Hmm, that's like someone who mines nonstop asking if ores should be nerfed or someone who fishes for 20 hours in the rain asking if catfish should be nerfed.
Because you chose to go around and gather 460 or 600 (!!) salmonberries doesn't mean they're op. It simply means you gathered a lot for those 4 days. I'm pretty sure most players, once they get a better grasp of the mechanics of the game, gather only what they need or want and don't go so overboard. Once upon a time, I too went around for 4 days trying to find every salmonberry bush. Most I got was maybe 200. Nowadays, I barely get 30-40 and use mainly for gifting. There's much better free food out there. Wait till you discover cactus and the art of growing them indoors.
Mmmkay, gonna say a few things, then I'mma gonna drop it.
Your whole post came off as very condescending to someone who has been doing Stardew Valley and optimizations thereof since long before this forum was created (back on the Chucklefish forums). He's got well over a thousand hours into the game, just as I have, and has been working on bringing optimized strategies for *years* now. He's quite well known within the community, and on the Discord, so I'm quite surprised that someone as knowledgeable on this topic as you claim to be hasn't come across him as a source before. I know he's been instrumental in making several of my guides.
Part of the problem here, I feel, is a lack of understanding about where he is coming from, given your rebuttal. So please, permit me to clarify.
First off, when he specified his yield over four days, there's a reason for that. You see, he's referencing a fairly well known strategy of upgrading your pick straight up to steel after Salmonberry Season starts, doing the copper and steel upgrades back-to-back, giving you four days in which you cannot go mining due to lack of pickaxe. And so generally, for an optimized play, you want something relevant you can do during those four days, and a common strategy is to gather salmonberries so you can more quickly dive the mines to get the gold you need for your sprinklers before the end of the third week, and also have the stamina you need to clear-cut the forest to get your Foraging skill up to the point where you have Tree Fertilizer recipe so that you can get your Oak Stand down before the end of Spring and start building 30 Kegs per week to build your processing infrastructure needed to hit a million before the end of your first Summer.
His point, which has at least some validity, is that the Salmonberries are a bit *too* good for this use. It enables you to get *hundreds* of berries while waiting for the pickaxe to finish, which enables you to dive 15-20 levels per day pretty reliably, plus also enables you to clear cut the forest with all the berries to regain stamina for grinding Forage. And enables you to do so for the cost of four day's worth of work. And his point is that to get an equivalent amount of stamina gains from Salad, you'd need to spend over 20k on them, which is maybe possible with Fishing over four days, but just barely.
Also, 400+ berries? That's not 'overboard', which you should know if you are as expert as you claim. There's always something to dump energy into that will be useful. Mining gold for more sprinklers, chopping trees and stumps for more Foraging xp. You can run just fine on 30-40, that generally implies you aren't spending enough energy on enough things in your first spring, and are going into summer in a sub-optimal position, but without actually seeing your strategies, I wouldn't know for certain.
Your comments about cactus is entirely irrelevant because by the time you unlock the Oasis, a player using this strategy has far better ways of getting food (cheese!), because you've already got dozens of sprinklers and are more interested in purchasing hundreds of Starfruit to go with the Deluxe Speed Gro to clear a million by the end of the first Summer. We're specifically talking Week 3 and 4 of your first Spring, and getting yourself established. Also... 'the art of growing them inside' is generally considered to be a trap, because you can't use sprinklers indoors. You're wasting energy and time to manually water everything you are growing in a pot indoors.
Your rebuttal post to the other individual confirmed you aren't aware of what is being discussed, because you reference the completely and entirely useless Blackberries, which grow in the Fall, by which point it isn't worth your time to collect them for a mere 50k-100kg over a few days, because by then you've already got your Greenhouse up and running producing more than that per week. You also assume he's playing with no sprinklers, which is just a challenge for himself for this round, and not particularly applicable in general. And furthermore assuming that he does no fishing, which is also false. His comments were exclusively about Spring 14-17. By then, he's usually already got Fishing 10 from fishing in the first half of the month, so he doesn't need to grind fishing anymore, it's strictly a comparison of 'do I get more advantage out of foraging Salmonberries or fishing during these four days'. And when the answer came out to be, overwhelmingly, Salmonberries... that's when he was wondering if it should be nerfed... because if there's something even more advantageous than fishing in the middle of spring... that's kind of a high bar it's passing.
Your own critique indicates that you are far less knowledgeable about general optimized strategy than you claim, your 'advise' is misguided at best, and your 'correction' simply indicates that you are unfamiliar with well known and documented energy management strategies, which makes your condescending tone of voice and air of superiority all the more... misplaced.
I would strongly advise in the future, as a general rule of thumb, that you refrain from using 'negging' as an attempt to establish yourself within a community. It typically never ends well. Especially not when you chose your targets as poorly as you just did.
Now then, how about we return to the discussion at hand, this time in a more civil manner, hmm? I'm honestly curious to see if you've managed to do something with Cactus grown indoors that I may have missed. I'm always curious about new strategies, because one can *always* improve, no matter how much time you've put into the game. I could never get anywhere substantial with it, if for no other reason than space and energy and time considerations, to grow a worthwhile number of them.
After Salmonberries, I generally find the most valuable food available is Cheese. A Deluxe Barn with 12 cows produces 12 cheese per day with a half dozen or so cheese presses. You can almost completely automate it with the auto-grabber, just pull from the auto-grabber, and slide along the bottom row in the barn to fill and collect the results. Many of the results will be gold-star cheese without needing any aging at all, which gives an amazing amount of energy and health, and can easily get you down to level 100 in the Skull Caves, even if you do it the long way.
As a general 'back of napkin math' sort of thing, let's assume that all cheese is of normal quality (which won't be the case, in my experience around three quarters of milk produced from five-star cows will be Large Milk which will produce gold-star cheese, but let's massively lowball for consistency's sake), you get 12 cheese per day. At 56H/125E per each, that's a daily yield of 300H/1500E *per day*. Without expending any energy and minimal time per day to do so.
Now let's look at Cactus. It takes 12 days to fully grow, let's just go ahead and ignore that since we're talking long-term yields anyway, refresh time is 3 days on Cactus Fruit. Each Cactus Fruit yields 33H/75E. So, 1500/75 is 20, meaning 20 Cactus fruit will produce every three days. So we actually need to triple that, so 60 cactus fruit will generally be equivalent in energy yields to 12 cows. Now, the advantage here is that you can do 60 Cactus in a basic Shed, which is far less expensive to build than a Deluxe Barn, and also has a smaller footprint. Which is a bonus. However, on the debit side is the energy expenditures in maintaining, since they can't be watered with sprinklers. So you're spending energy each day just in watering your cacti, plus spending more time per day watering them, so the opportunity cost is substantially higher. Not only that, but it means that the only way to reduce the energy expenditures would be to upgrade your Watering Can, which is generally regarded as a sucker's bet, since everything should be under Sprinklers by Summer 1 at the latest, and the only time you may need to ever touch a watering can again for the rest of your game might be on the first day of a month if you didn't grow something the previous season that was still in the ground on the last day. It also means more energy spent refilling the watering can. Since it would be more difficult to calculate this steady energy drain than I want to do with this particular post, I'm going to waive it for now, but just keep in mind that just as we're lowballing the cheese, we're also highballing the cactus in this back-of-the-napkin comparison.
But if you think you can beat those results with cacti... I'm very much interested. It could lead to entirely new strategies being developed, which is just good for the community as a whole. I'm also curious as to what you feel are optimal strategies, because it feels like we're on two different pages here, and I'm missing something. So please, share with the class!
