Why are tulips better than parsnips?

Quite right. 240 potatoes is the same as 420 parsnips in XP (I believe). If you took the 12,000 and bought 420 parsnips instead, you'd save 3600g. But the backside of only making 14,700g would total you out at 183 strawberries yet having to water 180 more times each day. Spending 12000g on parsnips would be 600 daily waterings and would not even get enough money to buy 240 strawberries without quality help. I can see your problem. However since I 'need' to buy the copper watering can to water over 80 fields, watering the 240 potatoes is pretty much not on my radar anyway.

Pushing farming 6 by the festival for me is way too early. I won't have sprinkler ores until much later in the season. Some farms I have had to plant summer crops with wheat in the sprinkler spots on summer 1 to fill them in later. The plan I am looking at now is trying to get them before summer 1 for sure. But watering strawberries with them is probably not going to happen unless it is after the first strawberry harvest where I hit level 6 farming.

I've tried fishing in the ocean or river on day 2 to get the fiberglass rod on day 2. The amount of money I was short was insane. I'm not even sure I had reached level 2 fishing by the time required. I'll have to run a few more days 1 and 2 to try again. But so far, this seems like quite the opposite of what I was trying to do with the tulip start. (Ease up on the money crunch after the spring 3 am fiberglass rod purchase) You are looking for 12000g on the 6th to plant potatoes and I'm looking for 2000g on the 5th for a backpack, 2000g on the 6th for a watering can upgrade, Maybe 4000g for the 8th to plant crops, 2000g on the 10th for an axe upgrade and then 12000g for strawberries on the 13th. (Of which I'll have a harvest totaling near 3000 on the 12th to help out with.) And I'm going to fund mine without catfish. I tried again the other day and level 6 fishing wasn't enough to catch any catfish.
By my math, I think one would have to have a catch rate of at least 38% on catfish to have the rainy river average 60g per fish, which is what I get from the mountain lake. (Before adding quality and perfect catch bonuses). That is over 1 in 3 to break even assuming the spawn rate for each fish is equal. Obviously that is possible, many folks do it. but i'm not there. I'm not even 1 for a day spring 3. Since my tappers were built too early on the 8th I was thinking of restarting anyway. I'll do a better job recording my fishing results this time around.

 

I agree! It's defintely a different style of play.

It is tight to pull this off without selling things that I'd rather not. The key for me is harvesting lots of fibre to sell on day 1. I can't honestly decide whether the training rod is worth it - it makes the level 2 fishing much easier, but the value of the fish is much less so it's hard to buy enough bait.

 

In my limited testing I was further ahead buying a 250 trout soup than the 25 training rod and I believe it was a significant margin. The +1 fishing level seems to me to be near the same as the benefit of the training rod, without the penalty of giving up the star qualities. Not to mention the xp boost for higher quality. Both my XP and gold levels were higher the times I opted for the trout soup instead of the training rod. But in neither case were they good enough to buy the fiberglass rod day 2.
Good news though, my boss told me we are shutting the office down at 3pm, so my new year's eve just got extra stardew valley time to retest !!! lol

back to tulips for a sec. The other reason I was looking at using them was to be able to ignore the spring onions. I hate walking all the way down there to find nothing...

<edit to add> day 4 total from fishing 4648g. Both day 3 and day 4 with 25% bonus. Bought the fiberglass rod in the am on the 3rd. Only got 1599 from day 2 fishing had to fish a bit on the pier to afford bait. Still ran out of bait during day 4 bought 300 worth. Had to leave 3 iridium chubs back due to inventory issues. Also left 3 reg, 5 silver, and an irdium chub in the chest on my farm. so another 1061. Total 6009 from fishing day 3 and 4. ate a few chubs. Not many.7608g worth of fish from first three days of fishing. Balance of 4741 starting day 5. I'll take it.

 

I've tried and tried to make fishing under Jodi's work for day 2 fiberglass, and I'm convinced you have to have an incredible day 1 for it to be. Either that or get lucky with bubbles. That's including tossing all daffodils and fiber in the shipping container on day 1. I've done 8 Tuesday river runs so far and I wasn't very close. Two runs I missed two fish, two runs I missed one, and four I caught everything that nibbled. Even though most times I got 2 or 3 sardines off the pier before the shop opened, best I got was 1750 and change, including 3 clams I'd rather not have sold. Admittedly, an artifact for Gunther on day 1 would have done it that time, though.

But going to the lake, even with the overhead of two hours wasted, I had three runs in a row that made it, the last time with no missed fish and two foraged clams (again...), giving me the rod and 131 bait. Should tide me over even if it's a worst luck day tomorrow. (I'm getting to the point that I don't think a Tuesday fiberglass is a reasonable expectation if you start Wednesday with a skull on the fortune teller screen. Might as well restart. A Wednesday bat is close -- I started the day with 60-some bait and ended the day with 3. The time I had a star on Wednesday, I ended the day with more bait than I started with. Massive difference, though that might be random variation, too.)

Re: tulips, I've tried that in the past because I, too, saw the net energy. (Parsnips are relative crap -- net 17 energy, about 4/day, while tulips are probably net 35, about 6/day.) Could never make it work, though. Never have enough tappers out to get much more than 5 or 10 Speed-Gro, plus the 20, and all the rest of the strawberries can get in the ground by Tuesday, Wednesday if I'm going to be able to have some more Speed-Gro by then, but still, tulips means at best a crop of parsnips and a crop of kale/potatoes. Might as well start with the crop of parsnips instead of taking the loss. Might work if tulips were 5-day, but they are not.

 

I'm not sure I followed. You say 3 times you went to the mountain lake on Spring 2 and were able to buy the fiberglass rod and 131 bait on Spring 2?
I had 1 save where I rushed to the mountain lake spring 2 and found bubbles catching the first 4 fish as trout. I had an artifact from spring 1 and a gift from spring 2 so 350, but I paused the game and added my fish totals up. I had the experience and would have had enough to buy the rod at just before 5pm and maybe 10 or 15 bait. But then I figured I would be fishing either at the ocean for little money or the river for medium money and still have to go to the shop on spring 3 for bait. I figured I was better off with the minimum 4 more hours of catching largemouth bass and taking my money in the am for the rod and bait together.
I bought a trout soup and over 100 bait with the rod on day 3 and didn't regret it.

Also I'm not sure you saw the point of the tulips. It was to ensure the watering can upgrade on day 6 to copper. Which means that there are no 20 speed gro from the cc as there is no watering on day 7. I've had my best run of speed-gro manufacture as 25. 5 clams and 5 tar by the 12th including upgrading the watering can to copper on day 6. Quite often I struggle to find more than 3 clams, though frankly after many many years of existing off the 20 speed gro from the cc alone, I'd settle for 20 home grown. With the copper can I get more than enough watering for my planting needs for spring 1.
I'll type up a better description of it all when I'm not so buried at work.

 

The best run I got 131 bait. All three got the rod and at least 150g of bait. Which is typical. Now that's not spending anything on day one. Usually that's 900 or 1000g with nothing special. I've been able to get both Gunthers' reward and the gift reward for 350g before. I got Gunther's and maybe both on the 131 bait run, I don't recall. One run had bubbles, but I don't think it was that run. Nothing spectacular in any event; it lasted for only a few casts.

Maybe I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about using trout soup to boost Tuesday fishing. You are saying use it on Wednesday? I think Tuesday trout soup was a net loss. At least for me. I MIGHT have had an extra chest or two (how would one know?), but I don't think it made an extra 250g of Willie-sellable loot. As I understand it, trout soup only increases fishing level. Might occasionally mean I hold onto one of the early catfish, but most games it probably won't make much difference. Maybe a few silvers will be golds instead, but Perfect Catch is more reliable, at least for me.

Ah, I see. I rarely upgrade watering can in Spring 1. Certainly not that early. Which is why I delay planting any strawberries without Speed-Gro until Tuesday; the extra three days might as well be used gaining XP with other crops. Without that XP, I couldn't do day 16 sprinklers. Well, maybe I could if I went parsnips out the wazoo and got lucky foraging, but any foraging at all on Tuesday 2 is incidental, and Wednesday I don't check the bottom of the stairs next to the sewer -- getting to fishing is much more important than finding an extra onion or two, or more likely none at all. I don't even go out of my way Tuesday at the bus station for less than a leek or two dandelions.

Difference appears to be mostly where our player skills lie. My mousing skills suck. My misclick rate (i.e., wasted energy) is probably 10-20% in the mines, vs. maybe 0-5% with low-stress watering, so I level up Mining on day 4 to get cherry bombs. Getting 5 bars is priority; anything left over for tappers is gravy. So I use up a lot of copper ore. But my fishing skill (using keyboard, NOT mouse) is really good. Though I hit Wednesday with L3 or maybe L4 fishing, I usually only miss a couple catfish early on. After L5, I rarely lose one.

You ask why people plant parsnips. In my case, its not energy OR gold. It's XP. Hands down, parsnips have the best XP/g/day at 0.1, at a cost of energy. Tulips are a distant second at 0.058, followed by potatoes at 0.054, and kale a bit below that. 0.049 or something. Potatoes are superior to kale if I plan to sell (and can handle the extra energy watering), kale to potatoes if I intend to eat the crop, so it usually ends up a combination of the two, based on how many chubs I caught or food was in the trash. And either only when I'm assured of being L6 by day 16 with what I intend to plant. Sprinklers are that important. If I'll have some Speed-Gro ready for Wednesday, I'll hold back that many seeds and spread out energy consumption a little, otherwise they all have to go in the ground on the 16th.

 

All right, maybe I'll get back to tulips vs parsnips and some of the open discussions here. But right now, I'm looking at why blueberries are better than strawberries. (to use the 20 free speed gro on) "maybe". (also I'm trying to figure out my xp plans for summer 1)

Question. The wiki says 10 xp per blueberry. Is that 10 per blueberry itself (30 per harvest) or 10 per harvest?
I mean we all know the listed 50g is per blueberrry and so revenue is 150. But xp doesn't have to be that way.

Thanks

 

Xp granted is per harvest action, not per crop harvested.

 

Blueberries are 10 xp per harvest.

But if you have a big enough field, you'll hit farming 10 during summer anyway, just by sheer volume, because there are so many more xp on offer in summer, regardless of which crop you go for.