Yet another peculiar Stardew Valley bug has popped up with the release of the farming sim’s latest patch, and this time creator Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone doesn’t have a lore reason to help fix it – he has a linguistic reason instead.
Over the weekend, a Twitter user alerted Barone to a new bug attached to the abandoned house near the Wizard Tower. Originally empty, once you’ve earned your first in-game achievement, a small mouse will move into the house, whereupon they’ll set up a business selling you a wide variety of fetching pieces of headwear. Sadly for some players, however, since the arrival of patch 1.6.9 on consoles, while they’ve been able to buy some new hats, the mouse that’s supposed to be selling them is nowhere to be found.
Reaching out to Barone for some classic social media bug reporting, it wasn’t long before they received a reply. The developer explained that the issue had been logged, and was a bug “if you are playing in Spanish,” that “will be fixed in an upcoming patch.”
There’s little sense of why this has happened, and even less of why it’s limited to the Spanish language version of the game. Even Barone seems a little stumped, evidenced by the lack of lore explanation offered – in recent weeks, he’s blamed disappearing chickens on a hungry coyote and performance-ruining cat hats on a spate of pet rashes. That’s to say nothing of the new infinite lobster exploit, which Barone says he’s also looking into. Sometimes, I guess that’s just how game dev be, and you’ve got to work out why a hat-selling mouse is apparently hiding from his stock of sombreros.