Stardew Valley - TAS of Joja% in

An exploratory Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) built using a recompiled version of Stardew Valley v1.3.36. This is my third attempt at developing a TAS framework for Stardew, and I finally think I've worked out most of the desync issues. This run is far from optimal, it's primarily a proof of concept and stress test (took about a weekend to play all ~133k frames).

Joja % is a run where you attempt to complete the Joja Community Development Form. It's a pretty easy run to TAS because there's really nothing more to do than make 140k gold as fast as possible. In this run I take advantage of some tricks that are not RTA viable (or at least not easy to take advantage of fully) which you'll see through:

1) Animation canceling - Every time you swing a tool, you have a certain number of frames before the tool hits its target. After the tool has hit, there are then "follow-through" frames that complete the animation. Pressing Right-Shift+Delete+R at the same time will cause the tool to stop animating and return the player to the default standing animation. Every single tool use in this TAS uses animation canceling to dramatically speedup movement. This is most noticeable with the scythe, where a single frame swing can be used to poke at weeds or grass in certain directions.

2) Rain manipulation - Rain for a day is decided two nights beforehand, based on a random number generator seeded with the player's step count. This run makes heavy abuse of this mechanic to force rain on almost every single day of the run where it can be used to water the crops (which is what makes this run viable).

3) Animation overlaps - during crop harvesting, you can pick up other crops that are within reach and only have to go through a single animation cycle (why I typically walk into the middle of a 3x3 and then pick them all up at once).

Otherwise it's a pretty simple money route: exponential increase crops to 205 tiles (what gets covered by my scarecrow) and try to minimize the number of days outside. I'll probably use a similar (if not identical) Spring route for other runs that require fast early game money.

Interested in SDV Speedrunning? Come join us at   / discord