Stardew Valley players have theorized for years that harvesting crops from left to right is faster than harvesting them from right to left. Not hugely faster, hardly even noticeable, but just ever so slightly quicker. For non-Stardewers it's the sort of thing that sounds a little weird and even ridiculous—not quite up there with fake moon landings and “Elvis is alive” conspiracy theories, but of a similar nature. Left-to-right, right-to-left—come on, be serious here!

Except in this case, well, it turns out that the temporally-sensitive farmers were correct: Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone confirmed today that there is in fact a bug that caused left-to-right harvesting to be faster than right-to-left harvesting, and it's going to be fixed in the big 1.6 update coming out next week.

Now, this isn't entirely new or unknown, at least among some deeply committed members of the Stardew Valley community. Three years ago, for instance, redditor Snow-Infernus conducted an experiment that delivered clear-cut results:

🚜 Seven-row harvesting, left-to-right: 11.11 seconds
🚜 Seven-row harvesting, right-to-left: 13.11 seconds

Tip: Harvesting crops is faster moving left to right, vs right to left. from r/StardewValley

“I discovered this while playing on Switch on the latest 1.5 build. Harvesting 3 rows of 7 columns results in exactly 2 seconds difference,” they explained. “|No boosts or status effects applied. I've found that with larger plots it's actually faster to walk back to the left side and move from left to right again, rather than harvest back from right to left.”

Barone later confirmed the specific nature of the bug—”The left facing harvest animation was 100ms longer than it should've been”—and that as far as he knows, the bug has been there since Stardew launched in 2016. 

What that means, folks, is that a truly staggering amount of time has been lost: Like a drop of water in the ocean, 100ms may not seem like much by itself but when you extrapolate it across the entire Stardew player base, it adds up in a hurry.

There are too many variables in field size and crop type to really nail it down, so let's look at it this way: If Snow-Infernus' experiment was replicated just once in each of Stardew Valley's 30 million copies sold, that would total 60 million seconds of lost time. That translates in turn to 1 million minutes, 16,667 hours, 694 days, or nearly two years. Two years! All because you were facing the wrong way when it was time to pick the potato trees.

Ah well, better late than never—and to be clear, Barone confirmed that the fix will speed up the right-to-left movement, not slow down the left-to-right. Efficiency!

The Stardew Valley 1.6 update is set to go live on March 19, and in case you were worried about it, Barone confirmed last week that despite its size, it will not wipe your progress: “All your save files will be fully intact.”