Mid/end game best way to make money?

Personally, I've gotten far enough that I experiment with various dupes/exploits, and this doesn't ruin the game because I have already mostly done everything.
(I don't actually hack or cheat, just using bugs inside of the game)
 

Kountess

Cowpoke
It's not a ton of money (to me) but every week I make around $300k from ancient fruit. I have a plot on my island that is 21x21 of ancient fruit. After a month of growing they reproduce every week. I then take them and put them in dehydrators and it gets me $290Kish. I also have 3 legend ll ponds but they don't produce a ton of roe. But the aged roe is $7k each and it's so passive I don't have to really work for it. I also put starfruit in my greenhouse but it's new so I'm not too sure how much money it makes yet.
 

ISSsloth

Farmer
As multiple people have said above me, the most common way for people to make the bulk of their money in the end game is farming ancient fruits or starfruits, but if you're looking for alternative/additional methods Salmence has made a video about additional moneymakers, as well as an update for 1.6. Personally, I'm planning on metal bars and slime hutches in one save, and a mix of honey, fruit trees, mystic sap, and mushrooms in the other.
 

FilthyGorilla

Local Legend
Generally you just want to start getting into processing, that's anything from crops, to animal products, to even fish and forage. As soon as you start branching into multipliers and the professions that support them, you become a lot more efficient with your time which is incredibly important as you start expanding and upscaling.

There are a few big purchases you'll want and need to make later on if you want to progress, so it's not a bad idea to really go at it at the start, even to the point where you feel you may be overdoing it in the smaller scheme of your immediate goals. Having some infrastructure up and running to begin with will help massively, especially to make the last parts of the game not feel like such a slog, something many who don't really prioritize or even care for any moneymaking throughout their gameplay until the end feel.
 

HaleyRocks

Farmer
My big moneymaking scheme, is:
1) 360 spots on ginger island to grow Starfruit
2) 3x beehive formations, each one centered around a Fairy Rose flower with 44x hives (total: 132x), on Ginger Island, next to the crops space
3) 119x Ancient Fruit in the Greenhouse
4) Fully upgraded cabin, filled to the brim with Kegs
5) 5x huge tree orchards, complete with mushroom logs and heavy tappers (min-max, perfect design, from reddit), 2 of them mystic trees and the rest, 1 from each remaining wild tree
6) 1 Big Shed, filled to the brim with Dehydrators

With this, you earn crazy money. Starfruit kegging alone, results into 1 million +, each time it's being processed (~7 days?)...
 
Deep endgame remains a challenge for me. I’ve never actually done full “perfection” because at some point the grind starts to become a “loot treadmill”, to afford all the obelisks and the golden clock, and I lose motivation. Then I either set the game aside for a few weeks, or start a new farm.

But I’m sure that my current farm will be different. I’ll totally manage it this time. Yea… that’s the ticket!😀
 

FilthyGorilla

Local Legend
Deep endgame remains a challenge for me. I’ve never actually done full “perfection” because at some point the grind starts to become a “loot treadmill”, to afford all the obelisks and the golden clock, and I lose motivation. Then I either set the game aside for a few weeks, or start a new farm.

But I’m sure that my current farm will be different. I’ll totally manage it this time. Yea… that’s the ticket!😀
The trick is the integrate it into the other gameplay, you can avoid the game ever becoming about cash cash cash if you're done the cash or you were passively doing the cash to any degree while pursuing the more active friendship/cooking/crafting/slaying/fishing/etc.

Since you'll have years while you do other stuff, you don't have to go all out at all. Take for example using dehydrators to the end of the game, you'll make way more money than you'll ever need for perfection just farming passively on the island without doing anything else or ever investing in more than 20-30 machines.
 
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