Best Crops In Stardew Valley:
1. Most Important Crop Enhancers
Before we even touch the crops, let’s talk about crop enhancers. I am talking about fertilizers, retaining soil and speed grow. You need to master these to master farming in this game.
Retaining soil is simple. There are three options, each of them has a chance for your crops to still be watered on the next day. The truth of the matter here is that, all of these suck except for deluxe retaining soil.
This is because it is just way too unreliable, while deluxe retaining soil has a 100% chance to keep your crops watered. Effectively meaning you never have to water that tile ever again. You can get the recipe for deluxe retaining soil by trading in 50 cinder shards at the island trader on ginger island. The stuff is quite expensive to craft, but I mean common. It’s kind of incredible.
Fertilizers are quite similar to retaining soil! This will increase the quality of your crops, allowing you to harvest more gold and iridium quality crops/ There are three options, and the first two are absolutely garbage. They just do not impact your crops enough for them to be worth it. You’re most likely going to turn those crops into artisan goods anyway.
However deluxe fertilizer is the outlier, if and only if you combine it with a Farmers lunch. If you use deluxe fertilizer with a farmers lunch, you will be given the privilege of harvesting iridium quality crops. And even better, 55% of all your crops will be iridium quality. Iridium crops are valuable, they’re valuable enough to just sell as is without needing to turn them into artisan goods. This is especially good on high value crops like sweet gem berries, starfruit and even pumpkins.
To get deluxe fertilizer, you will need to buy the recipe from Mr QI’s golden walnut shop for twenty qi gems. And yes, these are extremely expensive to craft. So only use these on ginger island or in your greenhouse.
Speed-Gro. This is still one of the best enhancers in the entire game. It reduces crop growth time by quite a bit. The bare minimum here is Deluxe speed grow that causes crops to grow 25% faster! You can buy the stuff from Sandy on Thursdays for only eighty gold each. That may not sound like much, but it’s huge for maximizing harvests within a single season. There is however an even better option. Hyper speed grow that causes crops to grow 33% faster!
And you can buy the recipe for hyper speed grow from Mr Qi’s Golden Walnut room for 30 qi gems. The moral of the story is!! Crop Enhancers are only here to help you! Use the gosh darn things for your own personal benefit.
2. Brand New 1.6 Crops.
Let’s quickly go over the brand new crops from the 1.6 Update.
Starting with Carrots. Carrots are a new Spring crop, finding the seeds isn’t that reliable as you can’t just buy the seeds from Pierre, however they do only take three days to fully mature. Carrots are not good for profits so don’t even bother selling them. Instead eat them for energy health, or feed them to your horse to make him run faster.
The Summer squash is the new summer crop, once again these seeds are hard to get.. However it takes six days to fully mature, and then it will reproduce crops every three days. Again, these do not sell for much but they’re an easy way to get early game farming experience.
Now for the fall crop! Broccoli! Once again, and quite annoyingly.. These seeds are hard to find and don’t sell for much.. They’re just here to help with farming experience… They take eight days to fully mature and regrow every four days..
Lastly we have Powder Melons! These are the new Winter crops! Again, hard to get the seeds and don’t sell for much. They take seven days to fully mature but these do not regrow..
3. Stardew Valley Giant Crops
Fortunately Powder Melons have one nice little secret! They can indeed turn into Giant Crops. Speaking of giant crops, grow three melons, pumpkins, cauliflower and now powder melons in a 3 by 3 grid for a chance to get a giant crop. If all of your crops are fully matured, you can just keep them watered and not harvest them. Every day that goes by, is another chance for them to turn into giant crops.
These do not die when the season changes, so you can indeed use these as decorations on your farm. However if you need the gold, you can chop them down with an ax to get bonus crops.
Now wait, there is one more giant crop. The giant Qi Fruit! This weird giant crop comes from planting Qi Beans. The funny thing is that you can only get giant crops on your regular farm. Giant crops are impossible on ginger island. So you can only get this, by planting qi fruit on your farm and not on ginger island. Quite cool if you ask me.
4. Best Spring Crops In Stardew Valley
Alright now for spring crops.
If you are looking to actually profit from crops in spring, then Rhubarb might be your best bet. You can only buy these seeds from Sandy at the oasis, but these might be the best spring crop for profit.
Strawberries are another strange spring crop where you can only get the seed at the annual egg festival.. Meaning they’re also not that reliable.. I actually don’t like strawberries at all… Imagine buying seeds and saving them for a year so that you can plant them on the first day of spring. Am I playing wrong? . Do you plant strawberries? Lemme know in the comments.
Coffee is a great spring crop! Unfortunately once again, the best way to get coffee seeds is by defeating dust sprites in the mines and finding a single seed. Then slowly building up a coffee empire. Fortunately coffee crops reproduce every two days, and give tons of coffee per harvest. And they grow in both spring and summer!! So you can very quickly build up a literal coffee empire in no time. Drop four seeds into a keg to get drinkable coffee. Not great for profit, but amazing for speed. Good enough for me.
If you have bee houses on your farm, grow blue jazz for your bees to create blue jazz honey. This is the most profitable honey that you will get in spring, not quite as good as other seasons but not bad regardless.
Otherwise most of the spring crops are all kinda meh, potatoes and kale are cheap,they grow fast and they have decent profits. Kale gives you loads of experience and potatoes have a chance to give you a bonus crop. That’s all.
5. Best Summer Crops In Stardew Valley
Summer! Heh heh heh. Summer is my favorite season in this little video game… There are many reasons to love summer !
Let’s start with wheat. The stuff only takes four days to fully mature, can grow in both summer and fall and the seeds only cost ten gold each. When you harvest wheat, you will get wheat! As well as hay. The only important thing here is beer. Drop that wheat into kegs to get beer. Beer sells for 280 gold. The seed costs 10 gold. You do the math, it’s worth it.
Then we have Hops!! They’re just as damn good as wheat!! Hops take 11 days to fully mature and then they reproduce every single day. You can quickly amass tons of Hops in no time. This is one of those perfect crops for speed grow. Anyway, drop hops into kegs to make Pale Ale!! Each serving of pale ale sells for 420 gold!! The hops seed costs 60 gold, and it reproduces. This makes Pale Ale just almost purely profit. It’s stupid how good Hops and wheat are..
Okay let’s talk about Starfruit. Starfruit is interesting… You can buy the seeds from Sandy for 400 gold each. Yeah, starfruit seeds are really expensive… Trust me, it’s worth it. Starfruit takes 14 days to fully mature. They do not reproduce, but since the seeds are so expensive, the wine sells for a ridiculous amount of gold.
Starfruit wine is the single best wine in the entire game, and it’s the only wine that I would ever consider aging in casks in your basement. Regular quality starfruit sells for 3150 gold each. Iridium quality starfruit wine sells for 6300 gold each. Setting up a starfruit empire is expensive, and slow.. However it’s always worth it.
If you do not have kegs yet, which you might not in your first year. Then Melons and Blueberries are your best bet in summer. Melons take 12 days to grow and they sell for a decent amount of gold. They’re solid. Blueberries take a long 13 days to fully mature, but then they reproduce every four days. And each harvest will get you three blueberries. These are excellent for profits if you’re not turning your crops into artisan goods.
Now for Flower Honey. There are three options here, sunflowers, summer spangles and poppies. Poppies are going to give you flower honey that sells for 540 gold each. Not bad. Fall is the king, but poppy honey is not bad at all.
6. Best Fall Crops In Stardew Valley
It’s time for fall. Fall is a great season, it’s not as amazing as summer however it’s still pretty gosh darn good.
Naturally wheat grows in fall, so if you want to continue growing wheat and making beer, you can. This is a very reliable consistent source of money.
Otherwise there are two viable options to grow in fall. Cranberries and Pumpkins.
Use cranberries if you do not have many kegs or preserve jars. This is because cranberries seeds only take seven days to fully mature, and then every five days you will get two cranberries. You will have so many crops from this, that you literally won’t find the time or space to turn it all into wine…
Otherwise plant pumpkins. Pumpkins take a very standard 12 days to fully mature and they do not regrow. Pumpkins have a very high sell price when compared to your average crop. And if you turn those pumpkins into juice using kegs, you’ll get 1000 gold per pumpkin.
It is important to note that dropping pumpkins into preserve jars will get you pickled pumpkins, and these sell for 966 gold. Which is very similar to the kegs, it’s just a little quicker. Pumpkins are not not bad, it’s not starfruit insanely incredible, however it’s not bad. Pumpkins are great in fall.
Sweet gem Berries are interesting right? Head to the Travelling merchant during spring and summer, and you can buy these seeds for one thousand gold each. This is actually a sweet gem berry seed. These can only be planted in fall and they take a crazy 24 days to fully mature!
These crops sell for between three and six thousand gold and they cannot be processed into artisan goods!! These are really bad for profit… They’re only good if you have tons of seeds and slowly create a huge stockpile of seeds using seedmakers.
Okay Honey! Fall is the absolute king of honey. Fairy rose honey!! Fairy rose honey sells for over 950 gold each, and honey is reproduced every four days. In my opinion, you could skip honey for every season as long as you do not miss fairy rose honey in fall. It’s that good.
7. Best Crop In Stardew Valley.
Ancient fruit get their own entire section because they are that good!! Listen. There are two ways to reliably get an ancient fruit seed. First, from defeating tons of bugs in the mines. And from dropping tons of crops into seed makers and hoping that one turns into an ancient fruit seed.
This means that we need to slowly grow the crop, and drop them into seed makers to truly have an ancient fruit empire.
This is easier said than done as this damn crop takes 28 days to fully mature, and then reproduces every seven days. Fortunately it does grow in spring, summer and fall.. However the fact that it dies in winter is a good enough reason for me to never plant these on my farm. Always grow ancient fruit in the greenhouse, or on your ginger island farm. These two spots have no seasons, so the ancient fruit will grow forever without any risk of dying..
Okay so why do we care about this slow crop where the seeds are hard to get ? Well drop those fruit into kegs and make 2300 gold per crop!! Think about that. They reproduce every seven days. They will last forever on ginger island and in your greenhouse. So every seven days you can drop ten, twenty or even hundreds of ancient fruit into kegs. This is the most reliable way to get ridiculously rich in this game.
That wraps up our guide to the best crops in Stardew Valley. The only crops you should care about in Stardew Valley. You now know exactly which crops are worth your time, which ones to avoid, and how to turn your farm into a gold-making machine. Whether you’re building a Starfruit empire, mass-producing Pale Ale, or setting up endless Ancient Fruit in your greenhouse, the path to getting rich is now crystal clear. Which crop strategy are you going to focus on first? If you enjoyed that, you absolutely need to read this post 10 Games That Are Better Than Stardew Valley to scratch that farming itch even more. Or check out my Stardew Valley Beginner Mistakes Guide to avoid the costly mistakes that slow down your progress. Either way, thanks for reading until the end. I appreciate you.
