1.5 Post-Completion Farm - Best Money Making Method?

[bioweapon]

So there's this Golden Chicken that lays Golden Egg. It seems very lucrative. Selling the Golden Egg at normal quality alone would net 500g. Every single day!

With auto-grabber, we just need to refill the silo. Very low maintenance, compared to either wine manufacturing or diamond farming.

If my math is correct, I need about 50 deluxe coops on the main farm to retire all Ancient Fruit crops. But to build that many coops requires 4 years+ alone. Probably need to start a new farm ...

Has anyone tried it? How does it feel like to have 600 animals on the farm?

 

[Zamiel]

Here's the math:

Stardrop Optimal Crop Calculation

Sheet1 Notes: 1) Assuming Tiller + Artisan profession. 2) Assuming that the plants are fully grown already (if they are a regenerating crop). 3) This does not account for the Jar/Keg time (e.g. Unlimited Kegs are assumed). 4) Speed-Gro will stay in the ground forever for the Island Farm / Greenh...

docs.google.com

From this data, we can see that the optimal way to make money is as follows:
1) On the island farm + greenhouse, use all Hyper Speed-Gro + Starfruit. Keg all Starfruit. (There are 792 squares available on the island farm, which gives you 272,250g per day.)
2) On your normal farm, make as many Deluxe Sheds as possible and fill them with Golden Chickens. Mayo all Golden Eggs.
3) With the remaining squares on your normal farm, fill them with Ancient Fruit. Keg all Ancient Fruit.
4) In this setup you wouldn't want any sheds on your farm, since that wastes space. Put the kegs in the desert + southern forest + bus stop, etc.

Of course, this is all very hypothetical, because the game is essentially over once you unlock Golden Chickens - there's no point to farm further gold. Consider that to unlock Golden Chickens, you already have the infrastructure in place to get 10 million for the clock. So at this point you basically have unlimited gold already, and there's nothing more expensive to buy than the golden clock, so there's no point to improve upon your existing infrastructure.

The real point of the game in patch 1.5 (from a min-max perspective, anyway) is to get the Statue of True Perfection by 1 Spring on year 3.
(You are gated behind the recipe for Shrimp Cocktail on Winter 28, and you have to sleep once after getting Perfection, so the first possible day that you can get the statue is Spring 1.)
This is actually pretty trivial, so you would also want to tack on some arbitrary secondary goal, e.g. also collect every hat in the game.
Now that I think about it, maybe a better challenge would be to get max Perfection, minus the gated recipes, on the earliest possible date in Year 2 that you can. This would allow any intelligent optimization to actually pay off.

Edit - Is it confirmed that Golden Chickens *always* make 1 Golden Egg per day?

 

[Drullo321]

Edit - Is it confirmed that Golden Chickens *always* make 1 Golden Egg per day?

That is a good question, considering that Ostriches laying one egg only every seven days. An ostrich egg is worth 10 mayonaise the same quality as the egg.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Here's the math:

Stardrop Optimal Crop Calculation

Sheet1 Notes: 1) Assuming Tiller + Artisan profession. 2) Assuming that the plants are fully grown already (if they are a regenerating crop). 3) This does not account for the Jar/Keg time (e.g. Unlimited Kegs are assumed). 4) Speed-Gro will stay in the ground forever for the Island Farm / Greenh...

docs.google.com

From this data, we can see that the optimal way to make money is as follows:
1) On the island farm + greenhouse, use all Hyper Speed-Gro + Starfruit. Keg all Starfruit. (There are 792 squares available on the island farm, which gives you 272,250g per day.)
2) On your normal farm, make as many Deluxe Sheds as possible and fill them with Golden Chickens. Mayo all Golden Eggs.
3) With the remaining squares on your normal farm, fill them with Ancient Fruit. Keg all Ancient Fruit.
4) In this setup you wouldn't want any sheds on your farm, since that wastes space. Put the kegs in the desert + southern forest + bus stop, etc.

More profitable and much less work intensive way:

1) Get Ancient Fruit
2) Propagate
3) ???
4) Weekly harvest, brew into wine, and Profit!!!

 

[bioweapon]

Edit - Is it confirmed that Golden Chickens *always* make 1 Golden Egg per day?

Can confirm, I have a Golden Chicken and she has been laying a Golden Egg every day since she's an adult.

Regarding the profitability: your sheet seems to assume that the Golden Egg is processed into Mayonnaise. Say, if I'm "lazy" and just sell it at par, and say I'm suddenly a Rancher so that it sells at 600g), the profit is halved, right? Which is around 285g per tile per day. Still not bad, considering it's virtually zero effort.

 

[bioweapon]

4) Weekly harvest, brew into wine, and Profit!!!

When you do it on a really large scale, it will become work-intensive. I currently run 8 Big Sheds of Kegs (or 1096 of them). On the day when they "mature", I have to spend around 12 in-game hours to reload them. This process is very repetitive and boring. This is the reason why I'm eagerly looking for alternatives. Golden chicken seems to be a good one.

 

[Cptldsilver]

Super late game if you were really dedicated and you wanted to maximize your profit per day the limiting factor would be how many times you could click per day. From my experience you can click (harvest, plant, hoe, plant fertilizer, collect and start equipment) anywhere from 3000 to 4000 times per day, depending on how efficient you are.

The theoretical best profit per clicks are
1. Truffles at 1500 gold/per click with botanist and gatherer. I dont know considering the unpredictable nature of truffles if you could get 3000+ clicks a day though.
2. Starfruit on ginger island at 1375 taking into account all the gathering (gathering and planting can be practically done in 1 click) and kegging.
3. Ancient fruit on the farm at 1096 taking into account all the hoeing, planting, gathering, and kegging.
4. Diamond crystalariums at 975. This method would probably net more clicks since you only have to gather and not start the equipment.

You could also fill your farm with coops/barns with autograbbers and let them run for years. You would only have to click to refill silos. If you really got one golden egg a day this could be the best method but it would require giving up ancient fruit/ truffles. So you would do max coops with golden chickens, starfruit on ginger island, and diamond crystalariums. Not sure what the optimal ratio of coops to silos would be.

 

[Zamiel]

Regarding the profitability: your sheet seems to assume that the Golden Egg is processed into Mayonnaise. Say, if I'm "lazy" and just sell it at par, and say I'm suddenly a Rancher so that it sells at 600g), the profit is halved, right?

I've updated the sheet to account for that.
Raw eggs come out to 225g per day per tile without the rancher profession, and 270g per day with the rancher profession.

In my above analysis, as others have rightly pointed out, I did not account for the amount of time spent to maintain the "thing", only looking at it through the lens of examining profitability per tile. In general, it is of course possible to grab + keg thousands of crops per day, but for practical purposes you may want to rely on easier methods.

Again, I will emphasize that min-maxing at this point of the game is ultimately pointless anyway, unless you are doing a challenge run where e.g. you need to maximize the total amount of money made by the end of the third year. These types of challenge runs are probably much less interesting than end-of-year-1 or end-of-year-2 type challenges.

 

[Zamiel]

That is a good question, considering that Ostriches laying one egg only every seven days. An ostrich egg is worth 10 mayonaise the same quality as the egg.

I also updated the spreadsheet for Ostriches.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

When you do it on a really large scale, it will become work-intensive. I currently run 8 Big Sheds of Kegs (or 1096 of them). On the day when they "mature", I have to spend around 12 in-game hours to reload them. This process is very repetitive and boring. This is the reason why I'm eagerly looking for alternatives. Golden chicken seems to be a good one.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. Ancient Fruit is far less work intensive than the method you described and linked, because you don't have to constantly replant, just harvest weekly. Sure, for your typical 800+ plot farm, it'll take pretty much the whole day. But that's still easier than trying to do it with starfruit. More profitable too, because it iterates weekly instead of three times per month (with DSG added).

Hops would theoretically be even more profitable, but would require significantly more infrastructure to support and would be a daily burden that would effectively prevent being able to play any other aspect of the game, and you'd still need to plant something in the walking lanes since hops is a trellis crop.

 

[Shart]

Your idea of making coops of golden chickens sounds fun. Harvesting 3k+ ancient fruits and then kegging them is really tedious and not fun compared to this. Might actually test it myself in my next run.

From my personal experience, statue of endless fortune is the best money maker and diamond crystalarium is the 2nd best. These two are easy to harvest (only needing to hold right click and start running). I don't like kegging because refilling the kegs are much harder than just harvesting diamonds (I tend to miss a lot of kegs when refilling it).
The downside of these two is that they are expensive, but hey when you're late game and don't know how to spend your money just buy more statues of endless fortune. The gold bars produced by these statues will also help you make more crystalariums.

Here's the math:

Stardrop Optimal Crop Calculation

Sheet1 Notes: 1) Assuming Tiller + Artisan profession. 2) Assuming that the plants are fully grown already (if they are a regenerating crop). 3) This does not account for the Jar/Keg time (e.g. Unlimited Kegs are assumed). 4) Speed-Gro will stay in the ground forever for the Island Farm / Greenh...

docs.google.com

From this data, we can see that the optimal way to make money is as follows:
1) On the island farm + greenhouse, use all Hyper Speed-Gro + Starfruit. Keg all Starfruit. (There are 792 squares available on the island farm, which gives you 272,250g per day.)
2) On your normal farm, make as many Deluxe Sheds as possible and fill them with Golden Chickens. Mayo all Golden Eggs.
3) With the remaining squares on your normal farm, fill them with Ancient Fruit. Keg all Ancient Fruit.
4) In this setup you wouldn't want any sheds on your farm, since that wastes space. Put the kegs in the desert + southern forest + bus stop, etc.

Of course, this is all very hypothetical, because the game is essentially over once you unlock Golden Chickens - there's no point to farm further gold. Consider that to unlock Golden Chickens, you already have the infrastructure in place to get 10 million for the clock. So at this point you basically have unlimited gold already, and there's nothing more expensive to buy than the golden clock, so there's no point to improve upon your existing infrastructure.

The real point of the game in patch 1.5 (from a min-max perspective, anyway) is to get the Statue of True Perfection by 1 Spring on year 3.
(You are gated behind the recipe for Shrimp Cocktail on Winter 28, and you have to sleep once after getting Perfection, so the first possible day that you can get the statue is Spring 1.)
This is actually pretty trivial, so you would also want to tack on some arbitrary secondary goal, e.g. also collect every hat in the game.
Now that I think about it, maybe a better challenge would be to get max Perfection, minus the gated recipes, on the earliest possible date in Year 2 that you can. This would allow any intelligent optimization to actually pay off.

Edit - Is it confirmed that Golden Chickens *always* make 1 Golden Egg per day?

Shouldn't you include 7days of kegging when calculating the profit/day?
I also want to add that if you have agriculturist profession, you can harvest starfruits in 7 days with hyper speed gro. You can just change profession to artisan whenever you want to sell those wines and change it back to agriculturist before replanting the starfruits again.

Super late game if you were really dedicated and you wanted to maximize your profit per day the limiting factor would be how many times you could click per day. From my experience you can click (harvest, plant, hoe, plant fertilizer, collect and start equipment) anywhere from 3000 to 4000 times per day, depending on how efficient you are.

The theoretical best profit per clicks are
1. Truffles at 1500 gold/per click with botanist and gatherer. I dont know considering the unpredictable nature of truffles if you could get 3000+ clicks a day though.
2. Starfruit on ginger island at 1375 taking into account all the gathering (gathering and planting can be practically done in 1 click) and kegging.
3. Ancient fruit on the farm at 1096 taking into account all the hoeing, planting, gathering, and kegging.
4. Diamond crystalariums at 975. This method would probably net more clicks since you only have to gather and not start the equipment.

You could also fill your farm with coops/barns with autograbbers and let them run for years. You would only have to click to refill silos. If you really got one golden egg a day this could be the best method but it would require giving up ancient fruit/ truffles. So you would do max coops with golden chickens, starfruit on ginger island, and diamond crystalariums. Not sure what the optimal ratio of coops to silos would be.

Interesting metric you use there (profite/click). Never thought of it that way, but sounds reasonable.
I never tested it myself, but I also think truffle farm is the most profitable money maker late game. But with the addition of the new golden chicken, it may change now (eggs don't depend on the weather and still producing in winter)

 

[Zamiel]

Shouldn't you include 7days of kegging when calculating the profit/day?

No, because the point of the spreadsheet is to calculate what is optimal for farmable tiles. The limited resource is farmable tiles, not kegs - you can place as many kegs as you want in the southern forest, backwoods, mountains, etc. Farmable tiles can only generate X gold per day, regardless of whether or not you keg their produce on non-farmable tiles. Conversely, non-farmable tiles can never generate gold (directly).

 

[Cptldsilver]

Your idea of making coops of golden chickens sounds fun. Harvesting 3k+ ancient fruits and then kegging them is really tedious and not fun compared to this. Might actually test it myself in my next run.

From my personal experience, statue of endless fortune is the best money maker and diamond crystalarium is the 2nd best. These two are easy to harvest (only needing to hold right click and start running). I don't like kegging because refilling the kegs are much harder than just harvesting diamonds (I tend to miss a lot of kegs when refilling it).
The downside of these two is that they are expensive, but hey when you're late game and don't know how to spend your money just buy more statues of endless fortune. The gold bars produced by these statues will also help you make more crystalariums.


Shouldn't you include 7days of kegging when calculating the profit/day?
I also want to add that if you have agriculturist profession, you can harvest starfruits in 7 days with hyper speed gro. You can just change profession to artisan whenever you want to sell those wines and change it back to agriculturist before replanting the starfruits again.


Interesting metric you use there (profite/click). Never thought of it that way, but sounds reasonable.
I never tested it myself, but I also think truffle farm is the most profitable money maker late game. But with the addition of the new golden chicken, it may change now (eggs don't depend on the weather and still producing in winter)

I was thinking more about it, if you had as much time as you wanted to set it up you could actually do some crazy things with coops. Since you don't actually need to go into a coop for it to produce you can fit almost 200 coops on the beach farm with enough silos (a minimum of 1 silo per 20 coops) to feed them every day. You would have to go through coop by coop and raise your chickens relationship till you had 5 stars with all. Then place an auto petter and an auto grabber. Then go to Robin and place this coop into the "Grid" of unreachable coops. The autograbber could theoretically go for 2500+ days until it ran out of space. Once all coops had 5 hearts with all chickens and an auto petter and auto grabber all you would have to do is put hay in the silo every day.

Each coop should theoretically produce 12 iridium quality golden eggs every day at the cost of 50 gold per egg (hay). Since one coop would require you to click on a silo once every 20 days, we multiply the 12 eggs (1200-50=1150) times 20 to get our gold per click (1150*12*20=276,000) giving us roughly 276,000 gold per click. Of course this would consume the entire farm so you would probably do this conjunction with off farm money making like diamond crystalariums and starfruit in the greenhouse and ginger island.

Harvesting the gold from the coops would be a massive ordeal since you would have to move them around at Robins to actually access them. I definitely wouldn't recommend doing this unless you wanted to see the maximum money potential of Stardew.

 

[Shart]

No, because the point of the spreadsheet is to calculate what is optimal for farmable tiles. The limited resource is farmable tiles, not kegs - you can place as many kegs as you want in the southern forest, backwoods, mountains, etc. Farmable tiles can only generate X gold per day, regardless of whether or not you keg their produce on non-farmable tiles. Conversely, non-farmable tiles can never generate gold (directly).

Ok fair enough. I didn't know if you were talking only the farmable tiles

I was thinking more about it, if you had as much time as you wanted to set it up you could actually do some crazy things with coops. Since you don't actually need to go into a coop for it to produce you can fit almost 200 coops on the beach farm with enough silos (a minimum of 1 silo per 20 coops) to feed them every day. You would have to go through coop by coop and raise your chickens relationship till you had 5 stars with all. Then place an auto petter and an auto grabber. Then go to Robin and place this coop into the "Grid" of unreachable coops. The autograbber could theoretically go for 2500+ days until it ran out of space. Once all coops had 5 hearts with all chickens and an auto petter and auto grabber all you would have to do is put hay in the silo every day.

Each coop should theoretically produce 12 iridium quality golden eggs every day at the cost of 50 gold per egg (hay). Since one coop would require you to click on a silo once every 20 days, we multiply the 12 eggs (1200-50=1150) times 20 to get our gold per click (1150*12*20=276,000) giving us roughly 276,000 gold per click. Of course this would consume the entire farm so you would probably do this conjunction with off farm money making like diamond crystalariums and starfruit in the greenhouse and ginger island.

Harvesting the gold from the coops would be a massive ordeal since you would have to move them around at Robins to actually access them. I definitely wouldn't recommend doing this unless you wanted to see the maximum money potential of Stardew.

200 coops.. Well, I'm surely interested in testing this coop strat but definitely not that insane.. It will take forever just to build all the coops, I would have lost interest in playing before I ever reached that point for sure

 

[imnvs]

From my personal experience, statue of endless fortune is the best money maker and diamond crystalarium is the 2nd best. These two are easy to harvest (only needing to hold right click and start running). I don't like kegging because refilling the kegs are much harder than just harvesting diamonds (I tend to miss a lot of kegs when refilling it).
The downside of these two is that they are expensive, but hey when you're late game and don't know how to spend your money just buy more statues of endless fortune. The gold bars produced by these statues will also help you make more crystalariums.

The gold and iridium bars produced, yes.

I have a shed with 132 crystalariums producing diamonds. I have a shed that I'm slowly but surely filling with Statues of Endless Convenience (fortune is a misnomer, as they take so long to pay for themselves, but they are just convenient, low-effort wealth, and occasionally I get a big dump of food in a stack for when I'm mining. Convenient it is... a fortune? Well, it cost a fortune. ). And yes, every so often I just stop by the desert and buy a statue or three. It's something to do with my money now that I have nothing else needing money.

 

[Shart]

The gold and iridium bars produced, yes.

I have a shed with 132 crystalariums producing diamonds. I have a shed that I'm slowly but surely filling with Statues of Endless Convenience (fortune is a misnomer, as they take so long to pay for themselves, but they are just convenient, low-effort wealth, and occasionally I get a big dump of food in a stack for when I'm mining. Convenient it is... a fortune? Well, it cost a fortune. ). And yes, every so often I just stop by the desert and buy a statue or three. It's something to do with my money now that I have nothing else needing money.

Diamonds are plentiful too. There are surprisingly quite a lot of villagers that love diamond so it will produce that when it's their birthday