No, Eric Barone is not adding infidelity to Stardew Valley, although he did briefly consider letting you ruin marriages, to Grandpa’s deep disappointment

Following reports claiming that Stardew Valley may soon let players divorce or cheat on their in-game spouses, Eric Barone has embarked upon a social media blitz to say no, that’s not actually happening, and asking everyone to please calm down about it.

Barone mused on the topic of Stardew infidelity in a wide-ranging new interview with Game Informer, saying that some players have expressed a desire to marry Caroline, Robin, or Demetrius—but noting that in order to do so they’d have to break up families in the town. Barone said he’s against that “on a moral level,” but then went on to say that people should be able to do bad things in sandbox games—and suffer appropriate consequences for their actions.

“I would be open to doing something like that, but I wouldn’t baby people about it,” Barone said. “There would be very serious consequences.” In the context of Stardew Valley, though, he added that he also feels like such things might be “too real,” and that “maybe Stardew Valley is supposed to be, to some degree, an escape from those kinds of things.”

That quote caused a bit of a stir, to put it mildly, and Barone has been working hard on social media to correct the record. “I’m not going to actually do this,” he wrote in response to one report on the misquote. “I was just talking theoretically, that if I WERE then I wouldn’t just make it some consequence-free thing, everyone would hate you, there would be severe consequences for your moral failures.

“If you’re making a sandbox game I think it’s interesting to allow people to do things, even bad things. But there should be consequences. That teaches you a life lesson. If you just get away with it or everyone is chill with it, that would be bad.”

I'm not actually going to do this. I was just talking theoretically, that if I WERE then I wouldn't just make it some consequence-free thing, everyone would hate you, there would be severe conseequences for your moral failures. If you're making a sandbox game I think it's interesting to allow people to do things, even bad things. But there should be consequences. That teaches you a life lesson. If you just get away with it or everyone is chill with it, that would be bad. — (Image credit: Eric Barone (Twitter))

Some of the uproar may have been sparked by a machine translation gone really wrong. Japanese gaming site Automaton covered the GI interview, and when its translation was flipped back to English, it came out quoting Barone as stating unequivocally, “We are considering the introduction of infidelity and divorce.”

“The only thing I had ever ‘considered’ was allowing players to break up Pierre/Caroline or Robin/Demetrius, but even that is probably too heavy and serious, and would be a ton of work to adjust all dialogue and tone of everyone in town in consequence, and Grandpa ashamed of you,” Barone wrote in response to Automaton’s post.

“It was just some theoretical idea I’ve toyed with. I don’t condone doing it either. But there is precedent for things like that in Stardew, like going to the Dark Shrine of Selfishness to turn your kids into doves, and then they haunt you forever.” Yeah, that sounds pretty morally iffy, alright!

Barone posted a few shorter replies referring to the Automaton report as “fake news” or a “clickbait article,” and said in one that the untranslated quotes are “taken out of context,” and “if you read the actual interview it’s clear that I’m not going to add it.”

He also, as is his way, swerved off course momentarily to tell a disappointed Stardew Valley player that “you’re born with a specific fairy godmother, I don’t make the rules,” and to congratulate another player who got an A+ on a presentation on the art of Stardew Valley.