29 January 2026

Stardew Valley Dev ConcernedApe Issues Statement on Haunted Chocolatier Development

By newsgame

Haunted Chocolatier, the long-awaited follow-up to ConcernedApe’s Stardew Valley, is still in development despite a lot of silence in recent months from its creator. Fans have been waiting more than four years for Haunted Chocolatier‘s arrival, and the developer recently spoke out to quash any rumors that it may have been scrapped.

Following the monumental success of Stardew Valley in 2016, creator Eric Barone announced new game Haunted Chocolatier in October 2021. Featuring similar charming, pixelated visuals to his past success, Haunted Chocolatier will put players in the role of a confectionery store owner, tasking them with gathering ingredients for their tasty goods and interacting with residents of the local village, both alive and dead. It will also feature some similar themes to Stardew Valley, as players will be able to pursue romantic relationships with NPCs, and it will also feature combat elements.

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Haunted Chocolatier is Taking Extra Time in Development, and ‘That’s Okay’

In a new, official blog post, Barone addressed his fans, stating that he’s made a lot of progress on Haunted Chocolatier as of late, in an effort to calm anyone who has been bothered by his general silence over the past several months. Haunted Chocolatier’s possibly distant release may be a lot further out than a lot of fans have expected, but the game is still in development. This news comes despite some chatter in the gaming community that has stated otherwise, and the purpose of the blog post seems to be to set the record straight about some incorrect assumptions fans have made.

In the new post, Barone took the opportunity to address multiple rumors he had been noticing about topics including Haunted Chocolatier‘s projected release window. Previous reports have indicated that players won’t get their hands on Haunted Chocolatier until 2030, but Barone said his past words have been taken out of context. Explaining the source of this rumor, last year, he responded to a question about whether the game would be released within the next five years, and he said that he hoped it would. That wasn’t an admission of a projected release date, and in fact, Barone doesn’t want to be hindered by adding a release date to Haunted Chocolatier. “The game will come out when it’s done,” he stated.

Haunted Chocolatier in-development screenshot

Another rumor he addressed alleges that Haunted Chocolatier is being scrapped, and that its content will be added to Stardew Valley in a future update. The source of this rumor seems unclear, but it also appears to be entirely out of touch with reality, as Barone has no plans to abandon his latest project. Furthermore, each of his two games is a separate entity, he explained, and they don’t even run on the same engine, so the technical aspects of placing the content of one game into the other make no sense to him. Additionally, he said he is still planning more updates for Stardew Valley, but that’s because he has ideas about how to improve that game further and not because he’s “burnt out” over Haunted Chocolatier‘s development.

The last post released on the blog before January came out back in early September 2025, and it was centered around the Stardew Valley 1.7 update. At that time, some fans had been wondering whether additional work being put into Stardew Valley would cause a delay for Haunted Chocolatier. “Maybe a little, but not as much as you might think,” he noted. While Barone famously created the entire game at launch by himself, he stated that he now has a team of other developers who assist him with updates, and this production model has been ongoing since the game released its 1.3 update in April 2016. For now, fans will have to wait for Haunted Chocolatier‘s release, and Barone thanked fans for their patience.