Stardew Valley’s Farming Master

Chapter 102: It’s Not Me That’s Wrong, It’s the World!

By the time Leon realized what had happened, Marlon had already slipped away.

“I can’t shake the feeling that Mr. Marlon is really into making money,” Leon muttered as he searched for the entrance to the first level of the mine. Before long, he spotted a hole about a meter in diameter under an electric lamp.

A short flight of stairs was embedded into the sides of the hole. The iron steps looked a little worn but not rusty. Leon gave them two solid kicks, and they didn’t so much as wobble—clearly, they were sturdy.

He descended the ladder, feeling the cool draft from below brushing against his backside and sighing in disappointment.

If you asked most Stardew Valley players the most efficient way to go mining, about 80% would say explosives, while the remaining 20%—the mod players—would tell you to use a tractor.

Leon was both a regular player and a mod player. Without considering the convenience of the tractor mod that converted the stable into a mining machine, the only option left to him was blasting.

Though he hadn’t unlocked any bomb recipes yet, Leon was, after all, a civilized man with nine years of compulsory education. Aside from using gunpowder, there were other ways to achieve similar results.

For example—dust explosions.

But before he even reached the first underground level, just in the stairway between the surface and the mines, he could already feel a noticeable airflow. That meant the conditions for a dust explosion weren’t quite right.

When he finally reached the bottom and saw the size of the first-floor mine, he gave up on the idea entirely. The space was too big.It was at least four meters high and about the size of a football field. Creating a proper dust explosion here would take far too much flour.

Not only would the cost outweigh the benefit, but the terrain could easily get him killed.

“Guess I’ll just mine the old-fashioned way.”

Looking at the irregularly placed but numerous rocks scattered throughout the mine, Leon quietly took out his pickaxe.

In his mind, mining meant carving a tunnel into a mountainside and then chiseling into the rock walls to find ore. In Stardew Valley, mining meant wandering through a large underground cavern, whacking at freestanding rocks. In a way, it was more like breaking stones at a construction site.

Unlike in the game, however, every rock here looked the same. Leon wasn’t sure if that meant there was no copper ore on this level, or if the copper was simply hidden inside.

He chose a nearby rock about the size of a washbasin and struck it once. The rock shattered instantly, its fragments sinking into the ground as if swallowed. All that remained was a single fist-sized stone lying on the hard floor.

Stone (Resource): A common material widely used in construction and processing.

This was different from the farm’s stone piles, which shrank with each hit and disappeared after the third strike, leaving only a stone drop. Leon had assumed the mine rocks worked the same way, but here, one swing destroyed the rock, and most of the fragments vanished into the mine itself.

Interesting… and a little concerning. If the mine could swallow stone, who’s to say it wouldn’t swallow him?

Still, he figured that was unlikely. More probable was that the mine had some kind of built-in recycling mechanism.

After pocketing the stone, Leon moved on to a larger rock, half his height and five or six meters across. A giant boulder.

The first swing jolted his arms, but the boulder visibly shrank. The second swing shrank it even more.

Leon kept swinging, and on the eighth strike, the boulder shattered, leaving a scatter of collectable stones. He counted them—eleven in total. Together, they weren’t even a twentieth the size of the original boulder.

“Can’t make sense of it, but I’ll accept it.”

He took a swig from his water bottle and sighed. The mining process here felt just like in Stardew Valley—only instead of looking through a monitor, it was a full panoramic VR experience.

If this was only because he was using System Tools, Leon could accept that. But if mining in this world really was like this, maybe he was the odd one out.

After all, if everyone thought something was normal and only you thought it was strange, odds are you’re the problem.

Shoving that philosophical musing aside, Leon stowed his water and, instead of breaking more rocks right away, began searching for the shaft to the next level, using the electric lamps on the walls for light.

But after a full circuit of the first floor, he found no shaft. The only things in sight were rocks of all sizes and the occasional patch of brown soil.

That made him suspect the entrance to the second floor was, like in the game, hidden under the rocks. No point wasting time—he went back to smashing.

It was a dull process. In the vast, empty mine, the only living thing was Leon, the only sound the clang of metal on stone echoing endlessly.

Clang!

As Leon swung at another rock, the impact felt unusually strong, and the sound was sharper than before.

Sensing something was off, he pulled back his pickaxe and drew his Galaxy Watermelon Knife. In the next instant, the rock in front of him burst upward, revealing the deadly threat hidden beneath.