Stardew Valley prepped the soil and planted the seeds for a decade of farm-sims. Since ConcernedApe's modern classic launched in 2016, we've seen dozens of similar games sprout and vie for the sunlight, like Coral Island and Dinkum. Some branched off in unique directions, like Pathea's My Time series, and even Disney got in on it all with Gameloft's Disney Dreamlight Valley.

You want prehistory? Roots of Pacha. Cute fairies your thing? Good thing Fae Farm exists. There's the solar-themed Sun Haven and Solarpunk, the beaver management sim Timberborn, cowboys, horses — Steam's farm-sim category is packed with games of every description.

They all have their merits, but only one of them properly builds on Stardew Valley's foundation with a host of improvements and innovations and sets itself up as an ambitious competitor: Fields of Mistria from developer NPC Studio. And after two years, it's finally exiting early access soon.

Fields of Mistria is the most ambitious Stardew Valley-like out there

Fields of Mistria casts you as an aspiring young traveler who winds up in Mistria, a town that's fallen a bit on hard times. You set up as a farmer, make friends, and lend your agricultural talents to the community to help bring everyone together and patch up Mistria's shabbier bits so the town has a bright and prosperous future. Sounds a lot like Stardew Valley, but here's the catch: Mistria is a magical town. That's not a metaphor. Mistria is in a world of magic and monsters. The town has its own resident witch. Mystical energy courses through the world's veins, giving it life. And instead of a Harvest Goddess a la Story of Seasons, you get Caldarus, a guardian dragon and romance interest. (He has a human form. Mistria isn't that kind of fantasy.)

You can eventually cast a small range of spells to help make your days easier, like one that summons rain or another that manifests dragon fire to toast your enemies. Mistria has a Stardew-like mine area crawling with monsters of varying types with different attack styles to learn and a whole suite of battle-related skills to help you out. The mines go deep and change themes after a set number of levels — deep water, lava, and so on — and getting to the bottom is quite a task.

One you won't complete right away, either. Fields of Mistria is very much a cozy farming game, with all the staple activities you'd expect from Stardew Valley and its inspirations. You'll plant crops and raise animals, then invest in equipment and improved production capabilities to make these raw items into something more valuable — or not, if you want to gift them or sell them as-is. One big difference in Fields of Mistria is that things like processing farm goods and unlocking new areas to explore, in or out of the mines, are often tied to town improvements. You need the local mill to turn milk into butter or eggs into mayonnaise (yes, mills do neither of those things in real life, but hey, it's a fantasy). But the mill is out of circulation, literally, until you help fix it, and you can't fix it until you contribute in other ways around town. Want to venture further into the mines? There's a quest chain to tackle first and a whole lot of other stuff to do.

Farming, mining, exploring, and building relationships — it's all very interconnected in a way that Stardew often isn't. In the deluge of farm games over the last decade, few make you feel like part of a growing community the way Mistria does. And the cast is just lovely, a thoroughly charming set of personalities brought to life with excellent writing. Even the grumpy ones have their soft sides, and melting them enough to see is always worth the effort.

Fields of Mistria's commitment to cozy extends beyond the feels, too. NPC Studio packed it full of quality-of-life improvements that take out some of the genre's most annoying, and ever-present, friction points like not being able to save until the end of the day. You can save when you need to. Quests have no expiration dates. Money is rarely a problem, and if it is, you'll still be able to get what you want even if it takes a while to build up the cash. And, best of all, storage is interconnected, so you can craft without having to hunt down that one chest with all your wood before starting a project.

Fields of Mistria 1.0 launches Aug. 5 for Windows PC. NPC Studio hasn't ruled out porting it to other platforms, but the 1.0 version and its support are the team's primary concerns for the foreseeable future.