Eric Barone has a new Stardew Valley PSA for players experiencing performance issues: "Remove all hats from pets," and yes, there's lore for that one too

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone is in the hilarious position of having to reveal PSAs for bugs with improvised lore, and his latest is a warning to "remove all hats from pets" because of a "strange rash affecting pets' ears in Zuzu City."

In reality, the reason Barone is telling Stardew Valley players to take hats off of their pets is because of a bug in update 1.6.9. that's impacting performance. Apparently, one way to improve performance while the bug is being fixes is to make all of your pets hatless. However, after he invented new lore about a wild coyote to explain the sudden disappearance of chickens - in reality caused by a bug - he's now perhaps mistakenly committed to doing the same for all bugs going forward.

"PSA: if you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets. We will address the problem as soon as possible," Barone said on Twitter.

In response to the PSA, one player asked, "What's the lore on that one?," and thus Barone was forced to come up with something.

"There's rumors of a strange rash affecting pets' ears in Zuzu City and we just want to make sure those ears can breath for a few days," he said.

I'm genuinely curious how Barone will approach similar situations in the future. Will he fully commit to the bit and include in-canon lore for every PSA and bug, or will he save himself the trouble and ask fans to leave him alone about it. Either way, I'm tickled by the notion that this could evolve into a legitimate predicament that he stumbled into with what was surely meant to be a one-off joke.

Meanwhile, the Stardew Valley creator has revealed a "secret, experimental mobile multiplayer feature" hidden behind the most famous cheat code in video game history.