Stardew Valley is an open-ended country-life RPG that came out back in 2016. The game was critically acclaimed for its revival of the country-life RPG genre with updated visual elements – combined with new exciting mechanics.
Stardew Valley improves upon the more nostalgic titles in the genre like the Harvest Moon games.
Re-imagining the classics with an indie-modern, pixel-savvy design and refined animations.
Being a farming-oriented game, most activities in Stardew Valley involve endless repetitive actions.
Whether you are preparing your soil, harvesting your crops, chopping trees, or down in the mines speedrunning levels.
On higher levels, larger-scale hustles are bottlenecked by the monotonously slow action animations. Which can make the game tedious over more extended periods of time.
Lucky for us, there is a nifty trick that can alleviate this struggle.
We are talking about a mechanical loophole known as Animation Cancelling.
For those that are already familiar with the concept – Yes, animation cancelling is possible in Stardew Valley. We’ll talk about it in detail below.
Animation Cancelling in Stardew Valley
In Stardew Valley, cancelling animations is made possible by a default combination of keys pressed together.
To cancel any action animation you need to press Right Shift + Delete + R simultaneously.
To achieve the best results, you need to properly time this combo with your action key.
This can prove to be quite tricky at first, as timing it even slightly early will cause the animation to cancel without achieving the result.
Furthermore, the awkward distance between all these keys will also make continuous animation cancelling quite tiresome and impractical, especially when performed with a single hand.
Fortunately, this problem can be solved by using a Macro.
How to Animation Cancel in Stardew Valley using Macros
In simpler terms, a Macro will allow us to bind the combination of keys responsible for animation canceling, to a single more viable key.
After which you will be able to animation cancel effortlessly via the press of a single key.
Sadly this cannot be achieved without installing a third-party software.
But there’s no need to worry as the macros software that we will use is extremely light and takes seconds to install.
More importantly, we will guide you through each step and make this task simple and easy.
Follow through with the easy steps below and make animation cancelling effortless:
- First of all, the Software you need to download is called AutoHotkey. The download link will be present right on the front page of their website.
- Download and install the latest version of this software, This will not take more than 2 minutes.
- Once it is installed, close the software window as you don’t have to do anything on it.
- Now in your game directory or anywhere suitable on your PC, right-click and go to the “New” options, from where you usually create new folders.
- An AutoHotkey script option is now available here. Create a new AutoHotkey Script file and name it anything you like. We’ll name it “Animation Cancel Script”.
- Now open the script file in notepad and copy-paste the following script inside.
Script:
#IfWinActive Stardew Valley
x::
While GetKeyState("x","P")
{
sendEvent {LButton Down}
sleep 10
sendEvent {LButton Up}
sleep 125
sendEvent {r Down}{Delete Down}{RShift Down}
sleep 10
sendEvent {r Up}{Delete Up}{RShift Up}
}
sleep 30
return- This script will assign the animation cancelling key combo to simply the “x” key. But you can choose any key you want.
- To use a key of your choice for this Macro, just replace the “x” in the second and third lines of code with your desired key. Some players find it easy to bind it onto one of their mouse side buttons.
What is Animation Cancelling
As you can see in the game, each action that our character performs is visualized with a particular animation. The result of the action is not achieved until the animation finishes. The goal of animation cancelling is to cancel the animation as early as possible while still achieving the action result. This significantly paces up your activities as it reduces animation times.
Note: Currently animation cancelling is only possible on PC. It is sad to say, there are no workarounds for performing this trick on other consoles like PS4 or Switch.
Advantages of Animation Cancelling
For those of you trying this for the first time, the new action timing might throw you off, often leading you to perform the action twice unwantedly.
But once you get the hang of it, it will be life-changing.
Specifically in the earlier levels when you have weaker weapons that already take ages to perform their tasks.
Furthermore, your newfound speed will allow you to complete your morning routines quickly, leaving you much more time for other exciting activities throughout the day.
Not to mention, clearing all that overgrown area around the house will be so much easier.
Chopping trees, mowing down hay and bushes, and crushing large rocks are all activities that will enjoy the speed boost from this simple trick.
Not to mention, going down the mines now will be a whole different experience.
Conclusion
Voila! Now you know how to animation cancel in Stardew valley.
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Also, check out our other guides on Stardew Valley below.