It’s happened to all of us. Whether you sow crops, husband animals, catch fish, or brave mines eventually your farm grows to be massive. Ideally this isn’t a bad thing, right? Well maybe not so much. A bigger farm means more time spent taking care of everything, after all. It’s hard to woo a lover or get that last nagging object for your bundle when you have to spend half of each and every day on the farm. Well, worry no longer. Here are ten ways for you to save time on your farm, from starting out fresh to being deep in the late game.
1. Upgrade Your Water Can
This might sound like an obvious thing for Stardew pros, but new players may not see the benefit of this when upgrading axes and pickaxes to get at harder materials is much more present. However, the truth is that when you start out you have little choice but to care for your crops by hand, which means you have to water them everyday or risk them going bad. That’s why water can upgrades are so useful. Simply by holding down your assigned control your water can will stretch out further than a single tile, three tiles in a straight line for bronze watering cans and five in a row for steel watering cans. That means three or five times less you have to spend watering your crops. Certainly worth it as soon as you can afford it.
2. Use Sprinklers
Like watering cans, sprinklers will help you save time watering your crops by automatically watering some of the surrounding tiles every morning and without having to be refilled. Sounds better than a watering can, right? It is, but its unfortunately more expensive. Not only do you have to hit certain farming levels before you can obtain the recipe, but early sprinklers (which cost 1 copper bar and 1 iron bar to make) only water tiles orthogonaly. However, while its wise to stick to the watering can at first, later sprinklers are an unquestionable boon. Sprinklers at level 6 farming (which you’ll get sometime around the mid game) water all eight adjacent tiles, and sprinklers at level 9 farming (which you’ll get sometime in the later game) water twenty-four adjacent tiles. The only difficulty in making them comes with the level 9 sprinkler that needs a battery pack to operate, but its well worth it to have ten or so around your farming grounds to save you time from having to water everything yourself.
3. Fences are a Waste
Yes, they look pretty, but the aim here is efficiency, not aesthetics. While the game makes it seem like fences are great the truth is, they do nothing that you can’t solve by other means and thus waste your resources (especially as you have to replace them about once a year or so). Sure, they block off grass from your farms and keep your animals penned in, but non-penned in animals won’t escape your farm, and if your put your barn near wild grass and keep the door opened the animals will wander out and eat for you, effectively containing the grass and providing for themselves. In essence, fences are nothing but a headache and blight that takes up space on your farm.
4. Auto Feeders/Collectors
Marnie sells these at her shop south of your farm. Just as they sound, they automatically collect your animal products (everything from eggs to milk to feathers) and automatically feed your animals hay from your hay silo (at least until it runs empty). While yes you do have to keep your silo stocked on hay and yes you will still need to pet all of your animals every day to obtain the maximum level of product the auto collector allows you to skip those milking animations and cuts down on your time for running around to collect eggs and feathers and Marnie also sells hay for cheap (which means you have to go down to her place and spend some money every now and then, but its well worth the investment so you don’t have to lay down lines of hay every day, especially for the larger barns and coops).
5. Unlock the Minecart First
While this doesn’t pertain to your farm, traveling in and of itself takes a great deal of time to perform. Simply walking from your farm to Clint’s blacksmith or up the mines takes at least 2-3 hours just to get there, not to mention getting back. One of the community center bundles, however, unlocks a minecart system that can take you from the bus stop to the mines and to right outside the blacksmith (and to the quarry as well once that’s unlocked). And the best part is? It does cost any extra time. You can appear from the mine to the blacksmith in just a few minutes versus what would normally be a few hours. Of course, the boiler room bundle does require mostly things you can find mining and adventuring, so it may take some time to gather it all up, but after you apply some of the other methods here you should have plenty of time to get the necessary elements, and it saves a huge amount of time in the long run.
6. Maximize your Greenhouse
Your greenhouse is a precious commodity that shouldn’t go to waste. Not only does it allow you to grow any crop despite the season, but its compact nature makes it great for easy watering and gathering. It’s best to put your most prosperous crops here: starfruit, cactus fruit, and ancient fruit to name a few. You can also line the outskirts of the greenhouse with fruit trees of any manner so long as you follow the rule that their adjacent tiles are empty, but even so it helps you save a lot of space. In this way if you feel you need to get other things accomplished (or just aren’t up for much harvesting that day) you can at least get your most valuable products to market swift and easy.
7. Plan Ahead
Not just a good skill for the real world it turns out. We’ve all had days where we’ve gone into town for one reason only to return home and realize that we meant to do more. Granted planning may sound like a pain, but in truth all you have to do is pause your game at the start of each day, make a small list of what you want to accomplish, and then plan out your route for the day so that you don’t skip over anything you meant to do. With the minecart unlocked this isn’t as necessary, but without it walking back and forth takes up a huge chunk of your day while planning it out takes two minutes tops.
8. Keep Your Inventory as Open as Possible
While its convenient to carry around some tools constantly such as your pickaxe, axe, or even hoe for digging up potential treasures, keeping your inventory as open as possible is ideal. Remember that not only does every item take up a slot, but every item of every quality. As such if you only have five spaces of your pack open, they’ll fill up fast. And what does that mean? More dreaded walking. It may not seem like a lot, but if you have to take your eggs from your coop to your house, then your milk from your barn to your house, then each type of crop…it adds up fast. Keeping an open inventory allows you to grab everything at once and eliminate the waste of time of having to go back and forth.
9. Put Chests Everywhere
Let’s say you have an empty inventory, but your farm is still massive. Even with more than twenty slots open if your farm is big and diverse enough you won’t have a lot of space, even with the maximum upgrades to your pack. So what do you do now? Waste the product? No way! Instead, try putting a chest at each location: one in the coop, the barn, the greenhouse, near each type of crop, or near ore veins if you have them on your farm. That way if your inventory happens to be too full today you can still save yourself the time of having to walk to and fro by simply storing them away today and picking them up another day when your inventory is less cumbersome. Chests do require a bit of wood but remember that this a one time deal. You only need to put one or two chests down at each location, and it’s an investment well worth it.
10. Your House is Prime Space
Like before, remember that this is about efficiency, not how pretty your farm looks. Or how your house looks. But what can you put in your house besides chests? Resources makers. Your furnaces, recycling machines, kegs, and preserves jars to name a few. They’re directly in your path and hard to miss. Why bother taking the time to walk out to a shed when you can operate your machines on the way out the door? And what’s more you get to harvest them all on your way to bed. Just be sure to keep them out of the path of your spouse! They’ll complain about the house being a mess if their pathing is blocked.
