I am new to this website! Here are some of my Stardew tips!

Starfruit Bubbly: It may be a long-term investment, considering how long starfruit takes to grow and how long wine takes to make, but you will not regret this means of income. I have 30 kegs and a greenhouse that is constantly growing starfruit (with the exception of a few treasured ancient fruit vines). 30 bottles of starfruit wine will rake in 67,500g. If you really have the patience, aging the wine will double it!

Loving your Animals: If you have a ton of livestock like me, there is just not enough time in the day to pet them all. So here's what I have learned - if you save the petting/product collecting for every two or three days, there will not be a significant drop in the quality of the products. Of course, this only works if you have the deluxe barn and coop that will automatically feed your animals.

Skull Cavern: I'm sure most of us have experienced this - the dreaded '0 health', waking up in the hospital, missing half of your items, and the loss of g's. My advice to everyone is to stay away from the Skull Cavern unless you are properly prepared. Below is a list of items you will want to bring with you:

• A weapon with at least 50 damage
• A ton of sustenance. I recommend energy tonics and miners treats.
• STAIRS! When you get to a level that is "overrun with monsters", using stairs to go down a level saves so much time and lowers your chances of dying.

Optional Skull Cavern Tips:

• If you're going to the Skull Cavern, make that the only task for the day. For maximum finds, you are going to want to be at the bus station the second Pam arrives and keep mining until 12am (give yourself enough time to get home) or until you've run out of health or energy.
• Bring luck-increasing foods. Your supply of iridium ore will thank you
• Bring at least 999 stone. If you just can't find any stairs and you want to beat your record for how far down you've gotten, a large supply of stone will be your best friend.
• TREAD CAREFULLY! I like to have my galaxy sword in hand before I go down a level. Serpents will occasionally show up out of nowhere with out the warning "swoosh" sound.

Treat yourself: It's good to keep a few of each seasonal crop, fish, or material for yourself. You never know when you're going to need to cook or craft something. You can never have too many items!

Riverland farms: If you're anything like me, you dread your farm layout decision everyday. The riverland farm has the least amount of space and it isn't even that great for fishing if you're an ambitious fisher. Here are some tips to make the most of your space.

• Making a perfectly enclosed and symmetrical area for your animals is a waste of precious farming space. Save the main chunk of land for crops and place your barns and coops on the islets, then you'll only need to build fences by the bridges.
• TREES TREES TREES. Since you can't plant crops on the large area of grass by the greenhouse, make that your orchard! I would approximate 6-9 trees could fit there if you place them correctly (don't quote me on that)
• I would recommend this for any player but this is especially important for riverland farms. Use the stardew valley farm planner to ensure that you are making the most of your land before putting things in place. Here is the link: https://stardew.info

Well! That's all I've got for now! Please give me feedback if you want more insight OR if you want me to post my farm! Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,
Your fellow farmer

 

Ahem, if I may be so bold as to perhaps critique your honestly well meant advise?

Concerning Starfruit Wine and Alternatives

Starfruit Wine is, indeed, the highest profit per item substance in the entire game, however it is not the highest as far as profit per day. If you have a Greenhouse, then first off you have only a tiny fraction of it being used if you are only producing 30 Starfruit Wine per week, which is crippling your potential income, since you have a total of 116 spaces after the iridium sprinklers are set in. Should you wish to optimize your income from your greenhouse further, here are some options:

1. Pomegranate Trees produce far better results than Starfruit do on a per day basis, as they grow one fruit per day. Even assuming that you use Preserves Jars instead of Kegs so that you only need 60-90 Jars instead of the 300+ kegs to keep them all processed, you are looking at 461g/tree/day. Starfruit Wine, on the other hand may cost 3150g/ea, but starfruit takes two WEEKS to grow, which means you are looking at 3150/14= 225g/day profit. Assuming they can all be processed. Granted, you can only have 30 fruit trees, and of those, only 12 are going to be internal which would get in the way of growing other things, but the profit increase is substantial over those few squares.
2. Ancient Fruit is far more profitable per week than Starfruit is because it produces weekly, meaning no bi-weekly investment into the seeds and more importantly, twice as much fruit grown from the same plot of land. What you want to do with Ancient Fruit is propagate it. Take your harvest from your ancient fruit and run it through a seed maker, then plant those seeds in your greenhouse until it is full (except for the fruit trees, of course). Ancient Wine carries a price tag of 2,310g/ea, which brings daily profits at 330g/day, almost 50% more profit than the starfruit, even without taking into consideration the purchase price of starfruit seeds.
   
3. If you truly wish to maximize profits, grow Hops, as much as you can. You can generally fit in some 74 or so hops (actually, probably as much as 76, but I use 74 to round the available remaining spaces), between the trees and the rows of ancient fruit that you can walk on (because remember, Hops is a trellis crop). The ratio comes out to: 74 Hops, 30 Ancient Fruit, and 30 Fruit Trees. Hops produces one hops *DAILY*, which is brewed into Pale Ale for a daily profit of 420g/ea/day. Compare with Ancient Fruit's 330g/day, or Starfruit's 225g/day. It even approaches the fruit trees daily profit of 461g/day, if you only use preserves jars. And because it only takes around 2 days to brew ale, as opposed to a week for wine, you actually need fewer barrels to maximize output than you might think. However, this admittedly DOES require daily harvesting in your greenhouse, and may be more work than you wish to put in.

To recap: A full Greenhouse of Starfruit would yield 225g/day*116 = 26,100g/day. It would require 58 kegs to accommodate a field of this size, which is roughly what you can fit into a single shed (you can accommodate 60 kegs in a single shed and still be able to access them all). A full greenhouse of Ancient Fruit would yield 330g/day*116 = 38,280g/day, and would require 116 kegs to accommodate a field of this size, which is roughly two sheds worth of kegs. Adding in the fruit trees, just assuming you only use preserves jars and not kegs to process them, will change those numbers to 104 ancient fruit and 30 fruit trees. So, you would have (330g*104)+(461g*30)= 34,320g+13,830g = 48,150g/day, and is typically considered the best compromise of frequency of harvesting versus profitability. You would need to add 60 preserves jars to accommodate this, which would be another shed's worth, but you would need 12 fewer kegs. If you went the hyper-optimization route with Hops, you could make (420g*74)+(461g*30)+(330g*30) = 31,080g+13,830g+9,900g=54,810g/day. Of course, doing so would require 148 kegs for the hops, 30 more for the ancient fruit, and 60 kegs for the pomegranate. This comes out to roughly 3 sheds of kegs (178 kegs would almost exactly fill up 3 sheds at 60 each for a potential total of 180) and one shed of jars.

You brag about 67,500 weekly? You can increase that fivefold at LEAST with fairly minimal effort. Just plant the pomegranate trees (may have to clear areas around them to ensure they actually grow, which means a loss of one season's growth, so you may wish to wait until your latest harvest of starfruit is done before beginning) and save up your ancient fruit to put through a seed maker until you have 104 of them, and instead of clearing a measly 67,500g/week, you could be clearing 337,050 per WEEK. You would need to invest in some more kegs, of course, and some preserves jars as well. The jars are fairly straightforward, requiring nothing more than wood, stone, and coal, all of which may be purchased if you don't have the requisite amounts on hand. The kegs would require iron and copper and resin and wood. The wood can be purchased, and iron and copper can be had in the mines, or from Clint if you want to spend cash to make things easier on yourself, but the oak resin is going to be trickier. If you don't already have a stand of 20-30 oak trees on tap, you may wish to consider doing so at your earliest convenience, as this will be your primary bottleneck in production.

Concerning animal husbandry and the lackluster results thereof

Animal husbandry just isn't particularly profitable, even with deluxe accommodations with auto-feeders and the brand new auto-collector for the barn. However, the profitability of only visiting them every other or third day is going to depend on what type of animals you have. If you have Chickens and Cows, then you have a problem if you don't collect daily, at least the cows need to be milked, and the coop will quickly fill up and you will end up losing produce if you leave your coop neglected for that long. As animals aren't particularly profitable as compared to the optimal crops properly processed, I tend to view animals with an eye to utility, which dovetails into a point you mentioned below with regards to consumables. Cheese is an amazing food item, and gold-star cheese is even better, which you get from Large Milk automatically. This will see you through your Skull Cave explorations.

Of course, if you decide on things like goats or ducks, then yes, you can afford to skip a day as they only produce on average once every other day. Same thing with Rabbits. Pigs, obviously, rummage for truffles outside and so follow a completely different schedule. Sheep you can skip a day or two without issue UNLESS you have Shepherd (which I don't particularly suggest unless you want your farm's focus to be animal products) in which case you'll want to sheer your sheep daily.

So I'm afraid that your advise concerning animal husbandry is short sighted at best and is... for the birds

Concerning the Skull Cavern

Your difficulties in the Skull Cavern will depend on several factors, including you the player's actual skill in the game's rather primitive combat system.

By the time you get access to the Skull Cavern, you will have at a minimum the Obsidian Edge (from the chest in level 90 of the Mines). While a bit underpowered for dealing with flying eels (which is really the only enemy that should be giving you troubles), it is perfectly serviceable for diving as long as you have staircases and plenty of gold-star cheese and bombs. If you feel it is insufficient, you can also buy the Lava Katana from the Adventurer's Guild once you hit 120 in the mines (where you find the skull key) which gives bonus defense as well as extra knockback and better overall damage, albeit at the cost of 25k. Get it if you feel you need a better blade. Of course, if you get a Prismatic Shard before entering the Skull Caves, you can get a Galaxy Sword or Hammer which is going to be the best weapon in the game. You can do this by farming Omni-Geodes which you can purchase from Sandy on Wednesdays for 1k/ea. Picking up a hundred of them will set you back 100k, but should net you good odds of getting at least one prismatic shard.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, cows produce cheese, which is pretty amazing food for the skull caves. Gold-star Cheese is worth 225 energy and 101 Health, which is more than the elixir of health provides. Furthermore, instead of needing to keep supplying your habits with mushrooms, cows produce them daily for no additional cost but fodder (which can be mitigated if you have a large enough field for them to graze in for at least most of the year). In addition, you may wish a solid supply of Coffee and Pepper Poppers for speed boosts. That should really be it for consumables.

Luck has a negligible impact on pretty much anything it actually impacts. I did some calculations on the effects of luck earlier, I'm sure someone will post it, assuming they haven't already done so as I was typing up my lengthy reply, but in short luck has such a negligible impact on anything that it simply isn't worth the cost to obtain.

Your comment about bringing stone for staircases is a long known and respected (perhaps even considered 'cheesy' by some) means of quickly descending, although you'll want far more than a single stack of stone if you want to get anywhere relevant. You'll probably want six to eight stacks to get down deep enough to get significant quantities of iridium. Equally important, getting a significant store of bombs will provide you with a quick means of clearing levels, meaning getting more iridium and chances of finding pits that will help you descend multiple levels at once.

Flying eels are, indeed, quite dangerous foes, probably the most dangerous foe in all of Stardew Valley. However, you don't necessarily *need* the Galaxy Sword to combat them Indeed, the Lava Katana is, in many ways, a superior weapon to use against them, due to the bonus defense and bonus knockback it provides.

Keep a reserve of items

The reason you want to hold back one or two of everything isn't just to be able to consume them when you like, it is because that way you always have something to gift for people's birthdays or upon request on the bulletin board, or for bundle completion purposes.

Farmland

I would strongly suggest a new player AVOID the Riverland Farm, because it has so little space available. You can hardly get in a few hundred crops, much less all the processing you're going to want to get the best bang for your buck from your produce. Likewise, I would suggest avoiding the Mountain Farm for the same reason. I would, however, suggest the Forest Farm, because you can get the seasonal forages, and the renewable stumps are not only a great source of hardwood, but a great way to grind up your Foraging skill so you have Foraging 6 before Summer so that you can have lightning rods to make batteries and to reduce the amount of crops damaged or destroyed by lightning strikes form the summer storms. Alternately, the 'vanilla' standard farm is perfectly serviceable, and has the largest amount of free space to build in.

The SDV planner is a well known and respected resource, one which is mentioned on the front page of the official Wiki. It has its uses, to be sure.

 

My favorite thing about Stardew Valley is that there is an unlimited number of ways to play. No player's technique is 'better' and there is no winning. I think we both have great advice to offer people of all stages in the game. Thanks for your response!

 

Oh absolutely, and please do not take my response as something that 'has' to be done or 'must' be done, because there are as many ways of playing this game as there are players. However, it seemed, especially for your first section, that you were trying to give advise on how to get maximum profit from your greenhouse, which is why I framed my response in the way I did. Obviously, if you don't want to go through the effort detailed therein, and don't mind the income you are already getting, then by all means... ignore it.

Some have called me 'the man with the iridium calculator' because I have a tendency to optimize for cash, several of my posts come perilously close to spreadsheets with summaries and tallied balances. However, even I acknowledge and applaud the various other playstyles which the game offers.

The only thing that I would say about your original post which is definitively and fundamentally incorrect is your assumption that you can neglect your animals for two or three days with no loss of production, and even that depends on which animals you are keeping and what purpose they serve for you.

 

Great guide, but actually, with an efficient setup, the Riverlands farm has plenty of space. On my riverlands save, I had room for two crop fields (192 crops total), two barns and two coops, three sheds (one for kegs, one for preserves, and one for animal product things like cheese presses), 14 beehouses, one slime hutch, 14 crab pots and at least two of each fruit tree. I could have even had more stuff but I'm big on aesthetics so the rest of the room was for decorations and grass fields. Granted, I'm not a min-maxer so if you want huge crop fields, the basic farm is the way to go, but for general players like me the Riverlands farm delivers an adequate amount of space.

Also, @ShneekeyTheLost, that was a pretty interesting read concerning the crops per-day profit. I didn't realize fruit trees were so profitable, something to keep in mind if I play again.

 

@ShneekeyTheLost I did say there is not a "significant" loss in quality of animal products if animals are not pet everyday, but I guess the difference between, say, gold and iridium wool could mean a major difference to someone else.

You seem like a very knowledgeable player with a ton of insight on making a large profit! I am definitely more into aesthetics than profit (although I am saving up for a gold clock). One of my favorite thing to do is regularly redesign my farm.

@ShneekeyTheLost Also, I did recently start a new game with the farming layout, but I just couldn't bear to part with my first game. I'm hoping that a new update will come along soon that will provide the option to change your farm.

 

@Jonesy Anything to make you happy

 

My sense of aesthetics is considered to be an affront to good taste around the globe, and has caused at least one individual to throw up their hands in utter disgust. I'm afraid that I tend to more function than form, as a result. I do at least make an attempt at making function also aesthetically pleasing, but I fail more often than I succeed.

I do tend to be one of the foremost number-crunchers on the forum. In fact, now that 1.3 has officially released, I have a revised guide I need to write up and post. You can generally tell these sorts of posts as they start with an ESRB rating label of 'O' for Optimization due to gratuitous and explicit number crunching, and that viewer discretion is advised. However, as much of a number cruncher as I am, I would be the LAST person to try and say that one MUST optimize, or that optimization play is somehow inherently superior, as that is all a load of hogwash.

If you wish to make the money for your golden clock in a reasonable time, and don't want to exert too much effort, simply plow your ancient fruit that you say you already have back into the seed maker(s) and start propagating them in your greenhouse, letting them slowly take over as the starfruit ripens and needs to be harvested, then make more kegs to be able to process them. It'll take about a season and a half to complete, but you'll likely have much better and more profitable returns, which means getting the clock that much faster. The only thing you'd need to really worry about as far as aesthetics would be where to put the extra kegs. If your farm layout doesn't have space to accommodate several sheds, you can always stuff a whole bunch of 'em back in the bus tunnel. Might be enough room for all 116 of them in there, come to think of it, or at least very close to it. No NPC's walk back there, so they will be safe from NPC's randomly walking through them. Just an idea if you are needing to grind up 10 million in a reasonable period of time. It'll yield roughly a quarter million per week, give or take, which is just over a million per season, so you'd need roughly two and a half years to obtain your clock at that rate.

 

Great info, thanks!

 

Something to note regarding the happiness/friendship level of livestock: If it decreases, then so does the quality of goods they produce? In which case it may be advantageous to let it decrease so as to get lower-quality milk/eggs (the smaller varieties, not necessarily gold/silver/iridium) to finish the achievement of shipping 15 of each item. Depending on how much of these goods the player used to cook or turn into an artisan good when they first started ranching or how they progressed through the game, having high quality goods non-stop can make this achievement take longer to get if they don't want to buy a whole new herd of animals for the lower quality goods. I'm not sure which would be faster, decreasing friendship/happiness or raising new animals, but if they didn't want to sell off their older livestock and got more, new animals, it would mean more time spent with the ranching aspect.
Something to consider, I guess.

 

The 15 of each thing only applies to the 28 crops for the polyculture achievement. It used to be that there were several cooking recipes that required small milk, but they've all been updated to accept any milk. So now there's no reason to need more than one of each, just for full shipment achievement.

On petting animals I'm one who thinks they should be petted daily, early on, to get there hearts up. Then they can be kind of ignored. Also I think the coop products work like other spawned items in the game; They are given a random tile to spawn on, then the tile is checked to see if it is clear. If the tile is already occupied by another item the item being spawned is discarded. So, as the floor fills up with eggs more and more eggs will be lost because they're trying to spawn on occupied tiles.

 

Ah, yeah mixed up my achievements. I've never let my coop go unvisited for more than 2 days so I dunno how many products will fill up the floor over time, but if it's as you say then wouldn't there be more cases of people not getting all products on first day? Like, 3 chicken eggs and 2 duck eggs are supposed to spawn on one day but, as randomness has it, 2 chicken eggs and one of the duck eggs just by chance happened to spawn on the same tile, resulting in 2 lost products?

 

Oh yeah, that second paragraph wasn't directed at you. It was just a random thought I had reading over the thread. There are certainly cases where eggs are missing. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. At least that's been my experience. And I've seen where that's how forage items and the quarry work. I assume it's how the fruit bats work. And kind of extrapolate it to the coop also. When eggs do go missing it's the explanation that seems to make the most sense.