BlaDe
Farmer
1.5 fixed a bug with discounting growth days that affected pumpkins. With agriculturalist and deluxe speed gro, on 1.4 they took 9 days, on 1.5 they take 8.
Min-Max Guide / Optimal Play
- Thread starter Zamiel
- Start date
LRangerR
Local Legend
It also is dependent upon which type of efficiency you are aiming for. Time efficiency and gameclock efficiency are different types of time management, and then there's income efficiency, as well as stress management efficiency, amongst other different types, including personal welfare efficiency (aka being happy).
However, all of that is dependent upon perspective and goals, which varies between individuals.
Cptldsilver
Planter
Glad too see the pumpkin thing got fixed, it was really unintuitive to have crops with the same growth period to be differently affected by agriculturalist.
Cptldsilver
Planter
Yeah, maximizing in game time really cuts into irl time.
Squigglyruth
Planter
I love this guide! I found it interesting to see that a lot of it is the same as what I do - especially the very start of spring. Then it deviates because I've never got good at combat so I always stop min-maxing and prioritise farming over skull cavern...
stardew-valley/Min-Max_Guide.md at main · Zamiell/stardew-valley
Contribute to Zamiell/stardew-valley development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com
I am interested though in whether some of what I have been doing could lead to an even more profitable route, in the hands of someone who was good at Skull Cavern. I have been playing with runs that get me farming 6 and enough resources in time to have sprinklers for two large harvests of strawberries, which I think probably makes them much less of a 'naive strategy' as no time is taken up watering them. If the rest of spring after planting the strawberries was aimed at Skull Cavern, I wonder how much money I could enter summer with? With the extra benefit of Agriculturalist from the start of summer...
OldMcKeg
Cowpoke
Void chicken are indeed pretty bad. Sheep and Pigs are a different matter -- they beat starfruit + pumpkins handily, and if you're constrained by money as opposed to space Ducks actually are a better return in summer, and better than pumpkins even if you aren't constrained for money (the fact that they produce in winter helps a lot). You're correct that the time is the real problem though -- with a deluxe building every 7 days, you're stonking rich from other channels long before Robin finishes construction on your animal empire.
I've been looking a lot into this myself, and came to the idea of rushing pigs in order to throw rain totems at the starfruit crop on the beach. I'm not sure it's a good strategy though. Have you considered it at all?
Zamiel
Sodbuster
How much profit do you get from two large harvests of strawberries? You can make around 100,000g a day per Skull Cavern run (eventually), so the opportunity cost of running around planting things + harvesting things is huge.
Last edited:
Zamiel
Sodbuster
That strikes me as being really bad. The cost is as follows:
- 69,500g for the Deluxe Barn
- 10 days for the Deluxe Barn to be built
- N * 16,000g for pigs
- 10 days for the pig to mature
- The opportunity cost of running to Robin three times
- The opportunity cost of collecting truffles every day (you would probably want to leave them on the ground overnight and collect them in the morning)
- The opportunity cost of M Tappers (probably at least 10?), which would presumably be instead producing Oak Resin for much-needed Kegs
- The opportunity cost of farming hardwood
That's a huge investment, and I don't understand the benefits of the payout. Is the idea to just prevent having to craft + place sprinklers on the Island Farm? That seems insane, since you can get the materials for a ton of quality sprinklers from the Skull Caverns "for free" whilst you are primarily farming Iridium Ore. By the time you have sold enough Iridium Ore to buy enough Starfruit Seeds to cover the most of the Island Farm, you should have infinite sprinklers anyway.
Last edited:
OldMcKeg
Cowpoke
No, no, not on the island farm: I mean rushing pigs in order to plant starfruit in summer year 1 on the beach farm, where sprinklers cannot be placed. Getting it in time for the first harvest is not possible, but I believe the latter two harvests can be covered.
Obviously sprinklers are better on any other farm -- but I'm wondering whether a rain totem rush is the best play for the beach. My feeling is that the need for so much early wood for the buildings makes it impractical, along with the difficulty of an early foraging 9.
One factor you may have missed in your analysis is that the pigs, one bought, can be sold to recover some of the initial cost. Though if the watering can is upgraded there is an argument for alternating rain totem days with regular watering in order to continue picking up truffles, since the pigs are pretty amazing in fall.
Also I don't believe you need hardwood, just regular wood. Is that what you meant?
OldMcKeg
Cowpoke
Yeah but clearing that area is trivial. You just need the steel axe.
Zamiel
Sodbuster
Ok, most players probably won't be playing on the Island Farm, unless they want to take on an additional challenge.
In the case of the Island Farm, depending on how well you do in Spring, you might not have Starfruit Seeds for that many extra tiles beyond the Sprinkler-waterable tiles on Summer 2. Thus, watering those with a watering can isn't a big deal. And you can only buy so many Starfruit seeds for the second/third harvest, since you don't have the income from the Starfruit Wine yet.
Feel free to experiment with a Rain Totem route where you rush a Barn. A good first step is to see how many Starfruit Seeds + DSG you actually have ready to plant on Summer 2. My feeling is that it probably won't be very good.
If you did that route, I probably wouldn't bother selling the pigs.
1) The majority of the investment is not in the raw gold spent, but in the *time* invested (opportunity cost). It takes 20 days to get going and a bunch of wasted time running around.
2) The pigs sell for a tiny amount, probably around 8,000 to 9,000g each. This is probably too tiny to be meaningful, since you can make upwards of 100,000g a day in the Skull Cavern. Another way of saying this is that 9,000g is very valuable in Spring, but near-useless in Summer.
Are pigs amazing in fall? That isn't my intuition. It seems expensive to have to walk around and pick up all the truffles. To be fair, presumably you could wait until the 28th and then pick up like 20 of them all at once, but I've never personally experimented with that and can't vouch that it works.
Another thing is I will say is that you usually don't need any money in Fall, because you are already a multi-millionaire. Unless you are just doing a pure min-max of money run, there are usually other objectives that you are trying to complete in fall, like maxing all friendship, etc.
According to the wiki, Rain Totems take 1 Hardwood to make.
Last edited:
Zamiel
Sodbuster
What day specifically are you proposing that iron ore is mined? Spring 7?
- Blacksmith is open from 9 AM --> 4 PM = 7 hours.
- It takes 1 hour to travel back and forth from the mines.
- You are at floor 20 in the mines.
- That gives you 6 hours to go from floor 20 --> floor 40 *and* mine 25 Iron Ore.
- You also only have 1 Furnace, so you would also need to mine 80 Copper Ore and craft 4 more furnaces in those 6 hours, so that you could make it back to the Blacksmith and craft all 5 iron bars inside of the Blacksmith and exploit the extended selling time.
Doing all that is probably impossible in 6 hours, which means that you would delay the entire route by a day, which is the opportunity cost of wasting a full day of Skull Cavern revenue.
Furthermore, you also have to factor in that in this route you've also lost the Y hours that the Gold Pickaxe saves from floors 20 --> 40, which presumably would be spent fishing.
Last edited:
OldMcKeg
Cowpoke
I realize that, and I agree that it isn't optimal. Well, ok, it is optimal at like...year 4 I think? Because by then you can actually use the extra land for buildings and have more output, surpassing the standard farm. But most players aren't interested in optimizing at that timescale, and very understandably!
So to be clear I would not try to rain totem the first starfruit planting. Based on my calculations that isn't really practical -- in order to have 28 truffles you'd need about 20 pig days, and since pigs take 10 days to grow that means you need 20 days since finishing your first deluxe barn if you get two pigs. If you get 4 pigs, you need 15 days since barn. This is all just really, really hard to do by Summer 1.
However, the standard Starfruit strat is to do 3 harvests, the 2nd and 3rd being much larger. The second and third plantings are far more achievable with rain totems. With two pigs you need to start the barn build on Spring 10; with four, Spring 14 or 15 (you can't build on 17 unless you buy a lot more pigs because Marnie will be closed on the 24th for the flower festival and you will miss a day). You don't need to buy the pigs themselves until Spring 19 or 21, which I think is very achievable -- you're well into Skull caverns at that point and the pigs should be easy. Honestly you probably just buy like, all 12 if you can.
I think you may not have run the numbers on pigs. Pigs can achievably outperform kegged pumpkins by a factor of ten. In fact pigs, space for space, are actually just better than anything else in Stardew, even kegged ancient fruit. Well, ok. Almost anything. Golden chickens beat them hands down.
A max-friendship pig will generate on average two truffles per day. The truffles persist across days -- I believe they only wipe at the end of the season -- so you don't have to pick them up daily. Even a lower-friendship pig generates, I believe, an average of at least one a day. Days after rain boost truffle production, so the loss from rainy days is not a full day. A deluxe barn full of pigs generates, over the course of 28 days, assuming just 1 truffle per pig per day, ~494k money, if you buy hay for feed and process the truffles into oil. A 7x5 (7x4 for the barn, plus space to walk) plot of pumpkins in fall will undergo 3 harvests and generate, after kegging, 84k. The pigs blow the pumpkins out of the water. Turning the truffles into oil can be a pain, but honestly given that you can just botanist them into iridium truffles trivially and require no post-processing, at which point the pigs yield 413k, which is still 100% fine. These numbers honestly understate the pig potential, as I haven't assumed high friendship, the gatherer perk, and the fact that you don't need nearly as many oil presses as you need kegs, especially if you skip the post-processing. Pigs that yield an average of 1.7 truffles per day (that's 1.42 truffles per day, then gatherer multiplying by 1.2) generate 840k gold in a season if you process into oil -- that is TEN TIMES the profit of pumpkins on the same space of land. Also, like, you can put stuff in the barn. Crystalariums, Kegs, whatever. It's a lot of value.
I'll grant that I haven't tested this. It might be, for example, that the game won't generate truffles if there isn't space to put them down, meaning the barns require not 7x5 but 7x6 or 7x7 worth of space. And maybe you would need to pick them up daily. But so what? It's so much money. It's 20k per day PER BARN. If I have five barns producing I make more money than skull cavern does by walking around and PICKING UP TRUFFLES. This takes what, an hour? Less?
Sheep are also worth considering if picking up truffles is a huge deal. They don't generate as much money as pigs, but require, with an autograbber, require very little time.
Good catch on the totems themselves. I missed that, but honestly, if I'm clearing the farm, I'm feel like I have that much hardwood just from the stumps. I only need, like, 18 or 19.
I agree that most people don't optimize fall. I think that this is sort of a shame, though, because it means that a lot of interesting strategies -- like animal ones! -- aren't considered, and I find that fun to think about. If it doesn't interest you, I mean, that's ok, you should do what makes the game fun for you! But I figured since you'd made a minmax guide and posted about it that you'd be interested in the topic.
Last edited:
OldMcKeg
Cowpoke
I'm not so sure about the Iron in a normal run. In my run, I'm getting the copper axe upgraded on day 3 (this is hard) doing a lot of mining, farming part of day 7 and upgrading to steel on day 8. Then mining down some more and doing the next upgrade on day 12 (I'm upgrading the axe when I'm not upgrading the pick, which may be a mistake, I'm not sure). I'd then expect to be able to reach bottom on 14 or 15 and start skull from 15 or 16. This seems in line with your guide -- am I mistaken? It seems to me that the extra money spent on gold ore -- 10k -- delays the vault by at least a day itself.
Last edited:
Zamiel
Sodbuster
To my knowledge, the only way to upgrade the pickaxe on Spring 3 is to use 25 copper gathered from random fishing chests (and potentially with a few coming from Artifact Spots). That isn't possible without resetting your day over and over, which is considered to be cheating - see appendix A of the guide.
If you allow resetting the day over and over, then my whole route isn't applicable at all. You would instead use RNG manipulation to get around 6000g on the first day with clay + artifacts + geodes + etc., and end up in Skull Caverns a lot earlier using no pickaxe at all and just using explosive ammo.
So, if you wanted to do a route that upgraded the pickaxe on Spring 3 without cheating, you would have to grind runs over and over starting from day 1 and hope for insane fishing chest luck. If you want to do that, go for it, but the point of the guide is to provide a consistent strategy. Thus, the guide recommends to start to upgrade the Copper Pickaxe on Spring 5, which is when the mines open, and the first reasonable day that you can get 25 copper.
Thus:
- Upgrade to Copper Pickaxe on Spring 5
- Get Copper Pickaxe back on Spring 7.
- Upgrade to Steel Pickaxe on Spring 7.
- Get Steel Pickaxe back on Spring 9.
- Upgrade to the Gold Pickaxe on Spring 9.
- Get the Gold Pickaxe back on Spring 11.
- Finish mines ASAP, all time in mines is spent "optimally" because you can do it twice as fast with Gold Pickaxe as you would with a Copper/Steel Pickaxe
- Get to bottom of mines around Spring 14, depending on luck
- Skull Caverns on Spring 15
Your route doesn't seem to make sense to me.
First, you don't have enough money to upgrade the Axe until you are already in Skull Caverns. Otherwise you would be delaying completing the Vault + buying the level 2 backpack, which is suboptimal.
Second, you only have one Furnace. Are you proposing that you make more? That would take farming 80 copper. (Call that A hours.)
Third, you would have to wait for the gold to smelt. (5 hours with 5 Furnaces, or 25 hours with 1 Furnace.)
Forth, you lose the marginal advantage of the Gold Pickaxe when clearing mines floors. The earliest floor that you can farm gold is floor 81. Doing the mines from floor 20 to floor 80 is 60 floors. (Call that B hours.)
Fifth, you lose the time of farming the 25 gold from floor 81. (Call that C hours.)
If M is the hourly rate of return from fishing at the mountain lake, then A+5+B+C would have to be <= 10,000g / M.
Making some assumptions:
For A, it might be 5 copper per hour = 16 hours.
For B, if on average it takes 3 days to get to the bottom of the mines, then that is (120 - 20) / 3 = 33.3 floors per day = 1.7 floors per hour = 102 hours.
Then, we use a penalty factor of say 0.5x (for marginal cost), which gives us 51 hours.
For C, it might be 5 gold per hour = 5 hours.
A+5+B+C = 77 hours.
I don't know what M is but it would have to be lower than 129.9 gold / per hour.
Feel free to experiment and refine these numbers if you'd like.
Finally, another thing not represented in these numbers is that the more that you defer mining, the greater the chances that you will get either a Neptune's Glaive or a Broken Trident from fishing chests, which obviously vastly outperform the Rusty Sword and any other weapons that you will get prior to the Obsidian Edge. You would want to account for that by increasing the penalty factor by an arbitrary amount.