Thinking about buying for iOS

[Rhiannon]

So our air conditioning went out two days ago and new one being installed today. Our house is at 85 degrees F which is too hot to run my computer. I’ve been messing around with my iPad and am considering buying the mobile version of SDV.

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos of game play but they are years old.

Questions:

Can the game be played if my iPad isn’t connected to WiFi?
One guy talked about porting a game from PC to iPad. That’s incorrect, right?
One guy talked about how much easier fishing is on iPad. That’s incorrect, right?

 

[Lew Zealand]

Answers (may even be correct):

1) Yes! you can play completely offline.
2) I dunno about porting but you'll be stuck on v1.4 for a while longer with the official game.
3) I have found fishing harder on the iPad but IMO it's likely with a similar amount of time put into it, it could be of similar difficulty to on PC.

Edit: OK I just Fished for the first time in forever on my phone and missed the first Fish but got a perfect catch on the second. It's possible and the technique is the same even though my fingers are protesting about who's supposed to be doing what.

 

[Rhiannon]

Oh cool. I don’t have a good game on my iPad that I can play offline. You never know when the power will go out and you get desperate. I’m cool with 1.4. Starting a new game, I don’t need the new content for a long time anyway.

What a fun backup game! And for $4.99? That’s a bargin!

 

[Lew Zealand]

It's a real fun backup game and the saves are whenever, not only at the end of the day, so you can play if you have only 5 minutes to spare.

Now keeping that play to only 5 minutes, well that's a bit harder...

 

[Boo1972]

The hardest thing about fishing in iOS, I think, is actually casting. Sometimes you walk or turn around. At the festival of ice, it can be a struggle to get to the fishing spots cuz you keep freaking casting. But only sometimes. I would definitely get it though, it’s such a bargain.

 

[Elenna101]

You can copy your save file from Ipad to PC, IIRC. Right now you can't do it the other way around because 1.5 save files are not backwards-compatible with the 1.4 version. I think you could do it the other way around if they were the same version, though.

I also find fishing harder on mobile (Android not iOS, but I don't think that makes a difference) but I also suspect it's just a matter of what version you're used to.
For the "walking instead of fishing" issue, yeah, that's definitely a pain. It helps if you touch in the water near your character to cast, instead of touching water further away from your character.

 

[SuperChouette]

For the "walking instead of fishing" issue, yeah, that's definitely a pain. It helps if you touch in the water near your character to cast, instead of touching water further away from your character.

This. Also, I find the zooming in very close helps me only cast line instead of trying to walk somewhere. I try to minimize any land squares and maximize the water.

 

[Lew Zealand]

The touch controls work really well considering how much needed to be reworked vs PC, in many ways better. But yeah I end up running around instead of casting quite a lot. Lol, it probably looks like I'm being chased by bees.

 

[CryogenCrystals]

Yep, 100% agree with both. I play on iOS (iPad) with no wifi, or WiFi toggled off sometimes and the game plays perfectly. Mobile doesn't have multiplayer, so there's really no need to be online with Stardew, other than maybe to check the wiki! Lol

Controls are fine, I can do most things with touch but planting is slower for me (speed planting or harvesting is easier with a controller paired, but maybe that's just me, I can't get it it work consistently with touch only). I bought a cheap $30 Bluetooth controller and paired it and that's amazing. You still do have to use touch for drag input things like loading tools that accept inputs, equipping clothing/items, stacking trashing items, auto-sorting since even though I have plenty of controller buttons for those functions, the game refuses to recognize them. Either that or it doesnt like my controller, I think (but could be totally wrong) that they didn't expect fully buttoned controllers to be paired or controller-only use on iOS and so didn't program it for that. That said, the items I mention are used far less than the main controls anyhow, so the occasional screen touch is not a big deal.

Fishing without pairing controller is okay. I agree with Boo, it is the casting that's the pain lol, the rest is completely fine. Fishing was the main reason I paired a controller, because at the beginning I really had no idea what I was doing, which made it 10 times harder, and I figured that a controller would make it easier (I hadn’t yet made the connection that fishing skill being low was the real reason I was bad at fishing lol). I also have not the greatest fingers for touch speed accuracy (numb), so thumbs work waaay better for me.

Also, I found out my accident one day after playing too long, that my Bluetooth controller (which wouldn't turn on to use if charging) would work while charging/plugged in, if I just paired it and started using it first, then plugged it in. I'm not sure yet if this discovery is good or bad, because it facilitated some ridiculously long play sessions.

I will say that switching up controls after becoming accustomed to them on another platform can be tricky. Sometimes it is what we get used to, though if wanting freedom of mobility larger mobile or tablet is great. I cant bring myself to transfer away from mobile due to its overwhelming convenience. I tried going to PC keyboard/mouse after iOS touch and paired controller and didn’t like it at all... though with a controller it was fine. Pros and cons to each.

 

[Rhiannon]

Thanks for all the tips and suggestions everyone! I did go ahead and buy the game and spent 8 game days so far enjoying everything again (I'm a one-save kind of gal). I consider it a great backup game to be played when the power is out or I'm burned out on TV and still need to put my aging back into my lounger. I appreciate the suggestion to pair my iPad with a controller. I'm an old school PC player and never got used to gaming console controllers. So I think that might be more of a pain that learning to fish by tapping the fishing rod. I did some fishing with it and it seems playable. Not sure HOW playable. I suppose that remains to be seen.

I wanted to comment on @Lew Zealand's comment about saves. I had a few issues with this. So for instance, when I needed to close my ipad for something and turned it back on, I lost the partial day I had played. It went back to the previous day. I also had the game crash once and same thing. Is there something I need to do to save the game in mid-day?

 

[Lew Zealand]

I wanted to comment on @Lew Zealand's comment about saves. I had a few issues with this. So for instance, when I needed to close my ipad for something and turned it back on, I lost the partial day I had played. It went back to the previous day. I also had the game crash once and same thing. Is there something I need to do to save the game in mid-day?

Ok, what I do on my iPhone (or iPad whenever I can wrestle it from one of the kids) is I exit SDV with the Home button to the App screen, wait a bit (I'm imagining it saving the state of the game or similar) and then I power off the screen. I assume if you just exit the game and put the iPad down it should do the same. I don't leave SDV "on" as the front app when I turn off the device, maybe it has bad behavior sometimes when doing that? Also a restart of the iPad is always a good thing to try (can you tell I work in IT tech support...).

Later I usually close the game on the iPhone due to a general perceived use of battery in the background. That last part is my broken brain doing unnecessary things, but there are a few apps which do background processes and waste battery. I have no evidence that SDV is one of those.

I hope some of this helps!

 

[CryogenCrystals]

Right on, congrats on your backup Stardew! That's fair about the controller. It is indeed all what we get used to sometimes.

If you go to the options menu, there is also a "save backup" button in there that might be helpful if the problem re-occurs. I had the save thing go awry a few times when my battery ran out unexpectedly, and for some other unknown reasons when the app was left in the background (maybe it crashed?). I'm also fairly certain I boogered up a time or two and closed it before it was done saving, since force quitting the app while saving can do it. The unknown ones drove me bonkers. Now I just do the overkill thing and use that button, and wait sufficient time for save, to prevent it (or my on silliness) even though that probably isn't needed most of the time (call me paranoid after a few progress losses I guess) lol.

I agree with Lew, I also don't leave the app as the top one on the screen, it seems to sometimes keep the screen awake on my device past its regular auto-sleep time, which can eat the battery a little. But, all of my issues might just be related to my own device (I think it needs a wipe and a restore).

In case it is helpful:

Spoiler: Wiki text

When the app is no longer shown on the screen, it is classed as being a ‘background’ app. If the phone or tablet is running low on resources, it might automatically unload any background apps, losing any unsaved progress.

If the game moves into the background, and then resumed, if the app hasn’t been unloaded by the phone/tablet, it will continue where it left off. If the game has been unloaded, however, the game will be reloaded, and will then need to load a save in order to carry on where it left off. To allow this, the game does an ‘emergency save’ when it goes into the background (for example, when you press the home button on an iPhone). Because of the complexity of Stardew Valley, this save takes a few seconds. If you ‘kill’ the app before this save is completed (by swiping it away from the list of background apps), the game will not complete its emergency save.

Note: If the game time is less than 6:20am, no emergency saves are created because the standard 6am save is assumed to be sufficient.

In my cases aside from battery runout, I think either my emergency save failed, maybe the app crashed unexpectedly (I don't close things unless I have to, preferring to toggle off the background refresh for most things), but mostly likely the backup and restore thing needs to happen since my Safari and a couple other apps have been crashing too. I really need to stop procrastinating on that...oh look, squirrel!