Stardew Valley's adorable hat-selling mouse has gone missing in the latest patch, but only in Spanish - and you can still buy hats from him

Stardew Valley
(Image credit: Eric Barone)

Yet another peculiar Stardew Valley bug has popped up with the release of the farming sim's latest patch, and this time creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone doesn't have a lore reason to help fix it - he has a linguistic reason instead.

Over the weekend, a Twitter user alerted Barone to a new bug attached to the abandoned house near the Wizard Tower. Originally empty, once you've earned your first in-game achievement, a small mouse will move into the house, whereupon they'll set up a business selling you a wide variety of fetching pieces of headwear. Sadly for some players, however, since the arrival of patch 1.6.9 on consoles, while they've been able to buy some new hats, the mouse that's supposed to be selling them is nowhere to be found.

Reaching out to Barone for some classic social media bug reporting, it wasn't long before they received a reply. The developer explained that the issue had been logged, and was a bug "if you are playing in Spanish," that "will be fixed in an upcoming patch."

There's little sense of why this has happened, and even less of why it's limited to the Spanish language version of the game. Even Barone seems a little stumped, evidenced by the lack of lore explanation offered - in recent weeks, he's blamed disappearing chickens on a hungry coyote and performance-ruining cat hats on a spate of pet rashes. That's to say nothing of the new infinite lobster exploit, which Barone says he's also looking into. Sometimes, I guess that's just how game dev be, and you've got to work out why a hat-selling mouse is apparently hiding from his stock of sombreros.

Stardew Valley's popularity has creator ConcernedApe feeling like he "could work on it for the rest of my life," even if he still wants to "make a new game" like Haunted Chocolatier.

Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.