Is gold per day that important?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by 4leaf clover, Apr 23, 2017.

  1. Jack Of Shades

    Jack Of Shades Pangalactic Porcupine

    Oh of course! Not everyone enjoys math but some folks find relaxation in numbers and equations. Nothing wrong with it. I'm just not one of them. :3
     
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    • ShneekeyTheLost

      ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

      Not... really. Not if you're doing the Community Center bundles, at any rate.

      Y'see, large crops don't produce star quality yield, they just produce twice as much normal yield. And you need five gold-star melons for the community bundle. Because you're also doing five gold-star parsnips and five gold-star corn. That way you don't need to do the pumpkins. So to maximize your chances of getting your five gold-star melons, you need to make sure that there is no chance of large melons happening. Personally, I use a grid of sprinklers to break up the pattern, which also doubles as watering the whole thing so I don't have to do it manually. As far as the rest, well..

      Cauliflower really isn't that profitable a crop after the first year, and you're not going to be able to get enough cauliflower early enough to reliably get a large cauliflower. Besides, Potatoes are reasonably profitable for your first year, and you can get far more harvests from them. And after your first year, you're using Rhubarb or Coffee and third year on you're using Strawberries, all of whom are vastly more profitable than even large cauliflowers.

      Melons... well, year one, you won't be wanting large melons because you'll be wanting five gold-star melons for the bundle. After that, there's FAR more profitable things to do, like Hops and Starfruit, two of the most profitable crops in the entire game, and melons kinda get left by the wayside.

      Pumpkins really aren't that profitable a crop regardless, most just go with a field of cranberries and one of each needed for the bundle. Personally, I like to have at least 15-30 preserves jars by the fall of the first year, because cranberry preserves are far more profitable than cranberries themselves. And you get to supply the entire valley with the cranberry sauce for thanksgiving dinner.

      So really... large crops are a thing to be avoided, if one is aiming to maximize profits.
       
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      • sunlite

        sunlite Pangalactic Porcupine

        It depends on the situation.

        If you are on a limited budget, you should go for what gives you the most return. Like if you have 1000 to spend and space isn't your limiting factor then you should plant 50 eggplants, not 4 cranberries, because you'll get more return with your limited budget since eggplants give you the most back for what you spend.

        However, after year 1 it's space that is the limiting factor, not your budget, so let's say you have 100 crop spaces and enough money to get either. You should buy 100 cranberries, not eggplants, because you'll make more gold per day.

        But personally, I don't care about profits. I like variety, so I grow every type of crop. Some crops have uses other than selling; I grow lots of kale annually for recipes along with tomatoes and hot peppers, and I grow melons to give to Penny.
         
        • sunlite

          sunlite Pangalactic Porcupine

          Actually, coffee is more profitable than strawberries when you look at the numbers.
           
          • 4leaf clover

            4leaf clover Tentacle Wrangler

            Well, thank you for getting it! Also, you don't spend the same energy on four cranberries than in fifty eggplants...
            And, yes. In the end, money it's just kind of optional and ain't nobody got time for those eggplants. Even I left the eggplants and cultivated a variety of crops for recipies and for gifting... Everyone falls in the black hole of relationships.
             
            • ShneekeyTheLost

              ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

              I've looked at those numbers, and no it isn't. The problem is that Coffee is NOT an Artisan Good, so you lose 40% value right there.

              You get 9 harvests of 4 beans worth 15g each. So, that's 36 beans worth 15g each. As raw beans, that comes out to 540g for the season. If you brew it, that comes out to 7 coffee at 150g each for 1050g for the season, plus a bean worth 15g

              With Strawberries, assuming they are planted Spring1 and not after the egg event, you get 5 harvests. Each strawberry can be brewed into Strawberry Wine which sells for 503g/ea assuming it isn't aged. That comes out to approximately 2,500g/season. Roughly two and a half times what the coffee brings in.

              As far as Summer goes, Coffee held over from the previous season gets lost in the rounding when compared to Starfruit or Hops. It does barely manage to beat out Blueberries, though.
               
              • Magistrella

                Magistrella Big Damn Hero

                ^ what he said if you're going for min/max. But if you don't want to fidge around with trellis and daily harvests you can still get coffee in spring and make 1650/plant/summer (+1 bean). Else there is no reason not to build a huge field of hops and starfruit for your kegs/casks.

                Year 1 coffee usually nets me 200-300k, depending when i'm able to get my first bean - in year 2 i don't bother as harvesting twice a season (and letting my junimo harvest my hops) is way more convenient - except for the speed boost. I still need 2 cups a day to run around - no difference to rl there *cough*

                ^.~
                 
                • ShneekeyTheLost

                  ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

                  While I think we can all agree that coffee is love, coffee is life... I think there comes a point where it becomes more economical to purchase from Gus instead of growing it.

                  For this number crunching exercise, we're going to assume some things for Coffee's maximum benefit:

                  * Coffee is effectively free, therefore every last coin is pure profit, instead of assuming you purchase from the cart vendor.
                  * That you already planted in spring, and so have maximum yield possible.

                  On a per-crop basis, here's what I found:

                  Coffee produces once every other day, giving 14 harvests out of the summer season. This gives (14*4=) 56 beans that gets brewed into 11 coffee for 1,650g. Plus a bean worth 15g.

                  Starfruit, on the other hand, is purchased from the Oasis vendor for 400g each. You get two crops for the season (assuming no speed-gro), so that's 800g in the hole to start off with. However, when fully mature, they go into the brewing keg and produce Starfruit Wine, one of the most expensive things you can possibly produce. Each starfruit wine sells (assuming Artisan) for 3,150g. That gives a seasonal gross of 6,300g. Subtract the 800g in costs, and you end up with a monthly profit of 5,500.

                  Here's the fun part. Subtract the 1,650g for the 11 coffee you don't get this way from 5,500g net profits and you STILL end up with 3850g profit, above and beyond purchasing the coffee, per crop square, plus the coffee you would normally have obtained by planting the coffee plant in spring.

                  So... no. Coffee is never profitable to plant as a crop outside a marginal situation in the spring of the second year if you already have a plethora of beans and you don't have any strawberry seeds. It is more profitable to plant Starfruit and just buy coffee from Gus than to plant it and grow it yourself.
                   
                  • Sventex

                    Sventex Pangalactic Porcupine

                    I like coffee since it lasts 2 seasons, and roasting the beans is a handy way of keeping busy in Winter.

                    A things with the starfruit, if you side with Joja, it's 40,000g to get the bus to the Oasis running again, so that has to be factored in when gaining access to the Starfruit seeds. 42,500g if you side with the Community Center.
                     
                    • ShneekeyTheLost

                      ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

                      You are going to need to do that anyway, so not really. You are simply taking advantage of the fact that it has already been done.

                      Between the Omni-Geodes you can spam purchase to both fill out the Museum and get the Prismatic Shard and get some Iridium, the Skull Caves, Qi's Casino... there's plenty of other things to do in the Oasis, you don't get it JUST to purchase Starfruit. And if you want to try to amortize the cost of the bundle into everything you do out in the Oasis, you're going to end up losing the cost in the rounding.

                      But hey, let's assume a completely *worst case* scenario, and use the entirely unfair strategy of trying to amortize the entire bus system's cost over a single crop harvest and see how we do.

                      Now then, let's assume a modest 500 crop plot. So, 40k/500 = 80g/each. A mere drop in the bucket. Less than the cost of the actual seeds by a significant margin, in fact. You could multiply that by a factor of twenty and STILL come nowhere close to ruining the profit margin.

                      In the Spring, assuming you purchase the coffee you would have produced, you earn an extra 1500g on top of having the coffee by planting Strawberries and just buying the coffee from Gus. In the Summer, you get almost 4k extra. In no case is it ever even remotely profitable to plant coffee instead of Strawberries/Starfruit and just purchase your coffee from Gus.

                      I'm not saying you can't have coffee. I'm simply saying that planting coffee is not profitable. Buying coffee from Gus after making a more profitable cash crop is going to net you ahead of the game. If nothing else, let's assume you are drinking your profits. In that case, in spring, you have an extra ten coffee PER PLANT to drink. In Summer... well, you're probably going to run out of space before you run out of spare cash.
                       
                      • Sventex

                        Sventex Pangalactic Porcupine

                        Lol, I don't think my forest farm ever got up to "a modest 500 crop plot". I'm not a min/maxer, so a 40,000g would have depleted my money supply and I'd have never been able to afford any seeds after that. At least not until the 3rd year. (But then again, I was sabotaging myself with mass plantings of fruit trees which operate at loss on the first year).

                        So I'm just pointing out that if you don't have the capital to invest in the bus and starfruit seeds, it's not as practical as coffee. From one bean, you can cover your entire farm with the stuff by summer.
                         
                          Last edited: Apr 29, 2017
                        • sunlite

                          sunlite Pangalactic Porcupine

                          In my main save, I typically grow 80 coffee plants every other year, since 80 coffee plants supplies me with 2-3 years worth of coffee. So in my opinion it is well worth the effort, especially if you aren't a min-maxer. I always grow red cabbage as my cash crop, never starfruit.
                           
                          • Surenu

                            Surenu The End of Time

                            Personally, I go by the formula of fun per day. One of the major selling points of SDV for me was that you can take your time.
                             
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                            • ShneekeyTheLost

                              ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

                              Getting the bus fixed is plot-required if you want to access the additional content from the 1.1 update. You don't get access to the quest until after you complete the community center/JojaCorp. So this is in no way optional, nor should it be done immediately. Besides, let's talk about a bare-bones minimal Spring of first year crop plot of 200 plants. Amortizing from 40k, that leaves an extra 200 per crop, which is nowhere NEAR enough to change the fact that Starfruit is like five times more profitable.

                              Also, Fruit Trees at least break even in the first year if you jar them into preserves.

                              Besides, you should've unlocked the bus in like fall of year one, we're talking summer of year 2+, you've got plenty of time and cash by that point, or at least you should.
                              Personally, whenever I find my coffee stash getting low, I purchase more from Gus and enjoy the enormously larger savings. That way, I have less to deal with. Starfruit takes two weeks to grow, so you only have to deal with it twice in the season, which means more time to enjoy my multi-millionaire lifestyle. So you don't have to go out to your crops every other day and harvest, then take up keg space brewing coffee when it could be brewing massively more profitable starfruit. After all, you're rich! You don't need to depend on day-to-day hand-in-mouth lifestyle of eating only what you grow. You've got millions rolling in from even a modest crop patch, you can afford a hundred thousand on five year's supply of coffee.
                               
                              • sunlite

                                sunlite Pangalactic Porcupine

                                You probably are making more money than me, but I like growing my own coffee because it adds diversity to my fields. I restock ancient fruit in my kegs on ancient fruit harvest days (every Sunday) and by Saturday, they're done, so that's when I brew all my coffee.

                                I haven't played on that file in a while though because I got bored of it. I've been playing on Riverlands lately. I still do make money on that farm, but not nearly as much as I could make, as I'm focusing on aesthetics and diversity more than money. On the farm, I only have 192 crop spaces (80 dedicated to berries), and I grow 8-16 of each other crop. As of summer year 1, I have 250k money, mainly from my strawberries and mushroom forages.
                                 
                                • Sventex

                                  Sventex Pangalactic Porcupine

                                  Wow, I did not grow 200 plots of crops in the first Spring, I could not tolerate watering all that without at least upgrading the watering-can.

                                  Are you sure about turning the fruit into jam? It costs 2,500g in raw materials to make a single preserve jar and 3 days to jam a single fruit. You'll need at least 3 perserve jars to keep up with a single fruit tree, so that's 7,500g per tree, plus the cost of the tree itself. Assuming I'm dealing with 1 peach tree (I was dealing with a lot more then that, and I was using kegs instead), it's a payout of 12,908g, assuming that you have already unlocked artisan. But the tree cost 6,000g, and 3 jam perserve jars cost 7,500g. So costs, 13,500g, revenue, 12,908g with artisan, 9,240g without. So no, fruit trees operate at a loss on the first year. You can gather resources instead to cut down on costs, but the point is, it's not directly profitable like strawberries.


                                  For roleplay purposes, I was turning everything to wine, and I was gaining way more fruit then I could convert into wine, so I had to buy up sheds and raw material to keep up. I was on the forest farm, covering the grass areas with fruit trees, which was keeping me poor into the 2nd year, which is why I access the bus so late, and why coffee played such an important role in my farm for the first 2 years. I just didn't have the money laying around to bother with starfruit until year 3, which by that point, all those fruit trees became very profitable and I didn't need to worry about money anymore.
                                   
                                    Last edited: Apr 29, 2017
                                  • Magistrella

                                    Magistrella Big Damn Hero

                                    May i ask why you calculate costs for jars when you can get an easy 80 coal/day in the mines spamming floors 40-50? ^^

                                    Just wondering :whoop:
                                     
                                    • Sventex

                                      Sventex Pangalactic Porcupine

                                      At somepoint in the game, my need for iron ore and coal out-striped what I got in the mines. I would almost never get 80 coal from the mines. Once I looted all the coal carts and bags, coal started to be a little difficult to come by, especially after I chopped down all the trees in Stardew valley. I go into the mines, somedays I find little ore or coal, and just a ton of monsters. Sometimes I'll find lots of ore, but it's not consistent but I'm never getting enough coal. Maybe I'm mining wrong? I mine all the ores, and then leave the moment I see the stairs, rather then break all the rocks in a floor. I never bothered with preserve jars, cause of the high coal costs, and I even held back on bee hives since they cost coal. For some reason in my play-though, coal was rare. In my first game, I got a magnet ring right away, in my current playthough, I only got a magnet ring late in the 2nd year. Maybe it's all luck based?

                                      And when I calculated that I would need 120 coal, 300 copper ores, and 300 iron ores to fill out 1 shed with Kegs, I decided to just buy the material, since I found all that mining tedious. It would take awhile just to smelt the bars anyway.
                                       
                                      • Lilliput

                                        Lilliput Supernova

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                                        • Honeywell

                                          Honeywell Phantasmal Quasar

                                          Fun per day, I love that!

                                          I truly enjoy the numbers side of things and coming up with a strategy is fun for me - at heart I'm more of a min-maxer than anything else but fun is what ultimately drives my decisions for my farm. Daily harvests of hops and a bajillion kegs because they're slightly more profitable? Shoot me now... I'll never grow hops in a big way. I'm going to opt for low yield, high profit every single time for my cash crops. But a field of coffee beans so I can be self sufficient and make my own coffee? That's fun and satisfying for some reason so I'll do that. A balance between efficient and fun is what gives me the most enjoyment so I go with that.
                                           
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