Introduction

Stardew Valley Stonks has two main functions:

• The Ranker displays a bar chart of the best crops, fertilizers, or pairs thereof, for the chosen ranking metric. Hovering or clicking on a bar opens a more detailed view showing how its value was calculated.
• The Optimizer recommends a near-optimal plan of fertilizers and crop plantings which maximize net gold or xp.

Both the Ranker and Optimizer update in response to any settings you change, allowing you to explore rankings and recommendations for various situations and combinations of crops and fertilizers.

Keep in mind that Stardew Valley Stonks is a tool to help you make informed decisions, and not a source of ultimate truth. This is because the Ranker and Optimizer operate under a certain set of limitations and assumptions. Understanding the main limitations can help you judge whether recommendations from the Ranker and Optimizer are ideal for your specific situation or playstyle.

Settings

If you are unsure about what certain settings do, notes and explanations for each are included below.

Start and End Date

Stardew Valley Stonks supports dates spanning multiple years but only to a maximum of four seasons. So, if the starting and ending seasons are the same, then the starting day cannot be after the ending day. For example, starting on Winter 5 and ending on Fall 28 is allowed, but starting on Winter 5 and ending on Winter 1 is not allowed.

Location

this is the location where crops will be planted. The Greenhouse and Ginger Island are functionally equivalent (e.g., both allow all crops to be planted out of season and prohibit giant crops from forming). The only difference is that Wild Seeds many destroy fertilizer on Ginger Island, while they do not in the Greenhouse or on the Farm.

Skill Level

this is your in-game farming or foraging skill level. Note that you start the game with a skill level of zero.

Skill Buff

this is the in-game farming or foraging buff you have from food at the time of harvesting. See the farming and foraging pages on the Stardew Valley Wiki for the buff values for various food items.

Ignore Skill Level Unlocks

professions, processors like the Seed Maker, and crafting recipes for Wild Seeds are all locked behind certain skill levels. Enabling this setting ensures that these items are always available/active regardless of skill level.

Ignore Profession Conflicts

level 10 professions are mutually exclusive with one another. Additionally, level 10 professions require the corresponding level 5 profession to be taken. Enabling this setting disables the automatic toggling of required professions or untoggling of exclusive professions.

Seed Strategy

the “buy first” strategy mandates that the first seed for a crop must be bought. Subsequent plantings of the same crop may continue to buy seeds or use alternative seed sources like the Seed Maker (if it is available/unlocked). However, due to a limitation with the Optimizer, choosing this strategy will currently cause the Optimizer to only buy seeds. With the “stockpile” strategy, the first seed is considered free. Subsequent seeds may be bought or can come from alternative seed sources. The major difference is that an extra seed must be left over to be “stockpiled” for the next year, thereby achieving net zero seeds. Under the “ignore” strategy, all harvested items are sold, no seeds are bought, and no seeds are obtained from alternative sources.

Pay for Fertilizer

if this setting is enabled, the gold cost of buying fertilizer is accounted for.

Pay for Destroyed Fertilizer

Wild Seeds grown on Ginger Island and giant crops grown on the Farm may destroy the fertilizer they were planted on once fully grown. Enabling this setting accounts for the cost of replacing the destroyed fertilizer between harvests. This setting is ignored if the “pay for fertilizer” setting is disabled.

Profit Margin

this corresponds to the profit margin setting found under advanced game options when creating a new Stardew Valley game.

Bear’s Knowledge

increases the sell price of Blackberries by a factor of 3. You can check your in-game wallet to see if you have this unlocked.

Apply Tiller to Foraged Grapes and Blackberries

the Tiller profession applies to Grapes grown from Grape Starter and Blackberries harvested from bushes, but it does not apply to Grapes and Blackberries harvested from Wild Seeds. However, combining a stack of foraged Grapes or Blackberries with another item stack of its tiller-benefitting counterpart causes all items in the new stack to benefit from the Tiller profession. Enabling this setting mimics this behaviour and will apply the Tiller profession to Grapes and Blackberries harvested from Wild Seeds.

Joja Membership

if enabled, this lowers most seed prices at JojaMart to match Pierre’s.

Average Giant Crop Orientations Per Tile

this setting represents the number of different possible ways a giant crop can spawn on a tile, averaged across all farm tiles. A longer explanation with a list of common values is included at the end of this section.

Shaving Enchantment

if you have an axe with the shaving enchantment, you can select the corresponding tool level here. This affects the number of items harvested from a giant crop. Surprisingly, gold and steel axes provide the highest expected shaved items.

Irrigated

enable this setting to apply the irrigation growth speed bonus (25%) to Rice and Taro.

Special Charm

you can check your in-game wallet to see if you have this unlocked. This setting has a very small effect on the number of crops harvested.

Luck Buff

this is the in-game luck buff you have at the time of harvesting. This setting has a very small effect on the number of crops harvested.

Quality Artisan Products

if you play with the quality artisan products mod, you can enable this setting. Items placed in kegs, etc., will retain their quality once processed into an artisan product.

Show Prices for Quality

this setting changes the prices shown in the products table in the crops tab. It only affects the prices in the “raw” column unless the “quality artisan products” setting is enabled.

Show Normalized Prices

the prices displayed in the products table are unit sell prices with this setting disabled. Enabling this setting instead displays the sell price per input item.

Giant Crops

To help explain the “average giant crop orientations per tile” setting, first consider an infinite field of crops. For any chosen tile, there are 9 different ways a giant crop can spawn on top of any given tile.

If the size of the field is set to a finite size, say 5x5 tiles, then the tiles near the edges have less possible ways for giant crops to spawn on them. By finding the number of possible spawning orientations for each tile and taking the average, it turns out that the average number of orientations is 3.24 for our 5x5 field example.

Doing this same process for your crop field can be tedious, since other obstacles in the field like sprinklers and jumino huts block certain spawning locations as well. So, included below are precomputed averages for various field layouts. Making a rough estimate for your field using the values below should be good enough. Note that the numbers below are all overestimates, since they do not take into account neighboring tiles becoming blocked after the first giant crop is spawned. So, you can choose to make a slightly lower estimate to compensate.

• For a plain field:

  Field Size	Avg. Orientations
  10x10	5.76
  15x15	6.76
  20x20	7.29
  25x25	7.62
  Infinite	9.00
  17x17 with jumino hut	6.52

• For a field with iridium sprinklers:

  Field Layout	Avg. Orientations
  2x2 sprinklers	2.65
  3x3 sprinklers	3.67
  4x4 sprinklers	4.22
  Infinite	6.00
  3x3 ring with jumino hut	2.25

  

• For a field of iridium sprinklers with pressure nozzles:

  Field Layout	Avg. Orientations
  1x1 sprinkler	3.00
  2x2 sprinklers	5.06
  3x3 sprinklers	5.83
  4x4 sprinklers	6.23
  Infinite	7.50

• Fields of normal or quality sprinklers have no 3x3 open spaces and so cannot spawn giant crops.

Ranker

The Ranker supports ranking three different set of items: crops, fertilizers, and “all pairs”.

• Ranking crops causes the Ranker to choose the fertilizer for each crop that gives the highest rank value. Sometimes, the best fertilizer actually turns out to be no fertilizer. This is common when ranking by ROI.

• Ranking fertilizers, unsurprisingly, does the reverse. It will cause the Ranker to choose the best crop for each fertilizer — the crop that gives the highest rank value.

• Ranking “all pairs” shows all possible combinations of crops and fertilizers on the chart. You can use the brush at the bottom of the chart to show more or less bars on the chart.

The Ranker can rank the above items by three different metrics: gold, ROI, or xp.

• Ranking by gold uses the net gold gained by the crop/fertilizer over the course of the specified start and end date. Fertilizer and seed costs are subtracted as necessary based on the “pay for fertilizer” settings and the “seed strategy” setting.

• Ranking by ROI is the same as ranking by gold but divides by the initial investment. The initial investment is defined as the cost of the initial fertilizer plus the first seed price if the “buy first” seed strategy is used. The “stockpile” and “ignore” seed strategies indicate that there is no initial seed investment. Similarly, if the “pay for fertilizer” setting is disabled, then the fertilizer does not contribute to the initial investment. If the initial investment is zero, then the crop/fertilizer is considered invalid and hidden on the chart unless the “show invalid” setting is enabled.

• Ranking by xp utilizes the total farming or foraging xp gained from harvesting. Note that invalid entries are still hidden even if the reason for being invalid is monetary in nature. For example, if the seed strategy is set to “buy first”, then crops without a seed price are still considered invalid even though they are being ranked by xp.

The Ranker can normalize the above rank metrics to a per season or per day basis. Note that there is actually a slight difference between the “per season” and “per day” settings explained below.

• Normalizing by season divides the rank value by the number of days the crop is in season. It then multiplies this value by 28.

• Normalizing by day divides the rank value by the number of days needing watering.

• The “total” setting applies no normalization and heavily favors crops that can grow in multiple seasons.

If you care more about how much value you get from spending energy watering, then “per day” is a better setting for you. Otherwise, if you care more about how much value you can squeeze into the season, then “per season” is a better setting in this case.

Finally, the “show invalid” setting unhides entries that are considered invalid (e.g., they have no possible harvests or have no seed price). These entries will appear at the end of the x-axis on the bar chart, and the reason(s) they are considered invalid can be inspected. This setting can be useful to show you why certain crops are not appearing in the recommendations from the Optimizer.

Optimizer

For those interested, this section details the optimization problem and how the Optimizer works.

Limitations

The Ranker and Optimizer have several main limitations that you may want to be aware of. In rough order of importance, these are:

• The Optimizer assumes the limiting factor is energy or farm tiles and not gold. It is for this reason and others that the Optimizer currently cannot maximize ROI (return on investment). The Ranker can provide the ROI for individual crops, but not across multiple crops like the Optmizer does for gold or xp.

  For example, at the very start of the game, you have little gold but comparatively lots of energy. I’m not a speedrunner, but the goal in this case could be to prioritize ROI and scale up as fast as possible, so that you are able to plant enough high-profiting crops to meet your energy capacity. In this case, the Optimizer may not be giving the “best” recommendation, but it could still be giving a decent one.

• When the “seed strategy” is set to “buy first”, the Optimizer will only buy seeds and will never use other sources like the Seed Maker or crafted Wild Seeds. The Ranker does not have this limitation.

• The Ranker and Optimizer do not factor in the change of variables over time (i.e., farming level). Both the Ranker and Optimizer will be more accurate if used over a shorter time period, or if variables do not change over time (i.e., you have the maximum farming level).

  One workaround is to manually check the recommendations for the next few farming levels and see whether the same crops keep getting recommended.

• The Ranker and Optimizer consider raw numbers (gold, xp, etc.), but not other logistical factors like:

  • Processing Time and Capacity

    • Harvesting and replanting is assumed to happen all on the same day, even when using the Seed Maker.

    For example, cranberries can be more profitable than pumpkins if turned into wine. However, each harvested crop gives (about) 2 cranberries and the regrow time is 5 days – less than the processing time for wine. You can process the excess cranberries over winter if you do not need immediate cash, or alternatively, you can plant pumpkins. This will give less gold, but won’t overload your keg capacity.

  • Time Investment

    For example, hops is often highly ranked when the keg is available, but are you willing to sacrifice time every morning to harvest all those hops and refill all your kegs? Sometimes yes, but sometimes Starfruit might be “better” even if it makes a little less gold and has a higher upfront investment. Food for thought…

  • Restrictions on When/Where Items Can Be Bought

    • Certain crops and fertilizers are only available from year 2 and onwards. Hint: the “Year 1” preset helps with this.
    • Deluxe Speed-Gro can only be bought on Thursday from the Oasis (if that matters).
    • Strawberry Seeds can only be bought at the Egg Festival.

    For example, the Sweet Gem Berry is often highly ranked in terms of gold, but it is hard to get any significant amount of Rare Seeds.

• The Ranker and Optimizer operate on a fixed start and end date with a maximum time span of 1 year. So, for the Greenhouse and Ginger Island, the first harvest and seed cost for regrow crops is included in its ranking/calculations. Over a longer time period, these time and gold investments would be less significant and may result in a higher ranking.

• If a multi-season crop has its growth period split by the chosen start and end date, then the Ranker chooses the period with the most harvests (or the least days if there is a tie).

Credits

• The Stardew Valley Stonks font is based off SVThin by “Omniros”. Both are available under the Open Font License.
• Thanks to Concerned Ape for making the original font of course! I think he also made a whole game called Stardew Valley or something. But actually, thanks for making an amazing game and supporting its awesome community!
• The Stardew Valley Wiki is a fantastic resource, you should check it out! Major props to everyone who contributed to make it what it is today.
• Stardew Valley Profits: the OG profit calculator which gave inspiration for the Ranker.
• The Stardew Valley Planner was used for the field layout images in the giant crops section.
• I build off the shoulders of giants, so you can also check out the list of technologies that made this site possible if you’re interested.

Contribute

• For bugs, please open an issue or submit a pull request on Github.
• For suggestions, you can either make a new discussion or open an issue on Github.
• For questions and other feedback, you can make a new discussion on Github.