New to SDV, looking for some tips *possible spoilers? not sure*

[GloomySeagull]

Hi all! I'm Gloomy Recently started playing Stardew Valley (5/30/22, methinks ), and I've been kind of just vibing with Farm Life™️. I did a ton of reading, and set my goals (what I felt was) high because playing games like SDV where what makes it fun is playing how you want, setting goals works for me. After (what felt like) a ton of research, goals were as follows:

# 1. I wanted to propose to my intended by Winter Y2 (Abigail because purple hair)
# 2. Get the Greenhouse up and running by Fall Y1
#3. Have fully functional by Winter Y2: 2 Deluxe Barns and 3 Deluxe Coops

Thus far, I'm in Fall Y2, and I've given Abigail a bouquet. My Greenhouse was ready by Spring Y1. And I'm still working on the coops and barns. These aren't set goals exactly; just things that I felt would be nice to have asap.

I am mostly looking for tips for the Greenhouse and Mining. I dont typically have much time to mine as I have yet to automate my farm but I'll be doing that today when I get home from work. As you can imagine, I've spent a lot of money. My current Overall Earnings is about 1.7M, and most of my money has gone to decor (I'm coming from ACNH...I am physically incapable of passing up good decor) and the barns/coops/animals.

For a while, I farmed potatoes, pumpkins, etc according to season.After unlocking the Desert, I bought 20 starfruit seeds and I accumulated maybe 11 rare seeds and started planting them in the greenhouse. It's been slow, as I've been using the seed maker to get more seeds and then planting those. I wanted 5 rows of each in the greenhouse. Sow, water, harvest, make seeds, repeat. It very cost-efficient, but the problem is it takes at least 4-5 in-game hours to actually do all of this, and the profits (once I profit...as I type this, I havent seen any actual profits from this venture....Ive been working on it since Winter Y1) would be very wonky. Seed maker doesn't give a set amount of seeds back, so I may end up with an actual profit or I may not, it would be hard to determine. Is this a worthwhile venture??? Would it be better to do with a different crop? Ive got 60 rare seeds raising in my Greenhouse right now so its a little late to decide but This is getting kind of long, so ill try to compress the rest of my questions:

1. How do you get starred artisan goods? Ive sold almost 700 artisan goods, and besides mayo and cheese, *none* of them have been starred, even if I use purple quality goods.

2. Is there a single best crop for the Greenhouse? not sure about sell value, etc....I looked for a data sheet for it but was unable to find one (maybe I missed it??), so I will have to sit down and crunch numbers on my own. Math isn't my best subject (terrible choice in games ), which is why i ask.

3. Is the Sweet Gem Berry worth it? Its a lot of gold at one time but I see many people using Starfruit instead, and worry that ive wasted my time.

4. And the mines...where to start? I need to automate my farm so I can spend more time there. On a good day, where I skip doing something (going to Pierre's, carpenter, skip mushrooms, skip greenhouse and try to do it by midnight, etc), I am able to do 5 floors, at the very least, but thats maybe once every in-game week. I hit every rock....is there kind of a mental sorting system anyone uses to decide which rocks to hit? Ive upgrade to Steel pick so far, so it is going quicker but the larger floors still take me 2-4 IRL minutes to get through which is a lot of time in-game.

I'm stuck in this weird "I catch bugs for a living" and "I want a billion dollar farm" mindset, and it's really setting me back And I just don't feel like the farm is as efficient as it could be because of that.

I do understand that there's no time crunch (ex. "[Thing] won't happen because you didn't do [event] by [date]."). I do have days (in-game) where I just work at a slower pace, but I like to be doing something in-game like 24/7, whether thats petting my dog 76 times, taking care of crops, or sitting with Abigail at the lake. Spending my days busy is just a preference !

Thank you for taking the time to read this whole thing! I have had a lot of questions and have not had anywhere to post them, so I'm sorry this post is so long!!

 

[Elenna101]

Once you upgrade the house to the maximum possible, you can age wine and cheese in the cellar to get higher quality. However, this takes a long time, and if you're setting your farm up to make tons of money, it probably won't make much of a difference in your overall profits.

Re: the Greenhouse, starfruit or ancient fruit are the best crops to use. The problem with rare seeds is that you can't process the resulting fruit into wine or jelly, so you lose out on a lot of profits that way. I could write a bunch of stuff about whether starfruit or ancient fruit is better (let me know if you're interested) but frankly, either one will be fine and will give you plenty of cash once you get it up and running. The important thing is to use kegs and jars as they increase the price to up to 3 times the base value. Without delving into formulas, in general fruit will sell for more when kegged and vegetables will sell for more when jarred, but both will sell for significantly more than the base price.

Also, don't bother with the seed maker (except for propagating ancient fruit which you can't buy). One starfruit wine will sell for far more than the (on average) 2 seeds you get from the seed maker will cost. This is true for every crop, I think, although I haven't actually checked every single one.
(There are a few other uses for the seed maker but this post is already long enough. The point is, don't use it to get seeds when you can buy them instead.)

Mining is partly just a matter of getting used to the controls and the combat system, but here are some tips:

• If you can kill a monster quickly, do so, and make sure to do so when it is on top of bare stone and not on top of a rock, sandy patch, etc. Monsters have a flat 15% chance of dropping ladders.
• If you can't kill the monster quickly, try to move around it and avoid fighting it at all, as it'll waste time you could be spending breaking rocks. Sounds like you've gotten at least to the iron levels - this is especially true for ghosts, don't just stand around waiting for them to get to you.
• Speaking of killing monsters quickly, you might consider buying a better weapon at the Adventurer's Guild? Also, if you have a club, you can do a powerful area-of-effect attack by right clicking and then mashing left click.
• Craft some bombs! People mostly talk about using bombs in Skull Caverns, but they can get you down the regular mines faster, too.
• For larger floors, try to move around the floor as you mine instead of breaking all the rocks at the entrance first. If there is a random free ladder on the floor, it prevents you from getting a ladder from a rock, so you want to find it before wasting a bunch of time breaking rocks. Also, you might find some helpful enemies to kill.
• Craft some staircases. These are particularly useful for monster floors and the spiral layout, but you can use them on any floor that isn't going well, as long as you've got the stone.
• Try to mine when the in-game luck is high, as mining is one of the few things strongly affected by luck. Of course it's perfectly possible to have terrible mines on a good luck day and vice versa, but it should make things better on average.

@BlaDe has a video about finding ladders which you can find here.

 

[PoppyForPenny]

The seedmaker is best for everbearing crops, especially ancient fruit. It's a great way to get berry crops for the next year, or to turn summer forage grapes into plantable fall grapes. It's also a neat alternative to crafting wild seeds. I also use it for wheat if I'm just trying to harvest hay. But single harvest crops, especially starfruit which makes great profit with wine or jam, sell or process the fruit and buy more seeds.
Sprinklers are pretty important. You can buy iridium sprinklers once you make enough museum donations, and crafting quality sprinklers is pretty good. Either route to getting sprinklers requires mining, for metals or geodes. To collect metals, hit the rocks with nodes. Hit rocks until a ladder appears then go down. Use the best sword and boots you can get.
The best greenhouse crop is ancient fruit or starfruit. Berries are also good- you can start with just a few and use your seedmaker. If you don't have sprinklers yet, maybe fruit trees.

 

[MissDandy]

It also depends on how profit driven you are... if you're in it for the big bucks (as it seems you might be), get started on kegs. Fill sheds with them, get them ready for when you really are able to mass produce valuable fruits. You can go on the wiki here to see what the most profitable wines and juices based on the sell value of the fruits are, and start preparing to craft them on a large scale because it will take some time.

As for greenhouse, if you're interested in seeing what some other people do with theirs (whether it be for productivity or for convenience), here, in this thread is where everyone shared their thoughts. Maybe it will help you out, but Elenna101 makes a good point when talking about how you can fill it efficiently. Remember, if you want ancient fruit all year long it has to be in the greenhouse to start because you can't put it in garden pots.