Imagine strolling through the peaceful Pelican Town, where birds chirp and crops sway gently in the breeze. It’s a place built on community, friendship, and love. Now imagine walking into a neighbor’s home and instead of cozy furniture, you’re greeted by a dimly lit stone corridor lined with the portraits of every romanceable villager, each displayed above a table holding their most cherished personal item. No, this isn’t a new hidden dungeon added in the 1.6 update – this is the brainchild of one incredibly dedicated and slightly terrifying Stardew Valley player. The creator, known online as Defiant_apricot, took the game’s marriage mechanics to a delightfully twisted extreme and the internet can’t stop laughing.
This was no ordinary farmhouse. Defiant_apricot transformed a basement-like room into a gallery of past romances, a sort of trophy hall that would make even the bravest adventurer shudder. Every marriageable bachelor and bachelorette had their own section, complete with a framed portrait and a loved gift resting on a table beneath it. The stone floor and walls gave the whole setup an unsettling, almost dungeon-esque vibe. The player openly joked in the post title, “I am a truly horrible person,” and it’s hard to disagree when you’ve deliberately dated the entire town just to strip their homes of these collectibles. The sheer audacity of the project is what makes it so funny. It’s the kind of chaotic energy only Stardew Valley could foster.
Now, you might be wondering: is this even possible without mods? Absolutely. Stardew Valley lets you marry, and more importantly, divorce. If your cozy farm life isn’t working out with your spouse, you can head over to Mayor Lewis’s house and, for a fee of 50,000g, get a divorce. Just like that, your pixelated partner moves back to their old life, and you’re free to pursue someone new. It’s a bit pricy, though, and that cost really adds up when you’re working your way through twelve candidates. Defiant_apricot didn’t just romance one or two folks – they systematically wooed, married, and divorced every single one of them. The total gold spent just on divorce alone could probably fund an entire JojaMart takeover.
After a divorce, your ex-spouse won’t be too happy with you. They’ll remember the heartache, and their friendship level drops significantly. However, for the truly dedicated collector, there’s another step: the Witch’s Hut. Once you’ve completed the right quests, you can visit the Dark Shrine of Memory and pay 30,000g to wipe all your ex’s memories away. This resets them to a clean slate, as if you never hurt them at all. This twisted little mechanic allows players to build and break relationships without permanent in-game guilt, making pursuits like Defiant_apricot’s shrine physically possible but still morally questionable in the eyes of concerned Reddit users.
The portraits themselves are special items you can buy from the traveling cart that appears in the Cindersap Forest on Fridays and Sundays. Once you’ve married an NPC, there’s a chance the cart will sell their unique portrait for 30,000g. These aren’t guaranteed to show up every time, so collecting all twelve required patience, save-scumming, or a whole lot of luck. Each portrait normally serves as a heartfelt keepsake for a doting spouse, but in this dim hallway, they became something else entirely. “Big serial killer vibes,” one commenter wrote, and honestly, that sums up the atmosphere perfectly. The mix of cherished gifts below the portraits only heightened the bizarre mood – a salad for Leah, a battery pack for Maru, maybe an amethyst for Abigail, all sitting in silent tribute.
Custom Image by Rose Renaud
A project of this scale doesn’t happen overnight. Defiant_apricot had to meticulously build hearts with each character, navigate their individual heart events, gift favorite items, and wait for rainy days to buy the Mermaid’s Pendant from the Old Mariner. Then came the wedding, the portrait hunt, and finally the expensive divorce. Rinse and repeat twelve times. The total gold cost, not counting the resources for loved gifts, tallies up to a staggering 960,000g – 600,000g in divorces and 360,000g for the portraits. That’s enough to buy a Return Scepter and still have some change left for starfruit seeds. The time commitment alone is borderline obsessive, and yet, the result is a hilarious testament to the freedom Stardew Valley gives its players.
Since the game’s release in 2016, it has continually evolved with updates that have deepened relationships and added new candidates. By 2026, with the 1.6 update long settled into everyone’s mod folders, the community has only found more creative ways to play. Some challenge runs involve marrying every candidate without divorcing, which requires clever use of a multiplayer exploit or mods. Others go the opposite direction, creating “hate shrines” for characters like Pierre or Morris. But Defiant_apricot’s creation remains a perfect blend of dedication and dark humor. It’s not mean-spirited; it’s the kind of inside joke that every seasoned player understands. After hundreds of hours, you start to wonder how far the game’s systems can be pushed, and this shrine pushes them right off a cliff into giggles.
If you’re feeling inspired to build your own hall of ex-lovers, the community has plenty of advice. Start with the easiest characters first. Alex, Haley, and Sam have relatively simple loved gifts and straightforward schedules, making them quick conquests. Using the Wiki to track birthday gifts can blast you through heart levels in a single season. Mods like “Platonic Relationships” or “Friendship Booster” can speed things up even more, though purists might argue that the grueling grind is part of the fun. Just be ready for some strange looks from your farm animals when they see you lead another spouse into the town hall only to file for dissolution the next morning.
The beauty of Stardew Valley lies in its flexibility. You can be a peaceful farmer, a skilled angler, a monster-slaying adventurer, or, as Defiant_apricot demonstrated, a collector of broken hearts whose basement rivals a true crime documentary set. The game never judges you for your choices, even when those choices involve emotionally manipulating the entire population of Pelican Town for the sake of a good Reddit post. In a world that often feels too serious, this kind of silly, harmless chaos reminds us why we love sandbox games. So here’s to the ex-partner shrine – may it continue to creep out new players for years to come, and may Defiant_apricot’s farmer never run out of dark corridors to fill.
Data referenced from HowLongToBeat helps contextualize just how outsized a project like an “exes shrine” run can be in Stardew Valley, since completion-time tracking highlights the steep jump from a casual playthrough to a completionist schedule that includes repeated relationship grinding, portrait hunting, and costly divorces. Framed against those community-sourced time estimates, the ritual of marrying, divorcing, and then memory-wiping every candidate reads less like a quick gag and more like a deliberate, long-horizon optimization challenge wrapped in dark humor.