Not only is Stardew Valley a fantastic and relaxing experience, but it's also incredibly deep to boot. Even if you've been playing for a while, there are probably a lot of mechanics and secrets that you're not familiar with. Our guide is filled with Starfew Valley advanced tips to help you go from amateur farmer to Stardew Valley pro in no time flat.
Time is Valuable
Stardew Valley is a game that you play at your own pace. You could do a little bit every day and just enjoy your time. You could also try to min/max every single minute of your day while trying to do absolutely everything if you're incredibly precise like us.
If there's any one aspect that Stardew Valley and real life share in common, it's that there is only so much time in a day.
This philosophy is namely one of efficiency. A good example is feeding your Animals. You could plant Grass Starters, wait for them to grow, and then cut some of it down with your Scythe. Once you're more established, however, a single bottle of Truffle Oil is worth over 1,000G and you can get one per Pig nearly every day. At that point, you have to consider if it's more efficient to farm your own grass or simply buy it from Marnie's Ranch.
Keep this in mind for all things in the game. Heck, apply it to your own life as well. Is this thing that you're going to do worth spending time on as opposed to spending money?
Scheduled Planning
One of the very first points in our tips for beginners was to plan your day to some degree. Have an idea of what's going on and go with the flow. This tip is a natural extension if you're the sort of person who really likes to plan things out.
Stardew Valley is a game of numbers. When you plant crops, you'll know when they'll grow. You'll know how much money you'll make by selling them at the minimum. You'll know when and where people are by simply looking them up on the official Wiki. There are very few actual unknown uncertainties in Stardew Valley.
To further implement this philosophy, the most extreme way would be planning every single point of every single day. We never go that far ourselves, but we can understand why some people might want to. There are more sensible things that would be worthwhile to consider doing.
How many plots of tilled land do you have on your farm? What are you going to plant there next season? What is it going to cost you to plant those things? When you've really established yourself, money won't be much of a concern, but you're going to be hurting for funds in the early game and you have to plan carefully.
For example, you're going to plant 34,000G worth of seeds this coming fall. You have 50,000G. How can you spend that remaining 16,000G to best maximize your earnings? You could buy a Pig, but it takes time for them to grow up, and they don't produce anything in Winter, so it might be best to wait. You could grab a couple of cheaper Animals instead, but buying multiple less profitable animals means that you'll have to feed them more.
We've also found that establishing some sort of weekly routine was useful. We'd always take care of giving gifts to Villagers on the first two days of the week if we could manage to get it out of the way or adjust days depending on what's going on. If it's raining and a particular fish is needed to finish off the Community Center, we will make that a top priority. If we don't have any crops to harvest, we'll take care of animals and either forage in the wilds or delve into The Mines.
Know what it is you'd generally like to accomplish, and think about the best way you can accomplish that within the game's mechanics. If this all sounds like too much work to you—don't do it. Get enjoyment out of planning things out and trying to maximize your days. Do what's the most enjoyable for you!
Passing Out Can Be Costly
Passing out happens once the clock strikes 2:00 AM. You'll collapse where you're standing, be taken home in the night, and receive a bill for 1,000G from Joja Corporation for the service of returning you to your home. 1,000G is a lot of money in the first few seasons.
Let's assume you're much more established, you have a fully upgraded barn filled with 12 pigs and Oil Makers. When you pull in over 12,000G in Truffle Oil for what amounts to a few seconds of work, 1,000G becomes negligible change.
If you're hundreds of layers deep into the Skull Cavern, the ore there is much better, and it's difficult to get that low on funds. It'll take you hours to get back home. Those hours might be better spent staying in The Mines or the wilds gathering more stuff for tomorrow. Don't worry, no matter where you pass out, you will always be returned home at the cost of 1,000G.
Strategically passing out is barely an incidental cost when you have a Greenhouse full of Ancient Fruit and a bunch of Kegs producing Ancient Fruit Wine. It seems terribly imbalanced for wealthier players unless it was intended this way, and in our experience, there may be a reasonable concern that it will be rebalanced one day. Should it ever be tuned to be a percentage of your income or something of that nature, this tip will essentially boil down to the same philosophy: consider the monetary cost of passing out and whether it's more profitable to let it happen or to return home.
Ignoring Animals
Marnie would crack me over the head with a Lead Rod if she ever heard me say this but don't worry so much about caring for your Animals. The produce they give you is great, but they can never die from starvation. If you fail to feed them or fail to care for them, your worst-case scenario is that they produce nothing and you may have a drop in the quality of the product.
You might have filled up the majority of your farm with Crops and awoken to hundreds or thousands of plots of Cranberries ready to go. What's gonna make you more money: getting those Cranberries into the Shipping Box or getting a few bottles of Milk off of your Cows?
Animals do go to sleep eventually and at that point, it's nigh impossible to pet them by interacting. You can, however, still use the Milk Pail or Shears to get their produce even if they're asleep. In those situations, you'll get something for the day, and as a bonus, they won't be running all over the place making your life difficult.
Buying Over Gathering
This circles back around to the first couple of tips. Consider how much money you could make in a given amount of time. What would you lose by running down into The Mines to get something?
For instance, if we needed 20 more Solar Essences to craft an Iridium Band, how could we best go about it? We could bounce floor to floor in The Mines (using the elevator) hunting Ghosts until we had enough, but that would take all day. We could go into the Skull Cavern and blow up the ubiquitous Mummies, but then we lose 500G on the Bus ticket and have to factor in the additional transport time to get there.
Alternatively, we could stay near the Farm and just buy them from the hidden vendor in The Sewers going by the name Krobus. Most of a day to get 20 Solar Essences or 1,600G? Earning 1,600G isn't even most of an hour for us with the kind of income we have in Stardew Valley.
Apply this philosophy to all things. Is using the Seed Maker worth it for something you could easily buy from Pierre? Is it really worth it to chop down acres of grass to make Hay as opposed to buying it from Marnie? Do you want to spend most of your day chopping down trees all around the map or would it be a better use of your time and money to buy as much wood as you need from the Carpenter's Shop?
Winter Crops
Everyone has different focuses in Stardew Valley. Some people like to stick with one or two things, some people like to do a lot of one thing, and some people like to do a lot of everything.
Winter is a dead period if your main focus is Farming. You can't plant anything in the ground really, and it takes quite a while to unlock the Greenhouse properly. Multiple seasons, in fact, unless you get particularly lucky with the stock of the Travelling Merchant.
That said, there is one set of Crops you can grow in the Winter—namely Winter Seeds. You can till the land and plant them as if it were any other season and they'll grow just fine. The catch is that you can't really buy them from anywhere. You'll have to use a Seed Maker to extract the seeds from Winter Roots or craft them, so you'll be limited to just how much you can grow.
If you're really keen on farming and Winter Seeds seem like a bunch of trouble, it might be best to focus on getting the Greenhouse as soon as possible. But, it is also not a major issue if you cannot farm for the time being, since you can most definitely take that time to do other things.
Winter Redesigning
Let's assume you don't have much to do in Winter. You have a handful of Animals, the Greenhouse isn't restored yet, and you have barely any Winter Seeds. Even with the Greenhouse, Barns, and Coops, you'll still have the majority of your day to do other tasks.
You could spend some time Fishing or running around in The Mines or Skull Cavern. This is probably the best time to mine since farming takes up a lot of the day for most players and there's practically very little farming to do in Winter.
One of the best ways to use your time is to work on designing your farm. Laying down some paths, setting up grids for your Crops. and figuring out where you're going to plant Fruit Trees or even build a new barn. You don't have to worry about weeds spreading and you don't have to worry about destroying Crops if you want to completely change your layout.
We used the Stardew Valley Planner to redesign our farm. We're going to build the new Animal buildings first, move animals, and then demolish the old buildings. We'll have to tear up all of my placed tiles, Sprinklers, and—most painfully—nearly 500,000G worth of Fruit Trees that had only paid off for one season. It is comforting and nice to neatly plan out and build our Farm as we went. The redesign will be great and Winter will be the most optimal time to complete it.
Re-buying Monster Slaying Rewards
The Adventurer's Guild will give you rewards based on reaching certain milestones if you kill Monsters. For instance, killing 1,000 Slimes will get you the Slime Charmer Ring, which renders you immune to damage and their nasty slowing debuff.
You might not want to use these rewards, though. It'd be senseless to throw them away, so you may as well store them or sell them. Thankfully, you can buy your earned rewards from the Adventurer's Guild once you've unlocked them. If you have a particular item that you're not interested in using at the moment, sell it. You can always buy it back later if you really need to, and the prices aren't terribly bad.
Barn Organization
A Barn takes up a certain amount of space on your Farm. Buildings in Stardew Valley are much larger on the inside.
We're working our way towards filling our Greenhouse with Ancient Fruit that started with a single seed, and hopefully, by the end of our third Winter, we'll have a Greenhouse filled with them. The best way to make money is by putting crops into Kegs, and the profit that you can get from Ancient Fruit Wine is patently absurd, especially considering that it continues to produce fruit on the vine every seven days.
You don't have a limit on buildings in Stardew Valley. You can place them wherever you want on your farm as long as the terrain is clear, and you can build as many of them as you'd like. Using a Barn to house a whole bunch of Kegs sounds funny, but helps tackle organizing.
Coops really aren't worth it—the ratio of saved space isn't as good. But a fully upgraded Barn can have around 130 tiles where you can safely place Kegs, Preserves Jars, or really any other thing that you would want to place inside such as Crystalariums. If you're going to have a barn full of Kegs like us, it would also be helpful to place a single one on the outside. Fill that Keg last, and once it shows as ready, you'll know all the ones on the inside are good to go as well.
Zone Off Areas
A little-known mechanic of Stardew Valley is that weeds will spread. If you leave sticks, stones, and grass unattended, they will gradually spread and potentially damage portions of your Farm.
If there's no real need for a tile to be uncovered, it should probably be covered. At the bare minimum, you should establish borders around your crops to protect them.
There's also the benefit of placing tiles to prevent new junk from popping up at the start of a new season. Each new season brings a few branches, stones, and garbage to make your life just a little bit more difficult. These won't spawn where you've placed tiles down. It looks nicer than just the plain ground, too.
Area Adjustment
There was a time in the earlier days of Stardew Valley when you could place anything nearly anywhere. We're talking about putting a row of Fruit Trees smack in the middle of Pelican Town. Some levels of comical abuse of this fashion remain; a common post on /r/StardewValley is "Look at how I filled up [a particular area] with Grass Starters haha." Comedy aside, there are useful things you can do as well.
A good example is the bushes leading to the Secret Woods. Every season they'll have a bit of weeds pop up. We chose to put down some Stepping Stone Paths so the path remains steadily open, rather than having to deal with them every 28 days.
It's really difficult to say what can and can't be placed outside of your farm when a future patch may change certain requirements. Experiment for yourself, see what you can place elsewhere, and consider how it might be useful to you specifically.
Getting Big Money
A major component of Stardew Valley is unfortunately very similar to life: you need money to do things, and getting money can be a very involved thing. Some things will make you more money than others, and we go into detail about those below.
For Animals, it really doesn't get much better than Pigs. Pigs are awfully low-maintenance creatures. Pat them on the head once a day, have them in a fully upgraded Barn (which comes with a lovely time-saving autofeeder), and let them out into the Farm. They'll dig around for Truffles that are worth 500G-750G each and you can turn those Truffles into Truffle Oil worth 850G each with an Oil Maker. If you have an Oil Maker ready from the get-go, a Pig will basically pay for themselves after 16 days of adulthood and the profit margin is pretty great.
When it comes to crops, there are a few layers to consider. First, as a general rule anything put into a Preserves Jar will give you twice the base value of the crop. Anything put in a Keg will give you three times the value of the crop. Crop quality is not a factor here; a gold star crop will not always yield gold star Artisan Goods. These aren't always hard and fast rules, however.
Wheat will turn into Beer in a Keg and is worth almost 10 times the value of the base crop. Hops are even better, netting you 12 times the value with the resultant Pale Ale. There's also the dynamics of the plants to consider. Wheat can grow in four days in both Summer and Fall so you can make an awful lot of it pretty quickly. Hops are on a vine and take some time to grow to maturity, but once they reach that point they will produce plants every single day for the remainder of Summer.
When it comes down to sheer efficiency, though, nothing beats Ancient Fruit Wine. Getting an Ancient Fruit is a task unto itself that boils down to luck. You'll either find the Ancient Seed Artifact and get your first one for free from Gunther, or you'll receive one via using the Seed Maker. They can be planted in any season, although filling your Greenhouse with Ancient Fruit will be more than enough. Dedicating a Barn to Kegs will let you net 2,250G per Ancient Fruit. Even better, they re-grow every seven days.
It's nice to have a variety of items on hand for quests and gifts, but if you're really into making money, focus on the things that can get you the most bang for your buck. After all, you only have so much time in a day and only so much space to plant crops. Don't waste it!
Placing Items
Decorating your home costs money, and you likely won't have much money to spare for the first few seasons. Once you can drop 5,000G on a table without hesitating, you'll probably start visiting the Travelling Cart and Carpenter's Shop to buy some furniture for your home.
A neat feature we found out (due to this thread on /r/StardewValley) is that you can place items on tables. And it's not just one or two things—you can place most things on tables, including other tables. It's a completely silly cosmetic feature that lets you add a bit of variety to your home's decoration.
Stardew Valley is a game with a surprising amount of depth and strategy if you look at its mechanics. It's a game you can enjoy at your own pace, and if that pace includes "Let's make as much money as possible and min/max eccentrically," there's a lot of room for that, as well!
Be sure to check out our other Stardew Valley articles, such as our review on the game, or our guide on the Ginger Island mermaid puzzle.
One of my earliest memories is playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I've had a controller in my hand since I was 4 and I… More about Robert N
