Stardew ValleyCharming farm decorations include two unique little blocks that play a flute or drum sound when players walk past them. While they’re cute, I never quite figured out how to arrange them. Mine were usually made to collect dust in a random chest somewhere in a dark corner of my farm.
But in the hands of the right player, flute and drum blocks morph into something incredible: walkways playing intricate classical melodies and popular tunes. And talented in the last six months Stardew Valley Players have mastered flute block arrangements of dizzyingly complex songs like Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)“Green Days”american idiot,” the Pokémon battle themeand of course Toby Fox’s “megalowania” out Undertale (where the character even looks like Papyrus).
On Reddit, clips of gamers traversing these musical paths have garnered tens of thousands of positive votes, and it’s easy to see why. These trails are mesmerizing—like a video game equivalent of an old music box, one of those slowly spinning cylinders with each protruding metal tab making a gentle plink. You can look at them and know this took some time to make. The arrangement of “Megalovania,” for example, took six hours to plan, followed by five hours to place blocks, creator Yaramy wrote in the Reddit post. And this is someone who has made some.
Arranging music is a challenge, even with the best tools, and making it happen Stardew Valley requires a combination of Excel magic and furious clicking. It also comes with some very specific hurdles: there’s the limit to the sounds that can be played at any given time; a sprite’s walking speed, which increases tempo; and the challenge of finding a sufficiently large spot Stardew Valley‘s card to list everything. Capturing the essence of a song is difficult – but still possible! – even with this little toolkit.
“One of the basics of recording is that you can use all of these tracks,” PK Levine, who made “American Idiot,” told Polygon over the phone. “In the stardew You have two because your pawn can go through at most two flute blocks at a time in sequential order. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are tricky.”
Levine is a multi-instrumentalist who can play guitar, piano and drums. Green Day’s anthem hit is obviously an iconic choice, but Levine specifically picked it because the song mostly alternates between guitars and vocals, allowing him to use a flute track and a drum track to make it sound “pushing, exciting and interesting.” . No rock song would work without those drums, Levin explained. Even then, it’s still an uphill battle, because “with drum kits you can hit up to three drums at once, and there’s a lot of heavy syncopation,” Levine said.
Redditor NetWarrior FM who created the Mario Overworld Theme and John Williams’ “duel of fates‘ (a Star Wars theme) in Stardew Valley, explained that the flute blocks also have a limited range of sounds. He told Polygon via email, “You have to get a little creative and go up or down an octave and try to get the best sounding notes.”
No masterpiece is created overnight. Levine began his arrangement with the meeting a detailed table in which he depicted the notes – flute blocks can play a range of 24 – referring to the Stardew Valley wiki page and a tablature of the song’s melody and vocal line. The flute block row alone required 16 columns, which is roughly two bars of 8/8, Levine explained.
“The number of flute blocks you run past in a given time is fixed,” Levine said. “So you can’t really get tricky with the rhythm. Essentially, 4/4 time music translates directly into eight flute blocks.”
Drums can be even trickier. There are seven values, but they’re pretty subjective. For example, you need to know the difference between bass and snare, and it can be difficult to tell. Some players think the bass drum is on click zero, but for Levine the bass is four clicks in while click zero sounds more like a low tom. Several creators stated that it comes down to trial and error.
“I basically laid out 16 drum pads and kept running past them repeatedly — I just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I could cram it into those 16 pads,” Levine said. “It’s only when you hear it together that you get the sense Does it work?”
Players can change the pitch of each flute and drum block Stardew Valley by repeatedly clicking the left mouse button. A flute block defaults to C, and 12 clicks takes you to C in a higher octave. Basically, if you’re not a music person, this means a lot of fucking clicking to get a simple “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” let alone “Turkish March” or the drumline of “American Idiot.”
Levine plays the game in multiplayer with mods Stardew Valley expanded and CJB item spawners installed – for spawning flute blocks – and it took about four months in game to complete the Green Day track. He did it in his multiplayer game, although it doesn’t allow a player to pause because they “love to play along [his] Friends” and “just wanted to make this organic.” Stardew Valley Expanded’s larger Calico Desert also gave Levine plenty of room; in prior consultation with the gravity falls Theme Levine used the vanilla game, and cacti kept getting in the way.
To play the song, his sprite opens a cup of coffee and then sprints through. Base player speed is five; Drinking one coffee increases that to six. So drinking coffee changes the tempo of the song, but it also fits the aesthetic – if I had to walk through a musical maze, I’d add caffeine too. This is closer to the faster tempo of “American Idiot,” according to Levine, and it’s not uncommon to see it in other arrangements. Levine’s next project has him planting grass on the path to slow his character’s walking speed since the track has a slower pace.
NetWarrior FM took a different approach, using the mod’s CJB cheats menu to pause the game so its character sprite didn’t have to sleep as often. It also allowed him to adjust his player speed. He “didn’t plan ahead where to place the blocks” but was happy to “just join in”. NetWarrior FM also uses an item spawning mod, but just discovered a flute block mod that allows players to switch instruments (toy piano is an option). He is currently using it to arrange “Let It Go”. Frozen.
Every time one of these arrangements crosses my feed, I pause to take it in. I’ve seen enough to be able to “read” the shape of the song: you can tell which bars are repeating when they appear like a closed loop, the a player can run an entire loop, with branching paths leading to others movements or from a chorus to a verse. Thirteen years of classical piano and I can’t play anything I used to, but obviously I can parry Stardew Valley Block music for flute. Imagine that.
They are a testament to hard work and incredible creativity, such as a beautiful structure within Minecraft or a perfectly terraformed one Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island. They’re an embodiment of a song, distilled into simple melodies and drumlines, pieces of music history that fans can recognize without all the bells and whistles. I wonder what they will adapt next.
