Stardew Valley's latest update, released last night, accidentally introduces some new issues, including chickens mysteriously disappearing.
Update 1.6.9, released alongside 1.6 for consoles, adds a new friend for retrieving lost items and more. However, there have been a few cases of players losing their chickens when starting a new farm in the Meadowlands and opening the chicken coop door on the first day.
Stardew Valley creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has said that one solution to this, at least for the moment, is to make sure players leave the co-op door “closed for a day.” Then—not that he needed it, but I love that he did—Barone blamed the chickens' disappearance on a “wild coyote” that sniffed around the farm on the first day. What a shameless bastard (the coyote, not Barone).
Barone has already released a patch, known as Update 1.6.10, on Steam and GOG that addresses rogue chickens as well as some bugs. This update will come to other platforms “as soon as possible,” Barone said.
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So after all this is settled, what's next for Barone? Earlier this year, the creator admitted that he hadn't actually touched his next game, Haunted Chocolatier, “in a long time,” because his attention had been focused on Stardew Valley.
Haunted Chocolatier was first announced in 2021, with a cute trailer showing off its spooky chocolate-making, monster-stabbing, small-town life RPG. Barone previously said that he's “not too worried about the pressure” of releasing Haunted Chocolatier, saying that “it's better to have a delayed game that's really good than a bad game that arrives on time.”
For more information, you can check out our Stardew Valley gift guide here.