Stardew Valley has an easier way to greet animals and I just found out after hundreds of hours

Instead of tending to your Stardew Valley animals one by one every morning, you can just hold the ‘pet’ button and run by them all

Whether it’s a game I’ve played for five minutes or five-hundred hours, I always love hearing about no-brainer tips that are easily overlooked – the kind that are small but impactful over time, and make you do a double-take for failing to notice them. For my fellow Stardew Valley fanatics, here’s a big one.

You know how you need to greet/pet your farmyard animals each day to get a little heart and grow your bond so they produce the highest-quality goods? Well, for many of us – especially those of us with more goats, chickens, cows, and pigs than we probably need – the morning ritual can be fussy. The Stardew animals can get all bunched-up in close quarters, and it’s a little pesky to greet them once (and only once!) so that you don’t accidentally bring up their friendship rating menu when you tend to them.

I have painstakingly greeted my animals one by one throughout my hundreds of hours in Stardew Valley. As it turns out, you can just hold the pet/interact button and run up to them – it’ll work perfectly. You’ll get friendship points with every animal and you won’t pull up the dreaded menu.

Here’s a demonstration of the trick on PC from Reddit user Boiled_potato8:

Took me ages to realize you could just click and hold the mouse to pet all of the animals
byu/Boiled_potato8 inStardewValley

How did I not know about this? I could’ve been more efficient this whole dang time!

My girlfriend mentioned the pro tip in passing – we aren’t sure where she saw it – but it blew my mind. And now that I’ve looked around, it’s definitely a common realization in the Stardew community.

I’m pretty sure my farmer just got a few more gray hairs.