Stardew Valley players are arranging Green Day with flute blocks

Stardew Valley’s charming farm decorations include two unique little blocks that play a flute note or a drum sound when players run by them. Though they’re cute, I never quite figured out how to arrange them. They were often left behind to gather dust in an unmarked corner of my farm.

The right player can make flute and drum block into incredible walking tracks, which play both popular and complex tunes. Talented musicians have emerged in recent months. Stardew Valley players have created masterful flute block arrangements of dizzyingly complex songs like Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca (Turkish March),” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” the Pokémon battle theme, and of course, Toby Fox’s “Megalovania” from UntertaleThis character looks almost exactly like Papyrus.

On Reddit, clips of players walking these musical paths have garnered tens of thousands of upvotes, and it’s easy to see why. These walking tracks are mesmerizing — like a video game equivalent of a vintage music box, one of those slowly rotating cylinders where each protruding metal tab makes a gentle plink. These tracks are so easy to look at that you can tell the difference. This took some effort.. The arrangement of “Megalovania,” for example, took six hours to plan, followed by five hours of placing blocks, creator Yaramy wrote in the Reddit post. This is someone who’s made quite a few.

Even with all the right tools, arranging music can be difficult. Stardew Valley It requires a mixture of Excel wizardry, furious clicking and Excel wizardry. It also involves some very specific hurdles: There’s the limitation of sounds that can be played at any given time; a sprite’s walking speed, which augments the tempo; and the challenge of finding a big enough spot on Stardew Valley’s map to lay it all out. Capturing the essence of a song is difficult — but still possible! — even with this small toolkit.

“One of the basics of recording is you have all these tracks you can use,” PK Levine, who did “American Idiot,” told Polygon over the phone. “In Stardew Two is enough, as your farmer may only run two blocks per turn in a continuous series of at most. There’s exceptions to that rule, but they’re tricky.”

Levine is a multi-instrumentalist who can play guitar, piano, and drums. Green Day’s anthemic hit is obviously an iconic choice, but Levine picked it specifically because the song largely alternates between guitars and vocals, which allowed him to make it sound “driving, exciting, and interesting” with one track of flute and one track of drums. Levin said that no rock song could be made without drums. Even then, it’s still an uphill battle, as “with drums you could be hitting as many as three drums simultaneously, and there’s frequently heavy syncopation,” Levine said.

Redditor NetWarrior FM, who created the Mario overworld theme and John Williams’ “Duel of the Fates” (a Star Wars theme) in Stardew ValleyAccording to, the sound palette of flute blocks is also limited. Over email, he told Polygon, “you have to get a little creative and go an octave higher or lower and try to get the best sounding notes.”

It takes time to create a masterpiece. Levine started his arrangement by making a detailed spreadsheet in which he mapped out the notes — flute blocks can play a range of 24 — while referencing the Stardew Valley wiki page and a tablature of the song’s melody and vocal line. Levine explained that 16 columns were required for the single flute row, which roughly corresponds to two 8/8 bar rows.

“The number of flute blocks that you’re going to run past in a certain time is going to be fixed,” Levine said. “So you can’t get really tricky with the rhythm. Essentially, a 4/4 bar of music translates directly to eight flute blocks.”

Drums are even more difficult. There are seven values, but they’re fairly subjective. It can be difficult to distinguish the differences between bass drum and snare. Although some people think that the click zero of the bass drum corresponds to click one, Levine says the click zero sound more like a low thumper. Multiple creators have said it is down to trial-and-error.

“I basically laid out 16 drum pads and ran past them repeatedly — I just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I could cram it into those 16 pads,” Levine said. “It’s not until you hear it together that you get the sense, Is this possible?”

You can adjust the pitch of every flute and each drum block by playing in Stardew ValleyRepeatedly left-click the mouse. The default flute block is C. Twelve clicks will bring you up to C at an upper octave. If you’re not a music person, this basically means a lot of fucking clicking to get a simple “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” let alone “Turkish March” or the drum line of “American Idiot.”

Levine is playing the game in multiplayer with mods Stardew Valley Expanded and CJB Item Spawner installed — for spawning flute blocks — and it took roughly four in-game months to complete the Green Day track. He did it in his multiplayer game, even though it doesn’t allow a player to pause, because he “loves playing with [his] friends” and just “wanted to do this organically.” Stardew Valley Expanded’s larger Calico Desert also gave Levine ample space; in a prior arrangement of the Gravity FallsLevine created the theme using the vanilla game. However, cacti kept getting in Levine’s way.

The sprite makes a cup and sprints to the end of the song. Base speed for a player is 5, but drinking coffee makes it six. So, guzzling coffee changes the song’s tempo, though it also happens to match the aesthetic — if I had to run through a musical maze, I’d caffeinate myself too. This is closer to the faster tempo of “American Idiot,” according to Levine, and it’s not unusual to see in other arrangements. On Levine’s next project, he’s planting grass on the path to slow his character’s walking speed because the track has a slower tempo.

NetWarrior FM took a different approach, using the mod CJB Cheats Menu in order to pause in-game and so his character sprite didn’t have to sleep as often. He could also adjust his player’s speed. He didn’t “plan on where to place the blocks beforehand” but likes to “just go with it.” NetWarrior FM also uses an item spawning mod, but just discovered a flute block mod that lets players change the instrument (toy piano is one option). He’s currently using it to arrange “Let It Go” from Frozen.

When one of these arrangements appears in my feed I take a moment to consider it. I’ve seen enough to be able to “read” the shape of the song: You can tell which bars repeat when they appear like a closed loop that a player can walk a full lap on, with branching paths that lead to other movements or from a chorus to a verse. Thirteen years of classical piano and I can’t play anything I used to be able to, but evidently I can parse Stardew ValleyFlute block music. Figure it out.

They’re evidence of hard work and incredible creativity, like a beautiful structure in MinecraftTerraformed perfectly Animal Crossing – New Horizons island. They’re a physicalization of a song distilled into simple melodies and drum lines, pieces of music history that fans can recognize even without all of the bells and whistles. I wonder what they’ll adapt next.