Chucklefish Working to Patch Sleep Crash Issue, Provide a Workaround in the Meantime

If you have been playing ConcernedApe’s smash hit Stardew Valley on the Nintendo Switch, then you may have encountered the horrifying sleep glitch. If you have not, then what happens is certain actions are causing the game to crash when your character goes to bed, rather than saving the game. It is excruciatingly painful when you lose an entire day of farming, fishing, and other activities. (I had JUST finished the Community Center!!) I noticed the issue in my own game whenever I would give Clint a tool to upgrade. While the patch is still in the works, programmer tccoxon with Chucklefish has come up with some ways to prevent the glitch, as well as what the cause is.

“There are two things that need to happen in order to cause the crash:

At least one of the following core tool items must not be in your inventory when you sleep: Pickaxe, Axe, Hoe, Watering Can, Scythe. If you have the Return Scepter, that counts too.
At least one of your chest-like containers must have a gap between two items. This includes chests you’ve crafted, the fridge in the farmhouse upgrade, and the containers on the Mill and Junimo Hut buildings. It doesn’t include the chests that spawn every 10 levels in the mines.
The crash happens when the game scans your inventory and chests to make sure none of your tools are missing. When it encounters a gap in the chest, it causes an error. The PC and other console versions are able to handle the error and keep running, however the Switch version cannot.

The crash doesn’t require you to upgrade any tools (although that is one way you can end up sleeping without tools in your inventory). And it doesn’t require the fridge.

That said, it’s surprisingly not very easy to create a gap in a chest. Simply adding or removing items from a chest automatically removes all the gaps. There are only two ways we know of:
With the house upgrade that provides the kitchen, cook some food that uses ingredients in the fridge. That can create a gap in the fridge.
With a full inventory, open a chest and directly trash an item from it.
We’re advising players who are encountering this crash to add or remove an item from each of their chests. You can continue using the fridge to cook food, as long as you manually add/remove something from it afterwards. Upgrading tools causes no problems as long as there are no gaps in any chests.

We believe that this accounts for all of the sleep crashes that people are reporting, and there is a fix for the issue in the patch we’re preparing.

Note that the crash occurs long before writing anything to your save file, so nothing is permanently damaged. And even if it did crash while saving – Stardew on Switch writes save files atomically, so nothing would be corrupted in that case. That said, there are a small number of people reporting a crash while loading their save file. We think this is a separate issue and we’re looking into it. Anyone encountering a crash while loading their save file is encouraged to contact us.

EDIT: I shouldn’t have used the word ‘sort’. The ‘organize’ button in chest interfaces doesn’t remove gaps, it just shifts them around. I’ve edited the text to say to ‘add or remove an item.'”