Stardew Valley: A Winter Mystery Quest Guide

Stardew Valley isn’t all farming and selling crops. There are also plenty of people to meet and mysterious quests to embark on. One of the most mysterious of which is A Winter Mystery. A Winter Mystery is a quest that triggers sometime during your first year on the farm and involves finding a shady character hiding in the Valley. If you saw this shadowy figure slinking around Pelican Town but don’t know where to find him to complete the quest, keep reading for a complete guide to completing A Winter Mystery. 

How to Start a Winter Mystery Quest in Stardew Valley

A Winter Mystery doesn’t require anything fancy to trigger it, apart from simply making it to your first Winter on the farm. Winter is the most uninteresting season in Stardew Valley, especially if you mainly focus on growing and selling crops on your farm, since the only thing you can grow outside in Winter is Powdermelon. Thankfully, other things like A Winter Mystery, for example, make the season far more exciting. 

Once you have reached your first Winter, the quest could begin at any moment. The only other prerequisite the cutscene requires is for you to leave your farm between the hours of 9 AM and 4 PM, which is something you will likely be doing anyway. As you approach the Bus Stop outside your farm, you will spot a mysterious black-shrouded figure. The figure gets a fright upon your arrival and quickly scoots off into the distance. 

Where Is the Shadowy Figure in Stardew Valley?

Follow the footsteps of the figure left behind in the snow to the park beside the Community Center. If you follow the figure straight away, you will be able to easily find their hiding spot in the bush between the swing set and the fiber garden. Shake the bush to make the mysterious figure pop out and drop a Magnifying Glass. 

This Magnifying Glass is the reward for this quest and unlocks the ability to find Secret Notes scattered around the Valley. These Secret Notes contain all sorts of handy information that can help you do things like find Golden Walnuts on Ginger Island, discover the villager’s most loved gifts so you can grow your relationships faster, and even provide hints that can lead you to other quests. You can find Secret Notes while fishing, mining, cutting down trees, defeating monsters, breaking giant crops, and digging up artifact spots in the Valley. 

Nothing is stopping you from simply moving on with your day in Stardew Valley instead of following this Mysterious Figure all over Pelican Town, but doing so is recommended. You can find the figure by following it’s footsteps. Once Winter is over and the snow has melted, so too do the footprints leading to the figure. That makes the quest far harder to complete, but if you forget to follow the shadowy figure, this guide will lead you right to where he is hiding. 

For more tips and tricks, check out How to Change Your Appearance in Stardew Valley.