Ancient Fruit. Sweet Gem Berries. Starfruit. You can fill your fields with countless riches in Stardew Valley, but for one dedicated player, nature's bounty simply wasn't enough. They rejected those crops. They chose something different. They chose to bring Stardew creator Eric Barone right to their farm, iconic jacket included, through a staggering in-game portrait crafted from countless materials over the course of some 20 hours.
Behold: Big ConcernedApe, in all his uncropped glory.
I built ConcernedApe in Stardew Valleyfrom r/StardewValley
"I built ConcernedApe in Stardew Valley," Reddit user Stillow casually declared last month, swiftly notching the fourth highest-rated post in the history of the game's enormous subreddit.
The incredible portrait was crafted using a Stardew adaptation of pixel art and dithering techniques, with statues, containers, and a zillion other materials serving as Stillow's palette. In a Reddit reply, Stillow said the whole process took "around 20 hours" over the course of two days, adding that they were "pretty committed to finishing ASAP after realizing early on that it has potential." That process has been condensed down to just 13 seconds in this amazing timelapse:
"This just relaxes me and I wanted to space out for a day or two," they said of their reasoning in another reply. "And no, I didn't map it out before, I just made the gradient out of brownish and blue/grey colors and hoped it would look nice at the end and luckily it did."
I reached out to Stillow to talk more about the creative process here. They explain that they got more into Stardew Valley last year but initially played the mobile version. It wasn't until they jumped to PC and saw the potential of mods – CJB Item Spawner was used for obvious reasons – and more precise inputs that they thought to make something like this.
"So basically, a few days after trying it out on PC I got the idea and pretty much started the thought process immediately," they say.
Because the bones of the portrait were thought out beforehand, Stillow says the actual 'painting' process didn't require any real trial and error. They share an image of their old work-in-progress palette, with colors and textures mapped to numbers to give the project some rules and references. It's clever, fascinating gridwork.
"First I had to get proportions right but I'm good with numbers so that wasn't hard," they tell me. "The tough part was figuring out what to use. I have a few pictures of me just messing around with things; this is one of the screenshots, where I laid down in-game items trying to get a gradient that somewhat matches Eric's colors (tough to do, that's why colors are a bit off but it still ended up decent I think haha)."
The results are stunning. I've reached out to the ConcernedApe LLC crew to see if they've seen this portrait and to ask for their take on it. Stillow says they couldn't believe the response from the Stardew Valley Reddit community: "I expected maybe some nice small response from the community but I definitely didn't expect it to jump at the top of the subreddit in one day."
