The Steam Client not running does not stop Stardew Valley from starting, or from running, or from saving. I have it disabled, because I genuinely dislike the idea of daily updates to a service I barely use, and because I’d like to run as little “background crap” on my system as possible (yes Adobe, I’m looking at you). However, I’ve just LOST two days worth of progress because the Steam Client wasn’t running in the background. All works well: Stardew Valley starts and I can play. Shortly after I thought that might have been a good idea and created one by myself and pinned to to my Start Menu.
I have the Steam version, and as I often do, I’ve asked Steam to not create a Desktop shortcut for my game.
I’ve been playing Stardew Valley for a few days, and I’m enjoying it a lot.
