Stardew Valley’s “dying grandpa” meme spawned a series of dark-humored mods

Stardew Valley‘s grandpa has seen better days

You’d think that so long after its release (now six years, to be exact), the Stardew Valley subreddit would have settled down by now, but in fact, it has done the opposite. While most of the posts usually consist of players posting bugs or how they’ve decorated their farms, a series of new memes have surfaced, which in turn has spawned a series of mods. The best part is that the joke isn’t even about anything in the actual core game itself, but instead in the introduction cutscene that plays when a player boots up a new save file. That’s right — it’s a bunch of grandpa mods.

The original scene starts with the player’s grandpa on his death bed (morbid, I know) as the game truly begins when the player inherits their grandfather’s farm and moves to Pelican Town. While the rest of the sequence shows the player character quitting their job and getting on the bus out to the country, it’s this first part that players have chosen to fixate on. You see, grandpa’s bed is looking a little rickety — kind of like the crappiest IKEA bed you can find, in fact, with just four skinny pieces of wood to hold it up. It looks like it’s ready to collapse at any second.

I feel like I’ve helped kick off a dying grandpa renaissance and honestly I’m so thrilled
by inStardewValley

Players thought this was pretty funny, and so they took the intro and ran with it by modding the opening scene of the game with their own interpretations.

One mod makes the already pretty crappy bed only slightly worse, while others depict the already-dead grandpa dead on the floor with flies buzzing around him. You can even mod him in the classic Family Guy death pose, if you so wish. The most recent installment makes it look like he’s wet the bed. Someone even went to the trouble of adding a NSFW, uh, happy version of grandpa’s death.

These mods are pretty silly, but I do have to admit that they play into the game’s tone in a fun way. Stardew Valley‘s opening with grandpa may make the game look all sweet and innocent from the start, but under the surface, it’s full of darker hidden content, like turning your unwanted children into doves, for example. I have to hand it to the Stardew Reddit community for their creativity, because these certainly made me chuckle.