Stardew Valley briefly broke itself after performance hotfix crashed the game

Stardew Valley managed to break itself this week after a hotfix intended to repair performance issues caused the game to repeatedly crash.

The patch introduced a memory leak problem which was making it perform progressively worse over longer play sessions. The hotfix went out on December 7, but players quickly began reporting that their game was crashing within minutes of booting up. Anything from entering a chicken coop to watering plants seemed to break things entirely, making it impossible to play.

As always, creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone was on the ball pretty quickly. "Alright, it's been brought to my attention that the hotfix broke the game," he tweeted out a mere two hours after the initial update. "We'll fix this ASAP. Sorry about that." It took less than three hours for a further hotfix to come out, with ConcernedApe confirming things were sorted in a follow-up tweet. Everything seems to be a-okay now, and players were quick to thank him for the speedy fix. 

Barone has been a busy bee lately. As well as continuing to pump out small updates for Stardew Valley including last week's Update 1.5.5 and working towards modding support, he recently announced that he's working on a brand-new game called Haunted Chocolatier.