Players take the role of a character who inherits their deceased grandfather's dilapidated farm in a place known as "Stardew Valley".

Stardew Valley is an open-ended game, allowing players to grow crops, raise livestock, fish, cook, mine, forage, and socialize with the townspeople, including the ability to marry and have children.

British studio Chucklefish approached Barone halfway through development with an offer to publish the game, allowing him to focus more on completing it.

Stardew Valley is a farming simulation game primarily inspired by Story of Seasons, a series by Marvelous and previously known as Harvest Moon.

Players can also engage in fishing, cooking, crafting, and exploring caves filled with materials and ores to mine or creatures to combat.

[6][7][8] Barone graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma in 2011 with a computer science degree but was unable to get a job in the industry, instead working as an usher at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle.

[6][12] Barone used Reason Studios, a digital audio workstation, to create all the music and sound effects within the game and Paint.NET for the pixel art.

[14] Initially, Barone considered releasing Stardew Valley on Xbox Live Indie Games due to the ease of publishing on that platform, but found that his scope for it became much larger than originally anticipated.

[6] Shortly after the Greenlight period in 2013, he was approached by Finn Brice, director of Chucklefish, who offered to help publish the game on release.

He originally programmed it in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework, but later migrated to MonoGame in 2021, which, according to Barone, "futureproofs the game and allows mods to access more than 4 gigs of RAM".

[17] Barone aimed to give players the feeling of immersion in a small farming community, saying he wanted Stardew Valley to be entertaining while also having "real-world messages".

[10][18] In contrast to earlier Story of Seasons games, which could end after two years of in-game time has passed, Barone kept Stardew Valley open-ended so that players would not feel rushed to try to complete everything possible.

[10] During development, he recognized that some players would attempt to figure out mechanically how to maximize their farm's yield and profit through spreadsheets and other tools, but hoped that most would take the time to learn these on their own.

[10] To that end, he designed the cooking aspect of the game purposely not to be profitable, but instead to pay back in bonuses that aided exploration, farming, mining, and fishing skills.

[10] In April 2015, Barone announced he intended to release the game only once he felt it was feature complete, refusing to put it onto the Early Access program or accept pre-sale payments.

[15] After its release, Barone continued to work on it, taking feedback from the community and patching bugs, and stated plans to add more features.

[20] Barone had planned for public beta testing of the multiplayer feature in late 2017 for the Windows version, but was still working to improve the network code by early 2018.

[30][31] In November 2024, Barone published an update significantly expanding on the initial features of the game, which was released on all platforms including PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation and Xbox.

[32] In May 2016, Barone announced that Chucklefish would help with non-English localizations, Linux, macOS, and console ports, and the technical aspects required for online cooperative play, allowing him to focus solely on the first major content update.

A collector's edition released at the same time included a physical map of the game's world, a download code for the soundtrack, and a guidebook.

[61] In 2020, ConcernedApe collaborated with Fangamer to announce the physical release of the game's standard and collector's edition, as well as the Switch and PC versions.

[62] On August 15, 2020, the orchestral album Symphonic Tale: The Place I Truly Belong (Music from Stardew Valley) directed by Kentaro Sato and performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra was released.

He also stated that the approach taken by Barone with Stardew Valley was able to retain the freedom that he had wanted to keep in the Story of Seasons series that had been lost in the later games, with more focus on animation and graphics.

[98] In 2017, Forbes named Barone one of their "30 Under 30" people to watch in the area of video games by citing his commitment towards making Stardew Valley.