How to fix Stardew Valley's funky frame-rate issues

Stardew Valley is a superb indie game that caters to a vibrant community of virtual farmers and dungeon explorers.

The game revolves around you inheriting and building up a neglected farm. Unfortunately, there's an issue you may encounter that causes slight Frame-Per-Second (FPS) drops at seemingly random intervals. But fear not. There's an easy fix that will get you back to your crops in no time.

Reinstall XNA

The problem has been narrowed down to Microsoft's XNA framework. You can reinstall the suite to see if that solves the issue and gets gameplay back to smooth levels. Here's how.

1. Hit Windows Key + Q to bring up Cortana.
2. Search "Add or Remove Programs".
3. Choose the top result. (It should match your query.)

4. Scroll down to the "Microsoft XNA" listing.

5. Select the program.
6. Hit "Modify".
7. Select the "Repair" option in the wizard.

Relaunch Stardew Valley and see if that solved your problem. If not, try to import a working configuration for XNA.

Import a working config

If reinstalling XNA didn't work, some folks turned to hunting through the game files and locating an installer within the installation of Stardew Valley. This seemed to fix everything for some, but others were unable to run the executable file. Here's how to import a working configuration package and reinstall XNA.

1. Navigate to your Stardew Valley installation. (This differs between platforms.)

2. Backup the "_redist" or "_CommonRedist" folder.

3. Download this file (kudos to Reddit user JamesIV4 for publishing his files).
4. Copy the contents to your Stardew Valley installation (overwriting all files).
5. Head into the "_redist" sub-folder, then the XNA folder and run "xnafx40_redist.msi".

You should now be able to move around without noticing any drop in frames. Sound off in the comments if you managed to solve this problem with the above walkthrough — or if you found another fix.