Mistakes Valley

The Story

Many times, when we are trying to plan ahead in games, it works wonders. Some of the time it can be a huge disaster. As I was working on Stardew Valley, I wanted to maximize my profit before the winter. This meant taking almost a year, in game, before doing any of the side stuff. The process was a ride I never thought I would experience. This was also to find out the top 5 crops in each season for profit without any artisan work.

I started by taking the crops, broken down by season to see how much would be made just from a single plant and the profit that could be gained in a single season. At the time, this seemed like the best start to the process. This meant calculating the total profit from a crop like Green Beans. This crop, once planted, can have at most 6 harvests in a single season. Spending 60 gold, harvesting it 6 times at 40 gold a piece, creates a profit of 180 gold. For crops that are one and done, this meant calculating the replanting process. Tulips have a maximum of being harvested 4 times in one season. These are plant once, harvest once and would have to replant to make more. at 20 gold a pop, the selling price for one being 30 gold, the profit for one season was only 40 gold.

The Mistakes

With all that work completed, I began to move onto the next phase; Planning the crops bought, how many etc. I had mistakenly placed down the crops I believed were the best profitable. This was until I failed to mark when each crop would be harvested. I made a rookie mistake and had to remedy the problem. This took some finagling and color coding to fix this. That is until I hit my next major problem. Pierre’s store hours of operations. I had mistakenly put down on Wednesday, to purchase crops throughout the Spring season, before I started working on the Summer. There was no fixing this, and I was forced to start over on Day 1.

Once this was completed, I then moved onto Summer. Summer was the most active month, a lot of planting, a lot of harvesting. I then had to calculate how many crops one could harvest in a day and still be able to plant new crops. This became a headache unto its own. I’ve had to restart Summer from scratch because I then realized, I never accounted for the festivals, which thankfully did not mean a lot for Spring, but meant Summer had to be redone, as I had almost finished it. Or so I thought.

With moving onto Fall, It was more laid back the first half of the season. That’s when I realized my biggest mistake. The mistake that made me realized that I had to start completely over, back to when I calculated the profits of the crops. While the profit in one season for one crop, was a good start, it was flawed. I had noticed that the top three Crops for Fall were Cranberries at number 1, Pumpkins in second and Grapes in third. Every time I went to calculate which crops to buy, after the cranberries were purchased, I noticed I leaned more towards the grapes, rather than the pumpkins.

Biggest Flaw

This is when I discovered that my thought process for Fall, was different from Spring and Summer and made my process wrong in its entirety. When having 120 gold, I would frequently pick 2 grapes, over the pumpkin and eggplant. I realized at this point, my process of thinking was skewed. I was looking at the prospect of one plant, as opposed to if I had bought a certain amount.

At this point, I had to step away, and scream my frustration into the void. As I came back, I had to form a way to calculate this process to give the crops an even playing field. So I decided to take the highest costing crop, and calculate it based on that. This meant starting in the Spring, with the Coffee Bean.

The Biggest Hurdle

I set out to try and calculate the prospect of the Coffee Bean in the Spring. This is where my next headache began. It was not as simple as “Plant and harvest” No. Every plant harvested, meant I had to add 4 beans planted. I really struggled to track this. This left me with launching my modded version of Stardew Valley just to keep track of everything.

Now, with this plan getting started, I knew the rest would be easier to calculate using my calendar method. I felt so much relief after getting past that hurdle. I learned that with a game like Stardew Valley, not everything can just be paper and penciled out. Some games require in game study.

You can see the results of my mistakes and efforts Here