Stardew Valley players finally learn the truth: Eric Barone confirms that for the past 8 years, left-to-right harvesting has been 100ms faster than right-to-left harvesting

Stardew Valley players have theorized for years that harvesting crops from left to right is faster than harvesting them from right to left. Not hugely faster, hardly even noticeable, but just ever so slightly quicker. For non-Stardewers it's the sort of thing that sounds a little weird and even ridiculous—not quite up there with fake moon landings and «Elvis is alive» conspiracy theories, but of a similar nature. Left-to-right, right-to-left—come on, be serious here!

Except in this case, well, it turns out that the temporally-sensitive farmers were correct: Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone confirmed today that there is in fact a bug that caused left-to-right harvesting to be faster than right-to-left harvesting, and it's going to be fixed in the big 1.6 update coming out next week.

Now, this isn't entirely new or unknown, at least among some deeply committed members of the Stardew Valley community. Three years ago, for instance, redditor Snow-Infernus conducted an experiment that delivered clear-cut results: