Mobile Saves
| Mobile Saves | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mechanic |
Saving on a phone or tablet has to cope with something a computer never does: the game being pushed into the background by a phone call, a message or the home button. Stardew Valley handles it by keeping three kinds of save side by side. The standard save is the ordinary overnight one, written when the farmer goes to bed, and it is identical to the computer version's file. An emergency save is taken automatically whenever the app leaves the screen, so an interrupted session can be picked up mid-afternoon. A backup save does the same thing on demand, from a button on the options page. Only the standard save keeps the file compatible with a computer, which is why the other two sit beside it instead of replacing it.
Overview
A folder is created on the device for each farm, and all three kinds of save live inside it. The standard save behaves exactly as it does elsewhere: it is written at bedtime, it always resumes at six in the morning, and it can be copied to and from a computer in either direction. The game also keeps the previous standard save alongside the current one, and the options page carries a button to swap between them, which turns the usual file-renaming trick into a single tap.
The emergency save exists because a backgrounded app can be unloaded without warning when the device needs the memory. Pressing the home button starts one, and it takes a few seconds to write, so swiping the app away immediately afterwards interrupts it and the save never finishes. Resuming an app that was never unloaded carries on exactly where it stopped and the emergency save is not needed. If the app was unloaded, the game notices the emergency file on the next launch and offers to restore the session from where it left off. One detail saves pointless writing: nothing is recorded before twenty past six in the morning, because the overnight standard save is already as good.
Only one emergency save exists on the device at a time, and it is not tied to a particular farm, so it belongs to whatever was being played last. It survives being loaded, and is only cleared when the next standard or backup save is written.
The backup save is the deliberate version of the same idea. Tapping Save Backup on the options page stores the current moment, and it can be done at almost any time, with festivals, cutscenes and a few other events excluded. The stored time is rounded forward to the next ten-minute mark. Loading a farm that has a backup prompts a choice between resuming from it and starting the morning fresh from the standard save. Each farm keeps one backup, so a new one replaces the old, and the next overnight save clears it away after the level-up screens and the shipping report have been seen.
Notes
Mid-day saves do not capture quite everything, which produces a few small oddities on resuming. Any Help Wanted notice that had not yet been accepted is gone. Fishing bubbles and panning spots already on the water disappear, though ones scheduled to start later in the day still appear on time. Buffs from food and drink are always lost, so a Lucky Lunch eaten before backgrounding the app has to be eaten again. Water troughs in a Slime Hutch come back empty, which stops Slime Balls appearing the following morning.
Because standard saves share their format with the computer version, a farm can move between the two freely as long as the game on the receiving device is not older than the one that wrote the file. On an Apple device the transfer runs through the file-sharing panel or the Files app, and anything that came from a modded computer game has to have its custom content stripped out first, since the mobile version has no concept of it.
The practical habit on mobile is to tap Save Backup before putting the device down, rather than trusting the automatic emergency save. The deliberate one is tied to the farm, is not overwritten by whatever gets played next, and does not depend on the write finishing before the app is swiped away.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
