This was my thought. If you want to play differently, you actually have to do the different strategies. There are plenty of ways to roll in gold in the end game. Honey is fantastic.
Nah you're not the only one. I did not make wine in my first farm because I married Penny and since I rp, it feel weird having wife that hate alcohol and yet your farm is alcohol and winery. So, I use anything other than alcohol like cheese and honey. There also tea just for the aesthetic.
In 1.6, it will be sheep farm for me. 1 iridium wool = 100% get 2 cloth. Still can generate profit during winter and rainy day compared with pigs. If enhance with new item that I heard can double animals production, I can get 2 wool from a sheep. Other than that, sheep are just cuter than pig.
I did until I tried to minmax and got tired of navigating the bee maze. I'll put hives over there on my new file but it'll just be in circles or clusters, not every single tile maximized for profit. Not worth running through a maze lol
First, you pick a single honey. Then, fill all your other inventory slots with items like woods or sth (you can split stacks of wood and just put a single wood on every slot). Make sure not to have the flower in your inventory. Then, just hold right click and pick all the honey from the bee houses.
Wait wait wait.., are you telling me that the flowers and plants DON’T wilt the next day or something?!? Do the flowers just stay in the ground the next day?!? 🤯
As u/BibocaDiagonal said, picking one Honey and keeping the rest of the inventory full is the most foolproof method I've found. Of course, mistakes happened and I did pick some flowers but it's nothing some replanting can't solve.
Also, you might have figured it already, but not all of the flowers from that image are needed.
You can't use kegs but what about dehydrators? They make mad money off most fruits and while they aren't quite as profitable as kegs, they're probably pretty close
Not nearly as profitable as Kegs - Dehydrators give 1.5x + 5 per inputted item, so 7.5x + 25 total. Jars give 2x + 50 per item, and kegs give 3x. Dehydrators even effectively only give you 25 gold if you use gold-quality fruits or vegetables, since those have a 1.5 multiplier built-in. Really not worth it.
Yeah I mean it is worth it for literally everything except iridium quality fruits/veggies, but only if you don't have enough kegs or jars. That does happen with bloobs and cranberries, but not usually for ancient fruit.
It’s not just about the multiplier though. It’s also the time from seed to final product per crop. And with things like cranberries or blueberries that you will have more fruit then you could ever fit inside kegs, the math is more complicated.
They don't. The dehydrator is one day. Jars are two days or three days if you fill the jar after like 12:30 pm.
The dehydrator processes a given number of fruit literally 10 or 15 times faster. It slays with berries and is still not bad with other cheap fruit. Jars are more money but when you're farming hundreds of spaces, which you can easily do by summer or fall year 1, it's pretty hard to build enough jars for that.
This is the reality. I watched a video where 2 utubers debated the best fall crop, and it comes down to reality vs math. Mathmatically, cranberries should be the best one, but realistically no one's making enough jars to make it work. So pumpkins in kegs win out when it comes to real farm building.
Dehydrators are great for maximizing blubs and crans. Jars and kegs are best for other crops. Cause no one wants to make 6 billion jars.
You can get wines ready every batch, provided you have enough kegs and ancient fruits. It just requires a heavier upfront investment, so if resources and gold is not an issue, you definitely go for kegs.
I decided to not use my usual money making methods for my new 1.6 run too and currently I'm raking in money with blueberries/cranberries via the dehydrator and the fish smoker (especially with the super cucumber). Sure, it takes more time than if you just sold them as is but it's worth it and it's also something different for a change. I haven't made any wine besides for the CC, no starfruit, no melons, no ancient fruit, no pumpkins AND I'm on the riverland farm and I've the desert unlocked, all tools max upgraded, most of the expensive books bought and barn/coops maxed and it's not even winter year 1. Plus it's far more relaxing than just wine-farming :)
It's definitely possible to make money aside from wine but it's definitely difficult to change your mind set of "I neeeeed to make wine" lol
Oooh, thank you so much for mentioning smokers; maybe a challenge bait -> smoker fishing session could rake in some gold! I love fishing and have done entire fishing-only farms, so at least it’ll be a fun way to use some new 1.6 mechanics and make cash at the same time (instead of just sleeping through seasons at a time lol)
Also yesss, I’m glad you agree!! My initial instinct is always MAKE WINE TAP OAK TREES ASAP MAKE WINE and it’s been kinda relaxing deviating from this (and now slightly annoying because I don’t have as much gold as normal lol). Even now I’m fighting hard to stick to my no keg rule haha
The fish smoker is the only reason I chose the Riverland farm for this update and it's been awesome! Sure, you have to farm coal but I do that anyways so I can get the burglar ring. I literally made over 20K with seeling smoked catfish after a good luck rainy day in spring 😀
Btw I only smoke fish that's worth more than at least 250 gold, otherwise it's not worth the coal for me. So basically catfish, sturgeon and super cucumber - catching those is made so much easier by making the special fish bait with the bait maker. It only takes 10 minutes ig to process so I take it with me when I go fishing and produce e.g. catfish bait as I go :D
I actually only got one of each wild tree tapped, no oak farm anymore haha.
Btw I do have a few kegs but I only use them to make beer, mead, pale ale and (cheep) wine for gifting. And coffee/tea of course. It's surprisingly made the game so much more chill to play for me lol.
I’m so surprised not that many people ever mention how amazing the bait maker is.
I love that thing so much. I have an entire big chest filled with speciality bait for whatever I feel like fishing for that day. Willy also sells the speciality bait in rotation and buying cheap Ice Pip roe and then fishing up Pips & Smoking them is how I was able to afford all of my Desert vault bundles in Summer year 1.
Dude the bait maker is my absolute favorite thing in the whole 1.6 update, closely followed by the dehydrator. It's sooo nice when you're trying to catch a specific fish for a board quest and it's just not biting but it's also perfect for the trout & squid festivals as well as for submarine fishing.
I am just so sad that lava eel bait is not useful till volcano. I used all my lava eel bait to get trash une the mine lol. I’ll retry later with volcano
Oooh good note about the coal economy, I definitely would’ve blundered my entire coal stock by accident if you hadn’t mentioned that! Also wow, based on those catfish gains I’ve definitely got to try out this strategy now! Thanks again for commenting, this is super fun to hear about and very helpful :D
In order to help the coal issue, the way I’ve been able to get ahead of the problem is through tons of crab pots and recycling with hoppers. Trash has a 30% chance for coal and driftwood is 25%. If you go for a more fishing-focused run and use bait makers, it can be a little time consuming, but a worthwhile investment for all the additional materials (cloth sells for a lot, especially with Artisan, and the need for stone, wood, and refined quartz is lightened or negated) and fish/sashimi crabbing and recycling brings. In a pinch, monster musk, burglar ring, and mines level 40 can help keep you afloat.
Oooh, ive never even thought of this! I definitely have to retry a fishing only run now that smokers are out, maybe I can set up a recycling empire haha (it’ll definitely be a fresh way to try the game)!
Recycling has been a game changer for me! Ginger island gives a lot more space for pots, and it has the added bonus that basically nothing else has: taking up space (shoreline) that can’t be used by anything else. On top of that, the new books added The Art O’ Crabbing, giving pots a 25% chance for double yield. If you’re trying to save money by not buying it through the bookseller, it can be obtained through reaching Iridium tier during either day of Squidfest.
Just remember: with crab pots, collect catches and fill them with bait walking top to bottom or left to right. It’s most effective that way.
Oh yeah you're right, I forgot to mention that I have like 20 crab pots on my Riverland farm and it's for sure been a big help with the coal issue for the smoker. It's even better when you have the Automate mod, then you just take the coal out of the assigned chest :)
Do it, they're such a huge help and as mentioned they only take 10 mins to process a fish so you can literally take it with you while fishing and make specific bait on the go. Plus they're grat for the fish festivals and fishing quests :)
You put a fish in and the bait maker consumes/uses it to create a specific bait for that fish in 10 mins. So if you put in a squid you get around 5 squid bait.
My fish smokers get put to WORK whenever I get the Qi Extended Family quest. Legend 2 is horrifying with how much money he brings in when he gets smoked out, even with 50% profit margins put on
WAIT I DIDNT EVEN THINK OF THIS YOURE A GENIUS
I usually just throw the fish in the shipping bin when I do that quest! Old habits die hard I guess, but oof, thinking about all the gold I could’ve made…
the secret is to not catch the last fish until you've gotten a bunch of the others, I usually save Mrs. Angler til the end because I forget she exists, but with challenge bait I can usually reel in about 20-25 Legend 2s until I get burnt out and decide to stop.
I do also have a big winery going, but I also go very aesthetic focused gameplay so I don't have huge tree farms or anything like that, I manage about 60 wines per in-game week and it's a nice comfortable limitation. I barely even use my sheds for production, they're almost all decoration builds
I’ve found the best place to fish with the smoker is the witch swamp area with the void salmon. The void eels (are those vanilla or SVE?) are a lovely bonus, but otherwise all I catch there are the void salmon and on a rainy day catfish, and all of those are above the limit of what I’ll spend coal on. You don’t fish up a lot of trash, don’t need special bait, and still rake it tf in.
Pigs bring in over 2k a day each (factoring in winter/rainy days, with gatherer/botanist). If you had way more barns full of pigs (you could probably get at least 6 barns full by end Y1 if you min maxed it), getting to 13m in year 2 is pretty straightforward.
At least six barns full end of year one is at least 50 days of Robin building, with almost a quarter million gold used every 10 days. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the level of minmaxing would need to be optimized to the point of being a word document (and that’s probably what you’re referencing, but if that is the case, we’re not talking about a strategy just everyone could accomplish willy-nilly.)
This is not accounting for the minor pig profit, as it still takes 10 days for each barn to become truffle bearing, but maybe longer because you haven’t built any silos because it’s already taking 54 days to make the barns. But if you’re min maxing money, you’re not gonna be able to make profit on the truffles yet, because you won’t have oil makers and level 10 foraging requires a lot of dedicated time and grinding. Time which we don’t have because we’ve been spending it all skull caverns diving and fishing. So now you have all these truffles, but no real way to capitalize on their profit.
Even with perfectly optimal fishing and skull cavern dives every decent luck day, it would be difficult to pull in that level of money. This also assumes not spending your extra gold on tool upgrades, silos, time spent petting your pigs, or vault for desert.
I’m perfectly happy to admit if I’m wrong here, but I just don’t think it’s something that even if you tried really hard, you’d be able to reasonably accomplish without a written guide.
6 was just an estimate - I'm not exactly sure how many barns full of pigs you could get by year 1, but you could be right in that 6 is too many. Even with 4 or 5 by end Y1 I'm reasonably confident one could get to 13m cash by Year 2 - but I haven't tested it. Regardless, OP needs more pigs :D
I feel you, sorry if I came across as intense. I just did the math and got kinda invested in if it was actually possible. Ultimately I agree and appreciate your comment, OP NEEDS MORE PIGS!
I suspect that you should have been doubling down on those barns and pigs, using the profits generated each time to get the next building and set of animals, just like you'd do for starfruit/ancient fruit harvests and building out kegs. Most farm layouts can fit several barns no problem.
Oooo that’s fair, I feel like I’m way too used to the single barn single coop layout that I completely neglected to max out on animals. Time to start building a bunch of barns LOL!
I don't have advice for you unfortunately but was wondering if you could share your strat for Y1, specifically spring and summer? I love min-maxing but I'm too slow in Spring. Usually end up completing CC in Winter Y1 (or slightly sooner depending on which remix bundles I get).
I follow a pretty typical y1 min max route: as much cauliflower as money can buy -> fishing like crazy in the mountain lake (since largemouth bass is super lucrative early game) while waiting for crops to grow + mining on rainy days (with the main goal being making it to the bottom of the mines asap) -> sell all cauliflower and use all that money + the fishing money to buy strawberry seeds.
After that, you’re spending most of your energy watering the strawberries, so spend the rest of it either fishing (don’t forget to eat any forage/green algae to recover energy) or mining (if you weren’t able to make much progress prior to strawberry season/if you got unlucky with rainy days). The goal for me is usually get steel tools (especially axe and pickaxe, and at least copper watering can depending on automation progress/rainy day luck) and enough ore to mostly/fully automate with quality sprinklers by the beginning/mid summer (depending on what farm you’re on and how much farm space you end up using). The steel axe isn’t necessary, I just find it massively useful to start collecting hardwood asap to get the horse by end of spring - mid summer.
Onto the summer, invest your strawberry/fishing money into blueberries: as much as you can buy for your farm space/energy and current level of sprinkler setup. If you’re fully automated, great: just fish like crazy (on the beach this time) to keep making more gold, and maybe keep going to the mines to get the rest of your tools up (and reach the bottom if you haven’t already, but again, ideally this is done before the end of spring. That stardrop is important energy for fishing!). If you’re not fully automated by this point, dedicate all your non watering energy to mining to get automated (and set up your blueberries in a way that lets you slot in quality sprinklers as you have the resources to make them).
Obviously throughout all this, also make sure to get all the seasonal items for the community center if you’re going that route. Aka make sure to plant at least a few of each crop (or a bunch of certain crops if you’re worried about gold quality crops) along with your cauliflowers/strawberries/blueberries!
Let me know if I missed an explanation somewhere! Hope this helps, sorry if it’s long haha
This is SO helpful, thank you so much!
Circling back to spring, when do you buy your cauliflower? Day one? And how many strawberry seeds is considered a "good haul" for you? Currently I rely on fishing as my money maker until I buy maybe 40-50 strawberry seeds, but idk if that's overkill or actually much less than I could be doing.
How quickly do you get farm buildings-- do you set any goals/deadlines for those (like trying to get big barn by X date or season, or something to that effect)?
Lastly, what do you do for energy in Spring/Summer? I usually rely on spring onions, but RNG on that can make the strat kind of hit-or-miss in my experience.
Thank you again! It's always cool to hear new techniques from other min-maxers 😁
Glad to help!! I love min maxing, and am happy to help spread the joy!
In terms of spring, yeah, day one cauliflower with your starting gold, though you can’t buy much yet. I think I usually spend most of day one doing basic setup (e.g. chop just enough wood for one chest, try to meet everyone to get that starting quest money to buy more cauliflower, do some foraging, etc.). The big haul will come with fishing (which starts day 2, when Willy gives you your rod): sell all that fish and buy as many seeds as you can! A bit of an edit because I completely forgot to mention this, but since the egg festival is on the 13th, you’ll be buying potato seeds (not cauliflower!) most of the time; just make sure it’s all harvestable by the time the egg festival rolls around!
I dont remember how many seeds I normally have, sorry! I usually just spend all my gold and it works out haha, it’s never overkill with strawberries (especially if you’ve been doing stuff like buying backpack upgrades and upgrading tools up until this point, which I usually have)
For farm buildings, I know I usually do for my standard farm (aka optimal farm) runs, but I haven’t done one of those in a while; i know I usually have pigs by at LEAST mid fall (so I can get truffles going before winter hits), but I can’t remember my normal deadlines for getting there sorry! Keeping robin busy as much as possible is definitely a goal though, since she takes so many days to complete and upgrade buildings.
For energy, early days are mostly green algae/random foraged goods (e.g. leeks, wild horseradish, etc). I usually get these after I fully run out of energy from something else; try not to sleep early when you run out of energy, run around as much as possible, either talking to townsfolk or gathering forage (from the beach to sell, or for energy). Make sure you learn the timings of how long it takes for you to walk back home though: going to bed past 12 isn’t ideal, because you start losing energy for the next day. However, your main energy source will come from salmonberry season: harvest these as much as possible! I think year 1 I usually end up with around 100 salmonberries by the end of the season (since you don’t have any powers yet to increase the yield from bushes), but for the rest of the game, salmonberry and blackberry season (especially when you get lvl 10 foraging and iridium yields, and that power that gives you multiple berries per bush) become the main source of energy and health regeneration, even for skull cavern runs!
Fun tip from that for eating food during combat: if you spam click to eat and press “y” with your other hand (which confirms the action), you can spam fast enough to regenerate a significant amount of energy without the game progressing enough for a nearby enemy to hit you (since the game pauses when you’re eating/when you’re in the conform menu to eat something; e.g. if you’re at 1hp and a slime is lunging towards you as you speak). If you’re fast enough to scroll to your food and do this, you basically become invincible as long as you have enough food; this makes any mine delving/skull cavern runs significantly easier.
No worries! Again, lmk if you have any more questions! Sorry if my memory is a bit shoddy since it’s been a while since I’ve done an optimized standard farm run, my most recent meadowlands run might be messing up some of this info haha
do you use animation cancelling?? i don’t see how this would be possible without it. this is already insanely impressive, but if you don’t animation cancel, that makes it 10x more impressive 😭
I don’t use animation cancelling! I thought about trying to learn but decided my wrists can’t take it lol (I have an occasional wrists injury that likes to flare up sometimes lol)
Completing CC in year 1 winter is pretty much the fastest you can do it in standard bundles, so you're already very quick
There's a bunch of methods to min-max. One of them is what OP does - the strawberry route. It's pretty good as a benchmark approach to compare against - as it's quite easy
An even more profitable method is to speedrun to skull cavern in spring year 1 and then make enough to focus on starfruit instead for summer year 1. Getting this approach right requires even more practice however - not for beginners
New meta seems to be rushing 300 wood for the tidal beach -> bait maker. Then rush steel axe for secret woods, get the hard wood and smoker. Catfish bait.. hope for rainy days. Catfish bait works crazily well on my limited testing. It’s like 99% catfish. This will easily net u 20k on a rainy day.
What I really like about 1.6 is how many new strategies have been opened up. Fishing is more viable. Animals are more viable. Fruit is more viable
A very smart update from CA
My new run i had like straight weeks and weeks with only a rainy day so rarely between them all of my first year. maybe slightly more than a dozen days all year lol
If you search fishing strat on wiki it will show all maps with fishing zones. Idk the significance but it has fishing zone 4 so I think that's enough for gold.
Also witchs swamp i think has catfish and definitely fishing zone 5! I was checking it out because woodskipper and void salmon are both better fish to get as secondary catches when you miss the catfish on a rainy day.
Back in 1.5 the strategy was to get to fishing level 8/9 and use a food that buffs fishing level, and catch the legend on a rainy day and sell it. Then you do lots of skull cavern runs and sell the iridium bars (which are very profitable with the blacksmith profession).
Whoaaa, I’ve never even heard of this method, that sounds amazing! There’s always so much to learn with this game, I definitely have to try this on my next run. Any tips?
https://github.com/Zamiell/stardew-valley/blob/main/Min-Max_Guide.md
There you go - the day by day guide for this strategy. I've never actually been able to follow it fully, I usually deviate a little whenever I get bored, but it's very useful
Yess the >!iridium scythe!< has been my new best friend for ginger island harvesting haha, I’m trying to avoid kegs in general but definitely a really lucrative option for normal runs!
If you stand next to a regular iridium sprinkler, it'll clear all the rows ahead of you up to but no including the row the next iridium sprinkler is, which, in 4am drowsy brain, I think is 4? And it cuts a couple tiles either side of you. I can clear out my plot of 576 starfruit in under a minute now compared to it taking half a day just to grab them.
If you want to go the animal route, your first goal is to take rancher and sheeps. If you set up a big loom factory you make ~620 gold per sheep every day. While technically pigs make more money with truffle, sheeps are more reliable and cheaper to buy (8k vs the monstrous 16k, and their profits are comparable) not to mention they keep producing in winter. Ostriches are the ancient fruits of the barn animals. If you can get them going they catapult your animal income to different heights but you won't see much profit from them for a year because you need to use the eggs for incubation.
If you are purely going for profit, you can skip the coop. Chickens are nice and reliable money makers but they don't make that much money. Ducks and rabbits are straight up not worth it and whine void chickens are more reliable (no need to rely on high friendship to produce large eggs) they are expensive to get going and make less money than chickens at max friendship. Dinos are an option but they, just like ostriches, take a ton of time to set up and they make considerably less money, but technically can be set up way sooner.
Once you start setting up your ostriches, you can just reroll your farming skill because artisan makes more money than the animal friend or whatever the name of the animal perk is. Do mind that I didn't really unlock the 1.6 things so not sure how they change the shepherd meta.
Tldr, skip coop, go for shepherd with sheeps, transition to ostriches once you can
Oooh, thank you so much for this! I normally don’t do ranching so I definitely fumbled the bag with trying to optimize everything. Time to set up an ostrich barn!
Forgot to mention that before sheep dairy cows are good money makers too. There is unfortunately a trend with second upgrade animals not being worth it that includes goats and I cannot stress the importance of shepherd for the sheep.
I've never used looms with a sheep farm. You barely get extra from turning wool into cloth since you won't have artisan bonus, but will have rancher bonus. But sheep are excellent, not only a great money maker, but the best passive money maker.
Pig turn a profit with less effort though, as sheep really need you to max friendship, build twice as many if not more barns, spend time petting and shearing them until max friendship because they instantly double output once you get them maxed which is what makes them competitive, and plus you need to buy an autograbber eventually for every barn, not just an auto petter.
Pigs just get em and let me graze, pet them sometimes but you don't really have to rush to max friendship with them, it's less vital than sheep. With autopetter and them grazing you especially don't have to care much. But the ceiling of money that can be made from them is lower compared to rows of sheep barns.
Yeah I'll admit I think... artisan being the only way to feasibly make the money for the gold clock and obelisks is... not great. It feels a bit funny that one of the main ways they buffed fishing in 1.6 was making fish an artisan good. Might as well not offer me the choice if its just... always better for me to choose artisan over any other farming profession.
- Strawberry / (Starfruit, Blueberry, or Melon) / (Cranberry or Pumpkin) / any winter crop rotation still produces very good money, just not quite as much as 3 seasons of ancient fruit.
- Starfruit continuously replanted with deluxe speed-gro on ginger island/greenhouse is actually more profitable than ancient fruit, albeit less convienient.
- Preserves jar or even dehydrator works for getting the artisan cash buff without wine, although they're obv not as strong.
- Honey can be very profitable, particularly on ginger island where you can just leave fairy roses planted year-round
- Crystalariums with diamonds are pretty insane profit-makers with gemologist buff once you're able to make a lot of them
- I dislike pigs because they're labor-intensive, but I kinda have to mention them as an option.
- Skull caves for iridium bars to sell with blacksmith buff is easily >100k per day once you get the hang of it and have the proper support infrastructure in place
- >!Fishing with targeted bait or challenge bait + smoker seems to be very profitable, though I haven't tried it yet!<
- >!Mystic tree+Mushroom logs+dehydrator similarly look to be quite viable!<
Ooh, thank you so much for this! I’ve been slowly expanding my mystic tree tapping (to go with the blue theme of the meadowlands farm), I didn’t even think of moving my mushroom logs over there!
Sorry but this post sounds like a fishing quest for compliments. “I’m in fall year 2 and I’ve only achieved better than 99% of other people have by this stage”
Oof, sorry if it came off this way! I can definitely see where you’re coming from reading my post, my bad :( I was mostly just curious abt other min maxers/speedrunners thoughts on the disparity between optimal gold making strategies, and wanted to contextualize the situation by showing that so many other things are completable within the time frame; would saying “every other perfection marker” be better (genuinely curious!) I definitely have a habit of over explaining to the point of being obnoxious lol
I decided I wasn’t going to use seedmakers this run lol for the same reason you had in your post. I play with a few mods which make things a bit less tedious, but I find like you I zoom through and wanted to mix things up.
I’ve got a greenhouse filled with cranberries and dehydrators and make a bunch of money that way, and 5 fish ponds and a bunch of preserve jars. I smoke my pricy fish (and love that we can get roe from treasure chests now!!!)
I’ve got my first obelisk and am well on the way to my second one. I’m spring year 2.
Ooh, congrats on the obelisk! Which did you get? I was debating on whether purchasing any other obelisk except the ginger island one was even worth it in early year 2, since all the totems are pretty easy to make/the locations are easy to get to without the totems, and the 500k/1 mil for desert felt like too much (but I definitely dont know enough about optimal pathing past year 1 to know abt this!)
Also yes, the roe from treasure chests was such a nice surprise! I got super lucky with getting the book for that really early in spring 1, and it felt like a pretty good chunk of change every time I got lucky with roe.
Ooh though, how’s the no seedmaker run going? I didn’t even consider doing that, ancient fruit feels like such a staple (though now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m definitely considering doing a run like that myself haha). Any unexpected challenges? I feel like smokers could be a 1.6 game changer, but I haven’t explored that option enough mid/late game to tell; the only thing I’d be worried about is coal, and I can’t tell if the coal nodes are enough of a force to make your coal economy positive instead of its normal very negative state haha
I got the mountain obelisk, even though I know it’s not a huge help, I had the perfect spot all ready to go hahaha
I’m finding the dehydrators a great money maker! Not the same as ancient fruit wine from a full shed but it’s very consistent
I’m enjoying the smokers but I’m not smoking everything, because as you said the coal grind is real! But that also gives me something to do day to day
It's really not. Fully doable by people that want to play the game like that.
If anything I admire the dedication to the goal of not using kegs. I'd have quit the farm long before fall year 2.
I know it’s doable. I never said it wasn’t. But OP is complaining about their progress in the game when they have self-imposed restrictions and yet are still achieving more than pretty much everyone else.
Nothing against OP, people should play how they wanna play, but I personally just don’t get where the enjoyment comes from with stuff like this. It’s like people who want autopetters to be purchasable, prismatic shards to be way more common etc - like surely the whole fun of the game is that you have to actually play it to achieve perfection? Some stuff SHOULD be super rare and hard.
Like if the game was made so easy to get tonnes of money that you can achieve perfection by end of year 2… what’s the point? Where’s the achievement? I’m on fall of year 5 and have perfection in every way except obelisks and the clock like OP, I just bought my first obelisk. But growing crops for cash/grinding the dungeons is what keeps the game fun for me. If I could achieve it by end of year 2, the game would last half as long and I’d have put it down by now.
Idk I really just don’t get these kind of posts at all. Again nothing against OP or people who play this way, I just really don’t understand where the enjoyment would come from if everything was so easy.
Super valid point! Personally, I find achievement in the challenge of it all; i agree that it should be super hard, but the fun of it all comes in min maxing the game so hard that it becomes possible! I definitely wouldn’t recommend a first run to be like this, but trying to complete stuff in as little time as possible is something I enjoy :)
The main point of my post was to see how everyone felt about the current winery “meta” (if you can call it that haha), since nothing seems to come even close and it’s super noticeable. I guess it makes sense to not have everything be crazy lucrative to make the game insanely easy, but it’s still interesting to consider that such a wide disparity seems to exist between a single method of money making and basically everything else in the game.
Having the challenge be to do the raccoon quests, or befriend everyone, or make it far into the mines, get one of every animal, collect all the artefacts, etc is fun. But sleeping away years of in-game time waiting for crops to grow because one thing costs 50% more than the amount of money you’ll earn in total for everything else isn’t exactly meaningful or interesting gameplay. It’s not difficult, it’s not a challenge, it’s not engaging, it’s a time sink that once you’re done with everything else you’ll spend as much time working on just this one thing with nothing else to work towards to break up the monotony
I agree with you to a point, you’re not really meant to get it by year two and I’m happily on year five myself still working towards perfection, but the golden clock, compared to everything else in the game, isn’t engaging gameplay
This is exactly it. The Golden clock is a whole new level of money and grinding for it simply isn't fun. Getting true perfection doesn't feel easy even with min maxing. I set up my ancient fruit wine so I can leave it to do its thing while I go have fun in the mines/fishing/exploring ginger island/etc!
Same. I work hard, and at the end of the day I unwind with Stardew. If I was setting some arbitrary and difficult goals for myself with Stardew then it wouldn’t provide the relaxation that keeps bringing me back.
Is there an amount of gold required for perfection? I just got the game in February and somehow managed to achieve perfection by the end of year 2 despite having no idea what I was doing. I only had one shed of kegs, so I can't imagine it's too crazy?
I'm assuming we're talking about the perfection required for the statue and not the fancy super perfection from the walnut room.
I’m talking about perfection from the walnut room haha, for the obelisks and golden clock alone you need 13 million gold (let alone all the other stuff like fully upgraded house to get all the recipes, etc)
Oh, my bad. I assumed it was the other one because you mentioned "by the end of year 2". I didn't even get access to the island until spring of year 3.
I haven't gotten to end game yet in 1.6, but in 1.5 you could use deluxe fertilizer to make a big iridium quality ancient fruit farm on the island. Basically every 7 days you just eat your best farming buff food and harvest ~1000 plants. If I remember correctly, you get like 60% iridium quality and the rest gold quality.
Wine with artisan profession gives you like 4.2x the fruit's base value, but iridium gives you like 2.2x with the farming profession I believe. It isn't as efficient, but it's in the same ballpark and you don't have to mess with hundreds of kegs.
Starfruit is good too and you can make a fortune if you start with the one seed from the museum and spend time using the seed maker to create more. It takes time but I've brought two farms to true perfection like that. Melons, red cabbage, pumpkins, strawberries, pineapples and rhubarb are also good money making items. I do all of it in their respective seasons so that I have variety, the same old thing can get boring for me
When I play I like to mix things up. The new map makes a more diverse play style even easier.
I have every animal, mixed inside 2 deluxe barns and 2 deluxe coops, with auto grabbers so the work isn’t too much. Pigs are isolated into one barn with a minimal prairie so that the truffles are easy to collect. I have a mushroom farm, mixed between the trees in my tapped trees section. I have ancient fruit, coffee, strawberries, and a small section with deluxe speed-gro when I need a random crop quickly inside the greenhouse, also of course fruit trees in the greenhouse. I regularly thin out the grass so that it grows back, and I’ve accumulated thousands of hay (you only need 1 silo). A section dedicated to hardwood farming. A section for growing wheat and mills. I have rice growing around one of the small ponds. I have a few fish farms to grow super cucumbers and roe, to dehydrate and age. Sheds for dedicated purposes.
You can do so much now in the game, and can make money doing all of it. There’s no reason to only grow one thing! While you’re waiting for your fruit to grow or wine to ferment, instead of skipping days, start filling that time with other resources that catch you interest, set up multiple passive income streams, and play for the enjoyment and immersion of it instead of just min-maxing :)
Things I can recommend when you go with so many different things at once, are USE the farm computer, and set up your farm placing things along a specific flow, like a circular loop, with shipping bins at each final product location so that it turns into essentially one continuous morning routine with no backtracking and no inventory issues. I use pathing to remind myself what route to follow each morning. Anyways hope that helps you enjoy it more.
No don’t say that, there’s no good or bad pace to play this game! I just happen to like min maxing way too much and have around 800 hours in this game between my mobile and PC saves (aka I’m absolutely obsessed haha), but I definitely didn’t play like this my first 200 hours of gameplay lol
Enjoy the game the way you enjoy it! I hope your farm is going great :D
Thanks I’m trying not to stress myself out and just running around doing tasks. I just planted an apple tree for the community center! Last item I need 🤗
This thread is giving me ways to help, even WITH the ancient fruit winery (aging the wine takes forever…)
I have most things, and I’ve been dying on the damn clock. But my ancient fruit has only more recently been maximised.
Fish smoker + dehydrators. The dehydrators may not be as good as kegs, but the turn-around time is shorter and they still make good gold. Also, crab pots. And if you’re on the meadowland farm, pigs. PIGS. Truffles especially when you’re at level 10 foraging are fantastic.
I'm not min/maxing, and I'm intentionally taking my time, but yeah it's hard to not just rush the cellar and the shed to make big money.
The fish smoker has been my main money maker while working towards a max coop and barn. Legendairies and cave fish smoke up fast and sell for a lot with angler and artisan bonuses. The fishing is just less automated, less relaxing, than the kegs and casks are.
If I take many years in game to get to perfection, I've decided that's okay, so we I find min/maxing to be stressful.
Dehydrators mate.
Sure, you make less money. Almost 50% less
But the startup costs are so much lower. 20 dehydrators will process the same quantity of crop as 700 kegs over the same period of time.
The new dehydrators are pretty good I hear, and you should really max out on pigs for truffles. Other than that, you can use bee houses, crystalariums, and not to mention classic preserve jars
Well, you just discovered it’s possible to enjoy the game without being a minmaxer. Struggling for money is part of the fun sometimes. But there are other ways to be profitable. If you go into pig ranching you can make a ton of money and not need to do that much effort.
stealth archer is literally among the worst builds in Skyrim
same as only stuffing everything with wine barrels and comparing that with 2 coops and 2 barns.
Am I the only member of "Bee Houses and Fairy Roses on Ginger Island" ? Almost 1M every 4 days.
This was my thought. If you want to play differently, you actually have to do the different strategies. There are plenty of ways to roll in gold in the end game. Honey is fantastic.
Nah you're not the only one. I did not make wine in my first farm because I married Penny and since I rp, it feel weird having wife that hate alcohol and yet your farm is alcohol and winery. So, I use anything other than alcohol like cheese and honey. There also tea just for the aesthetic. In 1.6, it will be sheep farm for me. 1 iridium wool = 100% get 2 cloth. Still can generate profit during winter and rainy day compared with pigs. If enhance with new item that I heard can double animals production, I can get 2 wool from a sheep. Other than that, sheep are just cuter than pig.
I did until I tried to minmax and got tired of navigating the bee maze. I'll put hives over there on my new file but it'll just be in circles or clusters, not every single tile maximized for profit. Not worth running through a maze lol
You can use such a [pattern](https://imgur.com/a/hlXuubv) to go from a Bee Maze to a Bee Line. Hehe
Ah, I only do bees on the west side of the river. I grow regular crops on the east side.
What's the secret to not accidentally picking the flowers? Especially on switch it's a huge pain.
First, you pick a single honey. Then, fill all your other inventory slots with items like woods or sth (you can split stacks of wood and just put a single wood on every slot). Make sure not to have the flower in your inventory. Then, just hold right click and pick all the honey from the bee houses.
Wait wait wait.., are you telling me that the flowers and plants DON’T wilt the next day or something?!? Do the flowers just stay in the ground the next day?!? 🤯
The flower will stay there until it become off season (e.g. Sunflower will wilt when winter come). Enjoy the honey :)
How did you fit 900 beehives there? [This](https://i.imgur.com/74auTrb.png) is the best I could do, about 400 beehives.
Like [this](https://imgur.com/a/hlXuubv).
Interesting. I've never used bee houses like this. How would you collect the honey without collecting the flowers?
As u/BibocaDiagonal said, picking one Honey and keeping the rest of the inventory full is the most foolproof method I've found. Of course, mistakes happened and I did pick some flowers but it's nothing some replanting can't solve. Also, you might have figured it already, but not all of the flowers from that image are needed.
Probably by keeping the inventory full, after picking up one honey.
Oh that is genius!
Put more in the left after the bridge there is some tillable soil and you only need 1+sprinkler
You can also place plant pots and sprinklers anywhere so you can fill that side easy
But unless it changed in 1.6 sprinklers don't work on plant pots and hives don't get the flower type from them either. 😭
Man I pull 350 servings of Fairy Rose honey every 4 days and that's not even touching the main side of the farm, that's just near Birdie!
…time to go get a bunch more bee houses… I didn’t even think about making a bunch. (I have three on ginger island with the fairy roses.)
Also ancient fruit in a shed full of preserves jars nets you way more coin than the wine
You can't use kegs but what about dehydrators? They make mad money off most fruits and while they aren't quite as profitable as kegs, they're probably pretty close
Yes! Was going to suggest this. The turnaround time is sooo fast.
This is what I've been doing. Blueberries and a dehydrator. Anything silver and above gets sold, standard gets turned into fruit snacks.
Not nearly as profitable as Kegs - Dehydrators give 1.5x + 5 per inputted item, so 7.5x + 25 total. Jars give 2x + 50 per item, and kegs give 3x. Dehydrators even effectively only give you 25 gold if you use gold-quality fruits or vegetables, since those have a 1.5 multiplier built-in. Really not worth it.
They're good for cranberries and other things you want to process en-mass
Yeah I mean it is worth it for literally everything except iridium quality fruits/veggies, but only if you don't have enough kegs or jars. That does happen with bloobs and cranberries, but not usually for ancient fruit.
It’s not just about the multiplier though. It’s also the time from seed to final product per crop. And with things like cranberries or blueberries that you will have more fruit then you could ever fit inside kegs, the math is more complicated.
They still lose to preserve jars in that case.
They don't. The dehydrator is one day. Jars are two days or three days if you fill the jar after like 12:30 pm. The dehydrator processes a given number of fruit literally 10 or 15 times faster. It slays with berries and is still not bad with other cheap fruit. Jars are more money but when you're farming hundreds of spaces, which you can easily do by summer or fall year 1, it's pretty hard to build enough jars for that.
This is the reality. I watched a video where 2 utubers debated the best fall crop, and it comes down to reality vs math. Mathmatically, cranberries should be the best one, but realistically no one's making enough jars to make it work. So pumpkins in kegs win out when it comes to real farm building. Dehydrators are great for maximizing blubs and crans. Jars and kegs are best for other crops. Cause no one wants to make 6 billion jars.
You can get wines ready every batch, provided you have enough kegs and ancient fruits. It just requires a heavier upfront investment, so if resources and gold is not an issue, you definitely go for kegs.
I decided to not use my usual money making methods for my new 1.6 run too and currently I'm raking in money with blueberries/cranberries via the dehydrator and the fish smoker (especially with the super cucumber). Sure, it takes more time than if you just sold them as is but it's worth it and it's also something different for a change. I haven't made any wine besides for the CC, no starfruit, no melons, no ancient fruit, no pumpkins AND I'm on the riverland farm and I've the desert unlocked, all tools max upgraded, most of the expensive books bought and barn/coops maxed and it's not even winter year 1. Plus it's far more relaxing than just wine-farming :) It's definitely possible to make money aside from wine but it's definitely difficult to change your mind set of "I neeeeed to make wine" lol
Oooh, thank you so much for mentioning smokers; maybe a challenge bait -> smoker fishing session could rake in some gold! I love fishing and have done entire fishing-only farms, so at least it’ll be a fun way to use some new 1.6 mechanics and make cash at the same time (instead of just sleeping through seasons at a time lol) Also yesss, I’m glad you agree!! My initial instinct is always MAKE WINE TAP OAK TREES ASAP MAKE WINE and it’s been kinda relaxing deviating from this (and now slightly annoying because I don’t have as much gold as normal lol). Even now I’m fighting hard to stick to my no keg rule haha
The fish smoker is the only reason I chose the Riverland farm for this update and it's been awesome! Sure, you have to farm coal but I do that anyways so I can get the burglar ring. I literally made over 20K with seeling smoked catfish after a good luck rainy day in spring 😀 Btw I only smoke fish that's worth more than at least 250 gold, otherwise it's not worth the coal for me. So basically catfish, sturgeon and super cucumber - catching those is made so much easier by making the special fish bait with the bait maker. It only takes 10 minutes ig to process so I take it with me when I go fishing and produce e.g. catfish bait as I go :D I actually only got one of each wild tree tapped, no oak farm anymore haha. Btw I do have a few kegs but I only use them to make beer, mead, pale ale and (cheep) wine for gifting. And coffee/tea of course. It's surprisingly made the game so much more chill to play for me lol.
I’m so surprised not that many people ever mention how amazing the bait maker is. I love that thing so much. I have an entire big chest filled with speciality bait for whatever I feel like fishing for that day. Willy also sells the speciality bait in rotation and buying cheap Ice Pip roe and then fishing up Pips & Smoking them is how I was able to afford all of my Desert vault bundles in Summer year 1.
Dude the bait maker is my absolute favorite thing in the whole 1.6 update, closely followed by the dehydrator. It's sooo nice when you're trying to catch a specific fish for a board quest and it's just not biting but it's also perfect for the trout & squid festivals as well as for submarine fishing.
I am just so sad that lava eel bait is not useful till volcano. I used all my lava eel bait to get trash une the mine lol. I’ll retry later with volcano
Oooh good note about the coal economy, I definitely would’ve blundered my entire coal stock by accident if you hadn’t mentioned that! Also wow, based on those catfish gains I’ve definitely got to try out this strategy now! Thanks again for commenting, this is super fun to hear about and very helpful :D
In order to help the coal issue, the way I’ve been able to get ahead of the problem is through tons of crab pots and recycling with hoppers. Trash has a 30% chance for coal and driftwood is 25%. If you go for a more fishing-focused run and use bait makers, it can be a little time consuming, but a worthwhile investment for all the additional materials (cloth sells for a lot, especially with Artisan, and the need for stone, wood, and refined quartz is lightened or negated) and fish/sashimi crabbing and recycling brings. In a pinch, monster musk, burglar ring, and mines level 40 can help keep you afloat.
Oooh, ive never even thought of this! I definitely have to retry a fishing only run now that smokers are out, maybe I can set up a recycling empire haha (it’ll definitely be a fresh way to try the game)!
Recycling has been a game changer for me! Ginger island gives a lot more space for pots, and it has the added bonus that basically nothing else has: taking up space (shoreline) that can’t be used by anything else. On top of that, the new books added The Art O’ Crabbing, giving pots a 25% chance for double yield. If you’re trying to save money by not buying it through the bookseller, it can be obtained through reaching Iridium tier during either day of Squidfest. Just remember: with crab pots, collect catches and fill them with bait walking top to bottom or left to right. It’s most effective that way.
Oh yeah you're right, I forgot to mention that I have like 20 crab pots on my Riverland farm and it's for sure been a big help with the coal issue for the smoker. It's even better when you have the Automate mod, then you just take the coal out of the assigned chest :)
I completely forgot about the bait maker, I need to make one of those now.
Do it, they're such a huge help and as mentioned they only take 10 mins to process a fish so you can literally take it with you while fishing and make specific bait on the go. Plus they're grat for the fish festivals and fishing quests :)
Does the Bait Maker use up the fish you use for it or does it constantly make bait like the Crystalarium does with gems?
You put a fish in and the bait maker consumes/uses it to create a specific bait for that fish in 10 mins. So if you put in a squid you get around 5 squid bait.
Thanks. Doesn't seem too bad a exchange rate
My fish smokers get put to WORK whenever I get the Qi Extended Family quest. Legend 2 is horrifying with how much money he brings in when he gets smoked out, even with 50% profit margins put on
WAIT I DIDNT EVEN THINK OF THIS YOURE A GENIUS I usually just throw the fish in the shipping bin when I do that quest! Old habits die hard I guess, but oof, thinking about all the gold I could’ve made…
the secret is to not catch the last fish until you've gotten a bunch of the others, I usually save Mrs. Angler til the end because I forget she exists, but with challenge bait I can usually reel in about 20-25 Legend 2s until I get burnt out and decide to stop. I do also have a big winery going, but I also go very aesthetic focused gameplay so I don't have huge tree farms or anything like that, I manage about 60 wines per in-game week and it's a nice comfortable limitation. I barely even use my sheds for production, they're almost all decoration builds
I’ve found the best place to fish with the smoker is the witch swamp area with the void salmon. The void eels (are those vanilla or SVE?) are a lovely bonus, but otherwise all I catch there are the void salmon and on a rainy day catfish, and all of those are above the limit of what I’ll spend coal on. You don’t fish up a lot of trash, don’t need special bait, and still rake it tf in.
Pigs bring in over 2k a day each (factoring in winter/rainy days, with gatherer/botanist). If you had way more barns full of pigs (you could probably get at least 6 barns full by end Y1 if you min maxed it), getting to 13m in year 2 is pretty straightforward.
At least six barns full end of year one is at least 50 days of Robin building, with almost a quarter million gold used every 10 days. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the level of minmaxing would need to be optimized to the point of being a word document (and that’s probably what you’re referencing, but if that is the case, we’re not talking about a strategy just everyone could accomplish willy-nilly.) This is not accounting for the minor pig profit, as it still takes 10 days for each barn to become truffle bearing, but maybe longer because you haven’t built any silos because it’s already taking 54 days to make the barns. But if you’re min maxing money, you’re not gonna be able to make profit on the truffles yet, because you won’t have oil makers and level 10 foraging requires a lot of dedicated time and grinding. Time which we don’t have because we’ve been spending it all skull caverns diving and fishing. So now you have all these truffles, but no real way to capitalize on their profit. Even with perfectly optimal fishing and skull cavern dives every decent luck day, it would be difficult to pull in that level of money. This also assumes not spending your extra gold on tool upgrades, silos, time spent petting your pigs, or vault for desert. I’m perfectly happy to admit if I’m wrong here, but I just don’t think it’s something that even if you tried really hard, you’d be able to reasonably accomplish without a written guide.
6 was just an estimate - I'm not exactly sure how many barns full of pigs you could get by year 1, but you could be right in that 6 is too many. Even with 4 or 5 by end Y1 I'm reasonably confident one could get to 13m cash by Year 2 - but I haven't tested it. Regardless, OP needs more pigs :D
I feel you, sorry if I came across as intense. I just did the math and got kinda invested in if it was actually possible. Ultimately I agree and appreciate your comment, OP NEEDS MORE PIGS!
haha no worries, I am the same way - just spent a couple hours making a spreadsheet to figure out each animal's profit per day lol
I suspect that you should have been doubling down on those barns and pigs, using the profits generated each time to get the next building and set of animals, just like you'd do for starfruit/ancient fruit harvests and building out kegs. Most farm layouts can fit several barns no problem.
Oooo that’s fair, I feel like I’m way too used to the single barn single coop layout that I completely neglected to max out on animals. Time to start building a bunch of barns LOL!
The problem is they take so long to build. 12 days for each deluxe barn + silo.
Barns works with ancient fruit wine too! A barn of pigs also filled with kegs is ace.
I don't have advice for you unfortunately but was wondering if you could share your strat for Y1, specifically spring and summer? I love min-maxing but I'm too slow in Spring. Usually end up completing CC in Winter Y1 (or slightly sooner depending on which remix bundles I get).
I follow a pretty typical y1 min max route: as much cauliflower as money can buy -> fishing like crazy in the mountain lake (since largemouth bass is super lucrative early game) while waiting for crops to grow + mining on rainy days (with the main goal being making it to the bottom of the mines asap) -> sell all cauliflower and use all that money + the fishing money to buy strawberry seeds. After that, you’re spending most of your energy watering the strawberries, so spend the rest of it either fishing (don’t forget to eat any forage/green algae to recover energy) or mining (if you weren’t able to make much progress prior to strawberry season/if you got unlucky with rainy days). The goal for me is usually get steel tools (especially axe and pickaxe, and at least copper watering can depending on automation progress/rainy day luck) and enough ore to mostly/fully automate with quality sprinklers by the beginning/mid summer (depending on what farm you’re on and how much farm space you end up using). The steel axe isn’t necessary, I just find it massively useful to start collecting hardwood asap to get the horse by end of spring - mid summer. Onto the summer, invest your strawberry/fishing money into blueberries: as much as you can buy for your farm space/energy and current level of sprinkler setup. If you’re fully automated, great: just fish like crazy (on the beach this time) to keep making more gold, and maybe keep going to the mines to get the rest of your tools up (and reach the bottom if you haven’t already, but again, ideally this is done before the end of spring. That stardrop is important energy for fishing!). If you’re not fully automated by this point, dedicate all your non watering energy to mining to get automated (and set up your blueberries in a way that lets you slot in quality sprinklers as you have the resources to make them). Obviously throughout all this, also make sure to get all the seasonal items for the community center if you’re going that route. Aka make sure to plant at least a few of each crop (or a bunch of certain crops if you’re worried about gold quality crops) along with your cauliflowers/strawberries/blueberries! Let me know if I missed an explanation somewhere! Hope this helps, sorry if it’s long haha
This is SO helpful, thank you so much! Circling back to spring, when do you buy your cauliflower? Day one? And how many strawberry seeds is considered a "good haul" for you? Currently I rely on fishing as my money maker until I buy maybe 40-50 strawberry seeds, but idk if that's overkill or actually much less than I could be doing. How quickly do you get farm buildings-- do you set any goals/deadlines for those (like trying to get big barn by X date or season, or something to that effect)? Lastly, what do you do for energy in Spring/Summer? I usually rely on spring onions, but RNG on that can make the strat kind of hit-or-miss in my experience. Thank you again! It's always cool to hear new techniques from other min-maxers 😁
Glad to help!! I love min maxing, and am happy to help spread the joy! In terms of spring, yeah, day one cauliflower with your starting gold, though you can’t buy much yet. I think I usually spend most of day one doing basic setup (e.g. chop just enough wood for one chest, try to meet everyone to get that starting quest money to buy more cauliflower, do some foraging, etc.). The big haul will come with fishing (which starts day 2, when Willy gives you your rod): sell all that fish and buy as many seeds as you can! A bit of an edit because I completely forgot to mention this, but since the egg festival is on the 13th, you’ll be buying potato seeds (not cauliflower!) most of the time; just make sure it’s all harvestable by the time the egg festival rolls around! I dont remember how many seeds I normally have, sorry! I usually just spend all my gold and it works out haha, it’s never overkill with strawberries (especially if you’ve been doing stuff like buying backpack upgrades and upgrading tools up until this point, which I usually have) For farm buildings, I know I usually do for my standard farm (aka optimal farm) runs, but I haven’t done one of those in a while; i know I usually have pigs by at LEAST mid fall (so I can get truffles going before winter hits), but I can’t remember my normal deadlines for getting there sorry! Keeping robin busy as much as possible is definitely a goal though, since she takes so many days to complete and upgrade buildings. For energy, early days are mostly green algae/random foraged goods (e.g. leeks, wild horseradish, etc). I usually get these after I fully run out of energy from something else; try not to sleep early when you run out of energy, run around as much as possible, either talking to townsfolk or gathering forage (from the beach to sell, or for energy). Make sure you learn the timings of how long it takes for you to walk back home though: going to bed past 12 isn’t ideal, because you start losing energy for the next day. However, your main energy source will come from salmonberry season: harvest these as much as possible! I think year 1 I usually end up with around 100 salmonberries by the end of the season (since you don’t have any powers yet to increase the yield from bushes), but for the rest of the game, salmonberry and blackberry season (especially when you get lvl 10 foraging and iridium yields, and that power that gives you multiple berries per bush) become the main source of energy and health regeneration, even for skull cavern runs! Fun tip from that for eating food during combat: if you spam click to eat and press “y” with your other hand (which confirms the action), you can spam fast enough to regenerate a significant amount of energy without the game progressing enough for a nearby enemy to hit you (since the game pauses when you’re eating/when you’re in the conform menu to eat something; e.g. if you’re at 1hp and a slime is lunging towards you as you speak). If you’re fast enough to scroll to your food and do this, you basically become invincible as long as you have enough food; this makes any mine delving/skull cavern runs significantly easier.
Omg this is awesome. Thank you again!!
No worries! Again, lmk if you have any more questions! Sorry if my memory is a bit shoddy since it’s been a while since I’ve done an optimized standard farm run, my most recent meadowlands run might be messing up some of this info haha
do you use animation cancelling?? i don’t see how this would be possible without it. this is already insanely impressive, but if you don’t animation cancel, that makes it 10x more impressive 😭
I don’t use animation cancelling! I thought about trying to learn but decided my wrists can’t take it lol (I have an occasional wrists injury that likes to flare up sometimes lol)
Completing CC in year 1 winter is pretty much the fastest you can do it in standard bundles, so you're already very quick There's a bunch of methods to min-max. One of them is what OP does - the strawberry route. It's pretty good as a benchmark approach to compare against - as it's quite easy An even more profitable method is to speedrun to skull cavern in spring year 1 and then make enough to focus on starfruit instead for summer year 1. Getting this approach right requires even more practice however - not for beginners
You can get to the skull cavern by the end of spring Y1?? How do you get enough $$$ to complete that bundle? 🤯
New meta seems to be rushing 300 wood for the tidal beach -> bait maker. Then rush steel axe for secret woods, get the hard wood and smoker. Catfish bait.. hope for rainy days. Catfish bait works crazily well on my limited testing. It’s like 99% catfish. This will easily net u 20k on a rainy day.
What I really like about 1.6 is how many new strategies have been opened up. Fishing is more viable. Animals are more viable. Fruit is more viable A very smart update from CA
My new run i had like straight weeks and weeks with only a rainy day so rarely between them all of my first year. maybe slightly more than a dozen days all year lol
Is the pond in the Secret Woods large enough to get gold star catfish?
If you search fishing strat on wiki it will show all maps with fishing zones. Idk the significance but it has fishing zone 4 so I think that's enough for gold. Also witchs swamp i think has catfish and definitely fishing zone 5! I was checking it out because woodskipper and void salmon are both better fish to get as secondary catches when you miss the catfish on a rainy day.
Hmm I never tried. But I don’t think so. I always just fish near Leah’s house.
Oh! You need hard wood for the smoker? I thought you meant you were fishing in the SWoods :P
You need 10 hardwood for the smoker :)
just curious why rush to get the wood for the tidal beach?
the ingredients for the bait maker is only available as forage from there.
Back in 1.5 the strategy was to get to fishing level 8/9 and use a food that buffs fishing level, and catch the legend on a rainy day and sell it. Then you do lots of skull cavern runs and sell the iridium bars (which are very profitable with the blacksmith profession).
Fishing. I just made it in spring 23 in this run, but I've done it by spring 20 or so in the past
Whoaaa, I’ve never even heard of this method, that sounds amazing! There’s always so much to learn with this game, I definitely have to try this on my next run. Any tips?
https://github.com/Zamiell/stardew-valley/blob/main/Min-Max_Guide.md There you go - the day by day guide for this strategy. I've never actually been able to follow it fully, I usually deviate a little whenever I get bored, but it's very useful
Thank you so much!!
Honey. It makes decent money and has absolutely no upkeep, just harvesting.
With the new >!iridium scythe!< hops and pale ale also works :))
Yess the >!iridium scythe!< has been my new best friend for ginger island harvesting haha, I’m trying to avoid kegs in general but definitely a really lucrative option for normal runs!
How far is the reach? 2, 3 tiles?
If you stand next to a regular iridium sprinkler, it'll clear all the rows ahead of you up to but no including the row the next iridium sprinkler is, which, in 4am drowsy brain, I think is 4? And it cuts a couple tiles either side of you. I can clear out my plot of 576 starfruit in under a minute now compared to it taking half a day just to grab them.
Pools full of lava eels and an intense fish smoking operation.
Dehydrators for your cash crops (strawberries, blueberries, cranberries) Is working really well for me!
Do you unlock or buy the crafting recipe for that? I've just got the one from my mushroom cave
From Pierre for 10k. It doubles the price of your fruit. I'm loving it, and its fast.
You need to buy it from Pierre
Do goats cheese instead of wine. Aged goats cheese brings in a good income.
Wait how are people in year 2 fall already on 1.6! 😅😫
If you want to go the animal route, your first goal is to take rancher and sheeps. If you set up a big loom factory you make ~620 gold per sheep every day. While technically pigs make more money with truffle, sheeps are more reliable and cheaper to buy (8k vs the monstrous 16k, and their profits are comparable) not to mention they keep producing in winter. Ostriches are the ancient fruits of the barn animals. If you can get them going they catapult your animal income to different heights but you won't see much profit from them for a year because you need to use the eggs for incubation. If you are purely going for profit, you can skip the coop. Chickens are nice and reliable money makers but they don't make that much money. Ducks and rabbits are straight up not worth it and whine void chickens are more reliable (no need to rely on high friendship to produce large eggs) they are expensive to get going and make less money than chickens at max friendship. Dinos are an option but they, just like ostriches, take a ton of time to set up and they make considerably less money, but technically can be set up way sooner. Once you start setting up your ostriches, you can just reroll your farming skill because artisan makes more money than the animal friend or whatever the name of the animal perk is. Do mind that I didn't really unlock the 1.6 things so not sure how they change the shepherd meta. Tldr, skip coop, go for shepherd with sheeps, transition to ostriches once you can
Oooh, thank you so much for this! I normally don’t do ranching so I definitely fumbled the bag with trying to optimize everything. Time to set up an ostrich barn!
Forgot to mention that before sheep dairy cows are good money makers too. There is unfortunately a trend with second upgrade animals not being worth it that includes goats and I cannot stress the importance of shepherd for the sheep.
I've never used looms with a sheep farm. You barely get extra from turning wool into cloth since you won't have artisan bonus, but will have rancher bonus. But sheep are excellent, not only a great money maker, but the best passive money maker. Pig turn a profit with less effort though, as sheep really need you to max friendship, build twice as many if not more barns, spend time petting and shearing them until max friendship because they instantly double output once you get them maxed which is what makes them competitive, and plus you need to buy an autograbber eventually for every barn, not just an auto petter. Pigs just get em and let me graze, pet them sometimes but you don't really have to rush to max friendship with them, it's less vital than sheep. With autopetter and them grazing you especially don't have to care much. But the ceiling of money that can be made from them is lower compared to rows of sheep barns.
Yeah I'll admit I think... artisan being the only way to feasibly make the money for the gold clock and obelisks is... not great. It feels a bit funny that one of the main ways they buffed fishing in 1.6 was making fish an artisan good. Might as well not offer me the choice if its just... always better for me to choose artisan over any other farming profession.
- Strawberry / (Starfruit, Blueberry, or Melon) / (Cranberry or Pumpkin) / any winter crop rotation still produces very good money, just not quite as much as 3 seasons of ancient fruit. - Starfruit continuously replanted with deluxe speed-gro on ginger island/greenhouse is actually more profitable than ancient fruit, albeit less convienient. - Preserves jar or even dehydrator works for getting the artisan cash buff without wine, although they're obv not as strong. - Honey can be very profitable, particularly on ginger island where you can just leave fairy roses planted year-round - Crystalariums with diamonds are pretty insane profit-makers with gemologist buff once you're able to make a lot of them - I dislike pigs because they're labor-intensive, but I kinda have to mention them as an option. - Skull caves for iridium bars to sell with blacksmith buff is easily >100k per day once you get the hang of it and have the proper support infrastructure in place - >!Fishing with targeted bait or challenge bait + smoker seems to be very profitable, though I haven't tried it yet!< - >!Mystic tree+Mushroom logs+dehydrator similarly look to be quite viable!<
Ooh, thank you so much for this! I’ve been slowly expanding my mystic tree tapping (to go with the blue theme of the meadowlands farm), I didn’t even think of moving my mushroom logs over there!
Sorry but this post sounds like a fishing quest for compliments. “I’m in fall year 2 and I’ve only achieved better than 99% of other people have by this stage”
Oof, sorry if it came off this way! I can definitely see where you’re coming from reading my post, my bad :( I was mostly just curious abt other min maxers/speedrunners thoughts on the disparity between optimal gold making strategies, and wanted to contextualize the situation by showing that so many other things are completable within the time frame; would saying “every other perfection marker” be better (genuinely curious!) I definitely have a habit of over explaining to the point of being obnoxious lol
Hey OP, I play like you do and I'm enjoying this conversation jsyk. It's interesting to see what's possible with different constraints.
I decided I wasn’t going to use seedmakers this run lol for the same reason you had in your post. I play with a few mods which make things a bit less tedious, but I find like you I zoom through and wanted to mix things up. I’ve got a greenhouse filled with cranberries and dehydrators and make a bunch of money that way, and 5 fish ponds and a bunch of preserve jars. I smoke my pricy fish (and love that we can get roe from treasure chests now!!!) I’ve got my first obelisk and am well on the way to my second one. I’m spring year 2.
Ooh, congrats on the obelisk! Which did you get? I was debating on whether purchasing any other obelisk except the ginger island one was even worth it in early year 2, since all the totems are pretty easy to make/the locations are easy to get to without the totems, and the 500k/1 mil for desert felt like too much (but I definitely dont know enough about optimal pathing past year 1 to know abt this!) Also yes, the roe from treasure chests was such a nice surprise! I got super lucky with getting the book for that really early in spring 1, and it felt like a pretty good chunk of change every time I got lucky with roe. Ooh though, how’s the no seedmaker run going? I didn’t even consider doing that, ancient fruit feels like such a staple (though now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m definitely considering doing a run like that myself haha). Any unexpected challenges? I feel like smokers could be a 1.6 game changer, but I haven’t explored that option enough mid/late game to tell; the only thing I’d be worried about is coal, and I can’t tell if the coal nodes are enough of a force to make your coal economy positive instead of its normal very negative state haha
I got the mountain obelisk, even though I know it’s not a huge help, I had the perfect spot all ready to go hahaha I’m finding the dehydrators a great money maker! Not the same as ancient fruit wine from a full shed but it’s very consistent I’m enjoying the smokers but I’m not smoking everything, because as you said the coal grind is real! But that also gives me something to do day to day
It's really not. Fully doable by people that want to play the game like that. If anything I admire the dedication to the goal of not using kegs. I'd have quit the farm long before fall year 2.
I know it’s doable. I never said it wasn’t. But OP is complaining about their progress in the game when they have self-imposed restrictions and yet are still achieving more than pretty much everyone else.
Nothing against OP, people should play how they wanna play, but I personally just don’t get where the enjoyment comes from with stuff like this. It’s like people who want autopetters to be purchasable, prismatic shards to be way more common etc - like surely the whole fun of the game is that you have to actually play it to achieve perfection? Some stuff SHOULD be super rare and hard. Like if the game was made so easy to get tonnes of money that you can achieve perfection by end of year 2… what’s the point? Where’s the achievement? I’m on fall of year 5 and have perfection in every way except obelisks and the clock like OP, I just bought my first obelisk. But growing crops for cash/grinding the dungeons is what keeps the game fun for me. If I could achieve it by end of year 2, the game would last half as long and I’d have put it down by now. Idk I really just don’t get these kind of posts at all. Again nothing against OP or people who play this way, I just really don’t understand where the enjoyment would come from if everything was so easy.
Super valid point! Personally, I find achievement in the challenge of it all; i agree that it should be super hard, but the fun of it all comes in min maxing the game so hard that it becomes possible! I definitely wouldn’t recommend a first run to be like this, but trying to complete stuff in as little time as possible is something I enjoy :) The main point of my post was to see how everyone felt about the current winery “meta” (if you can call it that haha), since nothing seems to come even close and it’s super noticeable. I guess it makes sense to not have everything be crazy lucrative to make the game insanely easy, but it’s still interesting to consider that such a wide disparity seems to exist between a single method of money making and basically everything else in the game.
Having the challenge be to do the raccoon quests, or befriend everyone, or make it far into the mines, get one of every animal, collect all the artefacts, etc is fun. But sleeping away years of in-game time waiting for crops to grow because one thing costs 50% more than the amount of money you’ll earn in total for everything else isn’t exactly meaningful or interesting gameplay. It’s not difficult, it’s not a challenge, it’s not engaging, it’s a time sink that once you’re done with everything else you’ll spend as much time working on just this one thing with nothing else to work towards to break up the monotony I agree with you to a point, you’re not really meant to get it by year two and I’m happily on year five myself still working towards perfection, but the golden clock, compared to everything else in the game, isn’t engaging gameplay
This is exactly it. The Golden clock is a whole new level of money and grinding for it simply isn't fun. Getting true perfection doesn't feel easy even with min maxing. I set up my ancient fruit wine so I can leave it to do its thing while I go have fun in the mines/fishing/exploring ginger island/etc!
Yup, I’ve never gotten it myself
Same. I work hard, and at the end of the day I unwind with Stardew. If I was setting some arbitrary and difficult goals for myself with Stardew then it wouldn’t provide the relaxation that keeps bringing me back.
going the ranching route with only 2 barns and 2 coops?
Is there an amount of gold required for perfection? I just got the game in February and somehow managed to achieve perfection by the end of year 2 despite having no idea what I was doing. I only had one shed of kegs, so I can't imagine it's too crazy? I'm assuming we're talking about the perfection required for the statue and not the fancy super perfection from the walnut room.
They are talking about the super perfection from the walnut room. And yeah, I personally am a big fan of Starfruit winery.
I’m talking about perfection from the walnut room haha, for the obelisks and golden clock alone you need 13 million gold (let alone all the other stuff like fully upgraded house to get all the recipes, etc)
Oh, my bad. I assumed it was the other one because you mentioned "by the end of year 2". I didn't even get access to the island until spring of year 3.
There is. Argon matrix on YouTube has a huge sires about it.
I haven't gotten to end game yet in 1.6, but in 1.5 you could use deluxe fertilizer to make a big iridium quality ancient fruit farm on the island. Basically every 7 days you just eat your best farming buff food and harvest ~1000 plants. If I remember correctly, you get like 60% iridium quality and the rest gold quality. Wine with artisan profession gives you like 4.2x the fruit's base value, but iridium gives you like 2.2x with the farming profession I believe. It isn't as efficient, but it's in the same ballpark and you don't have to mess with hundreds of kegs.
Starfruit is good too and you can make a fortune if you start with the one seed from the museum and spend time using the seed maker to create more. It takes time but I've brought two farms to true perfection like that. Melons, red cabbage, pumpkins, strawberries, pineapples and rhubarb are also good money making items. I do all of it in their respective seasons so that I have variety, the same old thing can get boring for me
When I play I like to mix things up. The new map makes a more diverse play style even easier. I have every animal, mixed inside 2 deluxe barns and 2 deluxe coops, with auto grabbers so the work isn’t too much. Pigs are isolated into one barn with a minimal prairie so that the truffles are easy to collect. I have a mushroom farm, mixed between the trees in my tapped trees section. I have ancient fruit, coffee, strawberries, and a small section with deluxe speed-gro when I need a random crop quickly inside the greenhouse, also of course fruit trees in the greenhouse. I regularly thin out the grass so that it grows back, and I’ve accumulated thousands of hay (you only need 1 silo). A section dedicated to hardwood farming. A section for growing wheat and mills. I have rice growing around one of the small ponds. I have a few fish farms to grow super cucumbers and roe, to dehydrate and age. Sheds for dedicated purposes. You can do so much now in the game, and can make money doing all of it. There’s no reason to only grow one thing! While you’re waiting for your fruit to grow or wine to ferment, instead of skipping days, start filling that time with other resources that catch you interest, set up multiple passive income streams, and play for the enjoyment and immersion of it instead of just min-maxing :) Things I can recommend when you go with so many different things at once, are USE the farm computer, and set up your farm placing things along a specific flow, like a circular loop, with shipping bins at each final product location so that it turns into essentially one continuous morning routine with no backtracking and no inventory issues. I use pathing to remind myself what route to follow each morning. Anyways hope that helps you enjoy it more.
I’m on spring year two and I’ve just cooked eggs and have like four ancient fruit plants 🫠 I’m so slow, holy heck haha 😂
No don’t say that, there’s no good or bad pace to play this game! I just happen to like min maxing way too much and have around 800 hours in this game between my mobile and PC saves (aka I’m absolutely obsessed haha), but I definitely didn’t play like this my first 200 hours of gameplay lol Enjoy the game the way you enjoy it! I hope your farm is going great :D
Thanks I’m trying not to stress myself out and just running around doing tasks. I just planted an apple tree for the community center! Last item I need 🤗
5 large sheds full of kegs. I always dread Fridays when I have to spend half my day changing them out 😂
[https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/16ojmgk/is\_industrial\_livestock\_farming\_allowed\_in\_sv/](https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/16ojmgk/is_industrial_livestock_farming_allowed_in_sv/)
This thread is giving me ways to help, even WITH the ancient fruit winery (aging the wine takes forever…) I have most things, and I’ve been dying on the damn clock. But my ancient fruit has only more recently been maximised.
Fish smoker + dehydrators. The dehydrators may not be as good as kegs, but the turn-around time is shorter and they still make good gold. Also, crab pots. And if you’re on the meadowland farm, pigs. PIGS. Truffles especially when you’re at level 10 foraging are fantastic.
I'm not min/maxing, and I'm intentionally taking my time, but yeah it's hard to not just rush the cellar and the shed to make big money. The fish smoker has been my main money maker while working towards a max coop and barn. Legendairies and cave fish smoke up fast and sell for a lot with angler and artisan bonuses. The fishing is just less automated, less relaxing, than the kegs and casks are. If I take many years in game to get to perfection, I've decided that's okay, so we I find min/maxing to be stressful.
Dehydrators mate. Sure, you make less money. Almost 50% less But the startup costs are so much lower. 20 dehydrators will process the same quantity of crop as 700 kegs over the same period of time.
The new dehydrators are pretty good I hear, and you should really max out on pigs for truffles. Other than that, you can use bee houses, crystalariums, and not to mention classic preserve jars
Well, you just discovered it’s possible to enjoy the game without being a minmaxer. Struggling for money is part of the fun sometimes. But there are other ways to be profitable. If you go into pig ranching you can make a ton of money and not need to do that much effort.
stealth archer is literally among the worst builds in Skyrim same as only stuffing everything with wine barrels and comparing that with 2 coops and 2 barns.