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[FilthyGorilla]

Yes, but I don't have 500 sap. :D I've just breached 300, but it's Summer in a couple of days, so that's about to disappear into Fertilizer.

Honestly, I never bother to ever use quality boosting fertilizer.
you could just lay off for a while or something and hold on to it.
What are you also fertilizing? Starfruit? Melons?

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Honestly, I never bother to ever use quality boosting fertilizer.
you could just lay off for a while or something and hold on to it.
What are you also fertilizing? Starfruit? Melons?

It is useful in getting the quality crops bundle done efficiently, especially if you've neglected your Farming skill in favor of leaning on Fishing early Spring. So my bet, given Summer is coming, would be Corn and Melons to get the bundle over with earlier.

 

[Hill Myna]

Honestly, I never bother to ever use quality boosting fertilizer.
you could just lay off for a while or something and hold on to it.
What are you also fertilizing? Starfruit? Melons?

It is useful in getting the quality crops bundle done efficiently, especially if you've neglected your Farming skill in favor of leaning on Fishing early Spring. So my bet, given Summer is coming, would be Corn and Melons to get the bundle over with earlier.

You're right in that I'm fertilising Melons, because my remixed Quality Crops Bundle requires 3 out of either gold-star Cauliflower, Melons, Blueberries, or Pumpkins.

I don't particularly like planting lots of Cauliflower, so that was off the chart, but now that I'm farming level 7 (just started Summer), the 9 Melon Seeds that Gunther gives + the 30 that I bought should be enough, Blueberries are easy peasy, and Pumpkins follow the same reckoning as Melons.

And had I remembered, I'd have put fertiliser on my 90 Hops and 54 Blueberries, but I forgot until it was 1:00am.

But in Spring? I was fertilising basically everything. It's totally worth it, I ended up with more Gold and Silver crops than not.

It also provides a nice division line between what I should process/keep (normal), what I should sell (silver), and what I should keep for gifting (gold).

But I never thought about NOT fertilising crops. Thanks for providing an alternate perspective!

 

[FilthyGorilla]

You're right in that I'm fertilising Melons, because my remixed Quality Crops Bundle requires 3 out of either gold-star Cauliflower, Melons, Blueberries, or Pumpkins.

I don't particularly like planting lots of Cauliflower, so that was off the chart, but now that I'm farming level 7 (just started Summer), the 9 Melon Seeds that Gunther gives + the 30 that I bought should be enough, Blueberries are easy peasy, and Pumpkins follow the same reckoning as Melons.

And had I remembered, I'd have put fertiliser on my 90 Hops and 54 Blueberries, but I forgot until it was 1:00am.

But in Spring? I was fertilising basically everything. It's totally worth it, I ended up with more Gold and Silver crops than not.

It also provides a nice division line between what I should process/keep (normal), what I should sell (silver), and what I should keep for gifting (gold).

But I never thought about NOT fertilising crops. Thanks for providing an alternate perspective!

Yeah, in spring I only plant crops for the farming xp so I can mass craft quality sprinklers in summer.
I think I messed up on my latest farm though and will have to plant too many crops.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You're right in that I'm fertilising Melons, because my remixed Quality Crops Bundle requires 3 out of either gold-star Cauliflower, Melons, Blueberries, or Pumpkins.

I don't particularly like planting lots of Cauliflower, so that was off the chart, but now that I'm farming level 7 (just started Summer), the 9 Melon Seeds that Gunther gives + the 30 that I bought should be enough, Blueberries are easy peasy, and Pumpkins follow the same reckoning as Melons.

And had I remembered, I'd have put fertiliser on my 90 Hops and 54 Blueberries, but I forgot until it was 1:00am.

But in Spring? I was fertilising basically everything. It's totally worth it, I ended up with more Gold and Silver crops than not.

It also provides a nice division line between what I should process/keep (normal), what I should sell (silver), and what I should keep for gifting (gold).

But I never thought about NOT fertilising crops. Thanks for providing an alternate perspective!

There's no real benefit to fertilizing Hops, you're just going to turn them all into Pale Ale anyway, which is going to be a flat sale price regardless of quality of hops used to produce it. Blueberries also don't benefit that much, they produce so many crops that you're going to get your gold-stars trivially.

There's a cute trick with Blueberries if you want to increase your profits without completely going HAM on preserves jars: You can get, on average, two blueberry seeds from a blueberry when run through a Seed Maker, which is a nice increase in yield (not the 300% that preserves jars do, though), and as an additional benefit if you run enough of them through seed makers you can get that 0.5% chance of an Ancient Seed (the kind you can plant, not the artifact) from it to get your late-game economy a head start.

 

[hexnessie]

There's no real benefit to fertilizing Hops, you're just going to turn them all into Pale Ale anyway

Not necessarily. I use the early gold Hops as Skull Mine food - they restore a lot of health and energy in one bite. And fertilizer is cheap to make, so why not.

It's a cheaper approach than using up your early Cheese as food.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

Not necessarily. I use the early gold Hops as Skull Mine food - they restore a lot of health and energy in one bite. And fertilizer is cheap to make, so why not.

It's a cheaper approach than using up your early Cheese as food.

Fertilizer only works for the first crop harvest though, so you only get as many fertilized crops as you have trelises.

 

[Elenna101]

Fertilizer only works for the first crop harvest though, so you only get as many fertilized crops as you have trelises.

The wiki phrases this weirdly, but that's not quite the case. Fertilizer applies to every harvest. What it actually means is that for crops like blueberries or cranberries that give more than one drop per harvest, only the first one in each harvest is affected by the fertilizer. (In fact, only the first one can have a quality at all, the rest are all normal quality.)

So, fertilizer works as expected on crops like hops that give you one hop at a time. But because blueberries give at least 3 blueberries on each harvest, only 1 of those 3 is affected by the fertilizer, the other two will always be normal quality. In fact if you have a higher farming level you can see this pretty easily, when harvesting a large field of blueberries you get a much higher percentage of normal quality than you do this other crops, because 2/3 of them are guaranteed normal quality.

TL;DR if you have a limited amount of fertilizer, don't use it on your blueberries or cranberries.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Not necessarily. I use the early gold Hops as Skull Mine food - they restore a lot of health and energy in one bite. And fertilizer is cheap to make, so why not.

It's a cheaper approach than using up your early Cheese as food.

I like this idea a lot as Hops are a weirdly good food for Energy, but I guess needing to plant them in the right Season and then only getting 1 Season of production bothers me in early game, so I prefer the simplicity of Cheese. I'll remember to try Hops in early game one of these saves...

 

[FilthyGorilla]

The wiki phrases this weirdly, but that's not quite the case. Fertilizer applies to every harvest. What it actually means is that for crops like blueberries or cranberries that give more than one drop per harvest, only the first one in each harvest is affected by the fertilizer. (In fact, only the first one can have a quality at all, the rest are all normal quality.)

So, fertilizer works as expected on crops like hops that give you one hop at a time. But because blueberries give at least 3 blueberries on each harvest, only 1 of those 3 is affected by the fertilizer, the other two will always be normal quality. In fact if you have a higher farming level you can see this pretty easily, when harvesting a large field of blueberries you get a much higher percentage of normal quality than you do this other crops, because 2/3 of them are guaranteed normal quality.

TL;DR if you have a limited amount of fertilizer, don't use it on your blueberries or cranberries.

Ok, cool to know, I may have messed some people up tho.
I knew about the multiple crop thing but that's good to know about fertilizer, thanks.

 

[Hill Myna]

I like this idea a lot as Hops are a weirdly good food for Energy, but I guess needing to plant them in the right Season and then only getting 1 Season of production bothers me in early game, so I prefer the simplicity of Cheese. I'll remember to try Hops in early game one of these saves...

Oh, for sure they're good food! On one of my previous saves, I planted so many Hops that by the end of Summer, I had more than a stack of regular quality Hops alone. I didn't manage to process them all until Spring Year 2, so I didn't feel bad eating all the Gold-quality Hops.

The wiki phrases this weirdly, but that's not quite the case. Fertilizer applies to every harvest. What it actually means is that for crops like blueberries or cranberries that give more than one drop per harvest, only the first one in each harvest is affected by the fertilizer. (In fact, only the first one can have a quality at all, the rest are all normal quality.)

So, fertilizer works as expected on crops like hops that give you one hop at a time. But because blueberries give at least 3 blueberries on each harvest, only 1 of those 3 is affected by the fertilizer, the other two will always be normal quality. In fact if you have a higher farming level you can see this pretty easily, when harvesting a large field of blueberries you get a much higher percentage of normal quality than you do this other crops, because 2/3 of them are guaranteed normal quality.

TL;DR if you have a limited amount of fertilizer, don't use it on your blueberries or cranberries.

Thanks, this was a great explanation!

the kind you can plant, not the artifact

One very cool use of the (1.5 Spoiler) Deconstructer is that you can put the Ancient Seed plant in and get the artifact out. So it doesn't matter as much which one you get, which could be useful given that I don't have either at the moment!

 

[Tom]

Wow. I didn't even know about the Dresser (maybe because I have never made any clothes). Very cool.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Not necessarily. I use the early gold Hops as Skull Mine food - they restore a lot of health and energy in one bite. And fertilizer is cheap to make, so why not.

It's a cheaper approach than using up your early Cheese as food.

I disagree rather strongly. Cheese is produced almost daily from cows, processed trivially, and provides very good food values. Hops isn't bad, but by not brewing it, you're losing 420g/ea. It's FAR cheaper to eat the less expensive AND much stronger Cheese than it is hops.

 

[hexnessie]

I disagree rather strongly. Cheese is produced almost daily from cows, processed trivially, and provides very good food values. Hops isn't bad, but by not brewing it, you're losing 420g/ea. It's FAR cheaper to eat the less expensive AND much stronger Cheese than it is hops.

It's all about processing capacity. In Year 1, you are going to be growing much more hops than you can initially process, because you won't have enough kegs.

Yes, you can store it, but then you don't profit from it immediately.

On the other hand, milk will be coming in limited quantity per day, so it's easy to process all of it and sell it for immediate profit (480 g)

It's not about eating all your hops and never brewing it. It's about saving some of your overproduction (that doesn't generate immediate profit anyway) and eating it when a snake chomps your behind.

This is obviously reversed in year 2 and beyond when you have more milk than you process, and hundreds of kegs. Then you are going to eat the cheese and keg the hops.

 

[One More Day]

By far the easiest skull cavern healing food is Salad bought directly from Gus in unlimited quantities.

In terms of financial efficiency, Salad outperforms almost everything anyway, certainly including cheese once you have Artisan. It's 4.4g/HP for salad, 5.75g/HP for regular cheese, 4.78g/HP for gold cheese and an effective 11.67g/HP for any hops due to the value of pale ale

Salad requires no effort other than a one off trip to Gus to buy unlimited quantities.

Salad has zero infrastructure costs, whereas building and populating a barn full of cows costs 61,000g, a silo, a heap of wood and stone, and all the ingredients for a dozen cheese presses. On top of that, there's either the daily time loss of going to the barn each day to chase and milk cows, or an additional 25,000g cost of an auto-collector.

Waiting to eat hops has an 11 day lead time, a daily maintenance burden due to harvesting every day, and a lost opportunity cost of 420g due to not brewing pale ale for every one eaten. Granted you're not processing everything immediately, but even if you only get as little as 30 kegs up and running by the time of your first hops harvest, your daily income from pale ale will be in excess of 6,000g per day, enough to buy almost 30 Salads every day, which is more than enough for skull runs, so there's no reason to eat hops that could be processed later when you can just buy salad with all that money you'll be raking in. And if you're not processing hops at all, there's no point in even growing them when you'd be better off spamming blueberries.

 

[hexnessie]

By far the easiest skull cavern healing food is Salad bought directly from Gus in unlimited quantities.

Yes, later on that's absolutely true, but once again - the question in the thread was "why use 2 sap to fertilize hops" in Year 1.

Sure, eventually you are going to be buying all the salad you want, but it's really a good bet to just dump some sap on the ground before you put in your first-ever trellis of hops - any gold quality ones will be an extra bonus you can eat or not, if you don't need it - nothing's wasted.

I'm not arguing to switch to hops long term. I'm saying "if you have any gold hops year 1 and don't know what to do with it, it makes a nice food".

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It's all about processing capacity. In Year 1, you are going to be growing much more hops than you can initially process, because you won't have enough kegs.

Yes, you can store it, but then you don't profit from it immediately.

On the other hand, milk will be coming in limited quantity per day, so it's easy to process all of it and sell it for immediate profit (480 g)

It's not about eating all your hops and never brewing it. It's about saving some of your overproduction (that doesn't generate immediate profit anyway) and eating it when a snake chomps your behind.

This is obviously reversed in year 2 and beyond when you have more milk than you process, and hundreds of kegs. Then you are going to eat the cheese and keg the hops.

Perhaps this is a difference in playstyle...

By the beginning of my first summer, the 30 oak tree stand is producing 30 oak resin per week, netting me 30 kegs per week production. By the time the Hops are ready, I've got minimum 60 kegs in a shed, and that number only grows limited only by my oak resin. So I don't really have a problem processing my hops in my first summer, making it ill advised to eat them.

Second year onward, I'm not planting hops, I'm planting Ancient Fruit. By propogating in my greenhouse through seed makers over fall and winter, I can generally get a couple hundred out by year two, on DSG to get an extra harvest in by the end of Spring. All of which get brewed weekly.

 

[Quirinea]

Unrelated but speaking of chests, if you're doing extensive trips to the mines early on in the game, as in within the first few days, put a chest on the main entrance floor to the mines so that when your inventory space is limited but full after five levels, you can just go up, drop off your stuff and go right back down. Saves a lot of time.

Yeah. The first thing to do when the mines open is to put a chest there. To dump things from mining and to keep things that are not needed elsewhere. I usually have only the small backpack at that point, and keeping the sword there (instead of carrying it around) is a must. Later that is the spot to store bombs, dwarf scrolls (to give as presents to the dwarf), and mining food.

 

[Quirinea]

Hmmm. What I've always been using for mining is just that "snack" (don't remember the name) that you can craft from tree seeds. Then Roots platters as soon I get the recipe and ingredients + algae soup / pale broth or just sashimi for extra energy. Cheap ingredients. Cheese? Gives a healthy amount of g.

 

[LolbitTheFox]

So.. I hate to sound like an idiot, but does anyone here play Stardew Valley? I do, and I think it’s an incredible game!! I’m on year ten!!