Stardew Valley

Blueberries were nice for the cash injection but I think The Plan for year 3 is going to be using all of my available farming space for starfruit. If I can save up enough I can probably get at least 2 cycles of 500 done. 1,000 stars produced into wine would be a few million gold.

Once I get my first million in gold, I have very little reason to care about moar moneyz. At that point I want to start thinking about friendstars.

In a related note, there's a mod that changes the male bachelors into female.

Have Fun.

1.1 going live Monday, October 3rd.

edited 30th Sep '16 9:48:08 AM by tclittle

Dammit, I had stuff to do. Now I have to reinstall it and whatnot.

Wait, Marrying Emily sounds like a bad idea.

FINALLY. I mean, it's almost completely useless compared to Just Buy Your Damn Wheat Flour Already, and nobody cares because now we can make our own wheat flour for cooking.

Casks are looking like a cool vanity item, which we need more of. They don't look like they could possibly make up for the cost of buying the cellar in the first place, but they're not supposed to - they're supposed to produce iridium star starfruit wine.

Nothing new will affect game balance any - this is good.

edited 30th Sep '16 8:59:30 PM by Ramidel

I'm guessing the creator doesn't care about balance, just what seems cool.

Now if only he could replace kegs with a fully functioning brewery.

No, but he seems to be avoiding anything more profitable than the current breakpoints and I assume that's intentional.

Does anyone here use mods? I just started trying to use them, but can't make them work. Did they break with the update?

&3 Cheese ages way faster than Wine though. Somebody will eventaully do the math on that one I think...

150g a week per cask, counting Artisan.

Starwine is 400g a week a cask. So, 250 cask-weeks for a cellar to make a profit (not counting the price of cask wood), starting in late Summer Y2, each starwine aging for eight weeks.

It doesn't fit well into my Y2 business plan very well because I'm unlikely to have the money - giant fields of starfruit are expensive.

Might have been useful in Winter Y1, though - aging my pale ale would have been profitable when nothing else was going on. But that would have been kinda hard to scrape the cash together for.

edited 7th Oct '16 9:00:39 PM by Ramidel

So my (RL) girlfriend threatened me not to buy a Joja membership. She compared it to a Deal with the Devil and Undertale's Genocide Run.

Isn't it just another way to achieve repairs? Just exchanging the fetch quest with cold hard cash?

Also does it always rain on Day 3 Spring?

edited 11th Oct '16 7:14:56 AM by Malco

No, that's random.

And theoretically, Joja Corp Community Development is just another way to revitalize the community - but you're doing it with the help of a big corporation and destroying an old community center that nobody cared about before you came along to put up a warehouse that will actually be used, And That's Terrible. You're supposed to revitalize Stardew Valley the natural way by farming, fishing, foraging, and fighting! You're supposed to support a store that's closed on Wednesdays and after five o'clock because it's local!

More seriously, it's really hard to do an anti-capitalist message in a business sim, and the most important part of your evaluation is making truckloads of gold. The reason you shouldn't go Joja kiiinda boils down to "because your grandpa don't like it." But Grandpa's old school.

I dunno, 100% of my 3 restarts and all of the lets players I watched have it rain on Day 3 for some reason. Probably a massive coincidence thanks to my low sample size.

Well I agree that Capitalism is not inherently bad.

Soon enough there's a convincing cutscene where their representative is jerkish, I guess I have no reason to support his company for now unless there's onscreen nice Joja people, but if the dev is going all in with the anti-capitalist message, then I doubt there will be one.

I wanna see what it's like though, maybe someday I will get around to the Dark Side playthrough.

Plus I'm actually enjoying the fetch quest so far.

So update, I started on a Forest farm, then being unsatisfied and figured out I liked fishing, I swapped to a River farm. It still rained on day 3. Now it's spring day 21 and I've upgraded backpack, pickaxe and water can.

I'm not sure if I'm doing well. Is there a guide that shows how much my net worth should ideally be at various points of the game?

I keep ignoring the coop but I guess I should focus on that next after I upgrade my axe.

edited 12th Oct '16 9:32:12 PM by Malco

My benchmarks (note: non-Joja run assumed):

1 Summer Y1: 10,000G cash-on-hand, Copper Axe, Pick, and Watering Can.

1 Fall Y1: 20kG cash-on-hand is nice, but not the true benchmark (I should have it, certainly, and more, but it's not what's important). I want Farming 9 (10 is better) and at least six active kegs.

1 Spring Y2: My tools must be at least gold, and hopefully iridium. 24 kegs, up to six of which may be jars (but as few as possible).

1 Summer Y2: 150kG cash on hand, and...

13 Summer Y2: 36 kegs, up to six of which may be jars.

Exactly how I plan to use this may be left as an exercise for the reader.

Regarding the coop, I normally start on animals in Spring Y2, so don't worry if you've left yours kinda fallow.

edited 12th Oct '16 11:23:39 PM by Ramidel

You mean Y2 for the last 3?

Well I guess I'm way behind on having 10k cash on hand by the first day of summer, but I'm on my way to have three upgraded tools and my net worth/earnings will probably pass 10k in a few days.

Now I know why I like this game... it's because it feels like Civilization. Optimization, snowballing and all that crap...

edited 12th Oct '16 11:24:08 PM by Malco

Fixed, thanks.

Anyway, don't sweat it if you don't get it perfect - the 150k benchmark for Summer Y2 is the one I consider vital, but that's only if you want to rush for the million by the time Grandpa evaluates you.

And yep - it's all about the many layers and levels of croptimization, especially in the midgame.

edited 12th Oct '16 11:38:26 PM by Ramidel

I think this is the point in the conversation where I'm just going "f you grampa can't I just relax and farm to my hearts content"...

At least he caused my player character to resign from Joja.

And I think my fishing hobby (did I say I love Stardew's fishing) is killing my profits.

edited 13th Oct '16 2:06:15 AM by Malco

On my second run, a Joja run. Katrin shall teach those corporatist bastards how it's really done! (Did get the greenhouse up and running by Fall, and am mass-producing Quality Sprinklers, so there's that.)

'Twas on my previous run that I learned that cooking food actually subtracts value in most cases. Whose idea was that?

A: Cooked goods aren't usually meant to be for sale/cooking isn't supposed to be an income source, but a source of energy food. B: Because usually the items to be cooked have stars, which are lost when processing. C: Cooking goods are horribly overpriced, and rice and vinegar can't be sourced on your farm.

On the plus side, you can make sashimi out of cheap pot-fish and usually make money on that, assuming you're not using said cheap fish for fertilizer.

Blackberry Cobbler is also uniquely profitable, especially if you have a mill.

I'm making sashimi to bribe Sebastian with...

So a question: I picked bats for the cave, and I got nothing so far. Should I regret it or something? Even restart the game?

edited 19th Oct '16 5:53:16 AM by Malco

I understand it always takes some time for the cave to spit out shrooms or fruit—two or three days between harvests. It's not crucial, though, really just a nice supplementary bonus.

I typically go with mushrooms, though I can see fruits being very useful if you're going the Community Center route—earlier bundle completion. It does mean you're potentially missing out on chantarelles and morels, though.

I got my chantrelles from the secret woods in the fall though...

I was worried about my choice of bats because it was WEEKS before I saw a single fruit and it was the relatively trash Salmonberry too...

Also my Pomegranate tree spitting out one fruit a day, is that the expected output?

Yup. Trees drop fruit at a rate of one per day, but on average it'll take something like two years for them to recoup the cost of the sapling (assuming you don't turn the fruit into alcohol or jelly, which will speed things up).

Unless you greenhouse them. The latest patch lets you plant trees in the greenhouse outside the patch of soil, which makes them immensely more profitable since they'll be producing the whole year round.