Stardew Valley is making an incredibly rare collaboration appearance in a cosy gacha game of all places
Okay, so I recently wrote about how I'm kind of over the Fortnitification of everything, but Infinity Nikki collaborating with Stardew Valley is one videogame crossover I can abide by.
The two cosy games are colliding in an update set to land on September 1. It's not 100% what Stardewy things will be making an appearance in Miraland yet—we get to see a junimo being flung from Pelican Town over to Infinity Nikki's world before bouncing off, but there's little more beyond that.
It does feel strange that a game whose clothes are little more than a handful of pixels is crossing over with a game that's all about clothes, but it seems like Infinity Nikki is using the opportunity to finally introduce its housing system, which we've been waiting on since the game launched last December.
Weirdly, I don't spy any Stardew-specific furniture items in the five-minute teaser from Infold. I will say that the system looks pretty damn neat, though. I was mostly just expecting the ability to decorate a pre-made house, but it turns out you can build the entire thing from scratch. Furniture can be resized and placed on top of beds and tables, too. It's all way more in-depth than I was expecting it to be—I was anticipating something much closer to Genshin's housing system than this, which operates on a far more limited scope.
I assume more Stardew-ness will come in with the farming system attached to housing. There are different crops that can be planted—come on, there has to be a Starfruit crop for Infinity Nikki—and you can even use abilities like the purifying orb (usually a combat ability) to quickly plant seeds across multiple dirt patches.
It's a surprising collaboration, especially considering Stardew Valley doesn't do this sort of thing very often. It collaborated with Terraria back in 2022, and most recently appeared as a themed card pack in Balatro. Outside of those two, however, Stardew Valley has mostly been contained within its own universe.
That makes me extra excited to see what's to come, and I really hope it's meatier beyond the whole "hey, junimos!" vibe the trailer was going for. It might even be enough to convince me to come back after the mess that was the 1.5 update. Might.