Dried Mushroom) and:
  • Base and Artisan profession prices by quality

We made deliberate decisions about which data to include and exclude. While our datasets are rich in numerical detail, we chose to omit broader global multipliers, like general profession-based price boosts, from most visualizations to avoid distorting trends across categories.

For use in the dashboard, the data is fed in by parsing the JSON in which it is stored and accessed further through key-value pairs. The charts and graphs of the dashboard change in accordance to the selected item.