Vent: my Stardew farm went from 4 hours a day to zero in about 3 weeks and I know exactly why
I started my first farm back in March and for like a month I was fully hooked, playing maybe 4 hours a day, sketching crop layouts on the back of receipts, the whole deal. Then I hit year two, unlocked the greenhouse, and suddenly the game turned into a chore list. My farm went from this messy little patch with a few parsnips to 80 crops plus sprinklers that I had to refill by hand because I placed them dumb, and I stopped playing almost overnight. It was not burnout exactly, it was that the fun part (wandering around, saying hi to everybody, catching a weird fish) got buried under watering and shipping bins. My before and after is wild too: my screenshot from Spring Year 1 is cozy and cluttered, and my Year 2 screenshot is this gray grid of soil with zero personality. My wife walked by and said it looked like a spreadsheet, which honestly stung because she was right. I deleted that save last week and started over with one rule, no more than 20 crops at a time. How do you all keep the early game feeling without it turning into a second job?