I went to the Stardew Valley profit calculator to monkey around with the numbers. According to the calculator, hops out paces the ancient fruit in terms of profits with the casks. I know people don't mention hops much because they require a lot of work, but if the profits are really that good, I don't mind running a pale ale into casks.
by Feeling-Classroom729
25 Comments
So it looks like the amount you can make via pallet ale is more. So it only takes 2 days to make pale ale in the barrels and then it only takes 34 days to fully age it, so it would be more profitable over all if You’re refilling as much as you can
You can get more hops than Ancient fruit in the same month and so in theory that is more profit. But in practice there’s not really enough space on the farm to age all that pale ale in any reasonable amount of time.
Based on your phrasing, it sounds like you haven’t done it yet and are still in the theory phase. I do recommend giving it a go so you can see what the effort is like yourself. It’ll always be worth it for at least a little bit, and finding where you will get tired of daily maintenance is hard to gauge
However, as for casks, you wont be able to age them all, or anywhere near it to make those theoretical numbers actuate.
I do a mix of hops and ancient fruit. But I find that the hops is very time consuming to harvest every day and then collect every two days from barrels. So this hinders time for other explorations. So that’s something to also consider.
They don’t just require a lot of work, but you can’t walk through them. Which makes placement with Sprinklers really annoying, though water retain fertilizer gets around that. Still, you will lose out on a bunch of placements due to that and the calculator assumes you instantly harvest and replant, as well as perfect keg timing. This is not that impactful on something that takes long, but it’s quite impactful on something like Hops.
If I didn’t do it wrong, adjusting for walking issues the new layout should hold 89 Hops and decrease the revenue, though according to the calculator it will still outperform Ancient Fruit.
That said, the way you farm lategame for a ton of money is by sleep-skipping, so you dont calculate gold gained on a full day basis, instead you look at how many actions you need to do (how much time they take) and then Ancient Fruit takes over. IIRC Starfruit was the most profitable for that, but it requires a bit more work.
Small edit: Just to show how impactful above mentioned is, Hops have to be harvested daily. So every day you have to take actions and it’s worse than Ancient Fruit since you can’t walk through the crops. You also need to Pale Ale every 34 days instead of 56, which is a lot of actions (since you can’t walk through them. So the Hops require at minimum 7 times the effort of time compared to Ancient Fruit by harvesting (let’s just say the sleep time is equal the additional travel time though it isn’t) and that would mean time wise, you can do 7 times the amount of processing/harvest with Ancient Fruit.
7x16m=112m vs Pale Ale 37m (adjusted for 89 Crops). So if you just consider time spent – and I haven’t added in the extra time spent for Kegs replacement – Ancient Fruit wins by a landslide. It’s also the reason why Starfruit is so profitable since you only have to do it once a month but then you have to replant it – I’ll ignore buying seeds and assume someone doing this bought enough seeds for the entire period ahead of time. I don’t recall anymore if you need to replenish fertilizer on them but that would increase time spent by a lot more to switch around in the inventory.
It makes sense. You can farm them everyday instead of every 7 days plus they need only 1,5 days instead of 6 days to age. So in the time you wait for the ancient fruit to ripe and then age you have already sold few pale ale for 300g each base price.
Money per day it’s the best or second best. The trick is that you need a lot of kegs. Endgame solutions is to have sheds with pots, deluxe retaining soil and hops – this gives you hops every day forever and thus forever-income. As it has to be done every day some people opt for pineapples in sheds which is less gold/day but way less time demanding.
So in my last perfection run, I built a shed and filled it with garden pots with 100% retaining soil and planted exclusively hops. It was so much work I gave up and repurposed the shed. I did make far more money with it than even starfruit, but the effort was more than the stardew grind I could tolerate.
I don’t recommend for more than a season, but go for it if you want to try.
If you don’t mind spending all of your time harvesting hops and making pale ale, then I think so. But man oh man does it get tedious after a while, especially if you’re trying to make tons and tons of money. It’s not too bad when you only have like 20-30 plants and kegs, but if you try to scale up the time suck is just absurd
Yes but really its no. The time required to make it worthwhile doesn’t add up, you spend far too much time working the farm to make the money and imo its not worth the hassle. 7 days to check on ancient fruit is amazing time balance.
Production numbers of pale ale will greatly outnumber the amount of casks you can fill. You get a new hops like every day or two but ancient fruit regrows a little longer. aging takes around the same time as ancient fruit wine however, meaning youll have a surplus of unaged beer after a short while
Simple answer: yes. Complex answer: no.
You have to harvest every day and visit every keg every day. Making it alot of work.
Hops sell as pale ale at 420g, but take 37.5 hrs in a keg to make. Which is actually a day and a half.
Here is some simplified math (not accounting the day and half, but giving it each day): 420g x 7days = 2,940g. So each keg, per week, makes 2,940g.
Ancient fruit, since it takes a week to make, is 2,310g.
You can see per keg you’re making more. That’s why the chart says that. But to make that many hops with sprinklers and placement and harvests EVERY day, it’s just too much when you can put a single fruit in and leave it for a week.
If you want something that makes even more money than ancient fruit, Starfruit, and hops? Go mead! Buy it at the oasis shop in the desert on Fridays for 200g. Mead takes half a day to keg, so if you don’t mind visiting every keg twice a day, then you would get (840-400) x 7 =3,080g per keg in a week. Which is better than hops because you can just buy the honey meaning no farm space to grow it. It actually kegs easier, (half a day instead of a day and a half), and you make more.
Cheers
I make so much pale ale. Once mature, the plants provide hops daily, and it’s a one day turnaround in the keg. It’s fast cash if nothing else
Unless we can auto harvest in sheds and put in kegs I.e. automate the process
Hops greenhouse means harvest half the day and keg it the remaining , making the game just clicker game
0 gameplay, by the time we achieve this we already at 100million mark where we already have everything
True Late game stardew is decorating the farm imo
I think the important note is also how much time/how many kegs you’ll need
Sure hops, will out produce ancient fruit, but then you need to keg each one of those and rotate them out more often.
How much space are you willing to sacrifice to kegs?
Ancient fruit and well, anything else, is generally lower maintenance than hops. I don’t want to have to collect the hops everyday, when I could be mining or fishing
On paper it’s better, in practice it’s much more time consuming and doesn’t give enough time to do other thingsÂ
In real life aging a pale ale is going to ruin the flavor.
… I had no idea you could age anything other than cheese and wine 🤦
Ancient fruit is a once a week harvest which conveniently is also how long it takes the wine to keg. Pale ale is harvested *every single day* and takes 1.5 days. So not only will you be harvesting them every day, you’ll also require 2x as many kegs as you have plants.
Yea no thanks.
Pale Ale is potentially the highest profit crop product, but there’s a massive catch. It is extremely awkward and labor intensive.
1) It regrows daily (that’s why it can make so much). That means daily harvesting, and the need for a massive number of kegs for processing (roughly 2 for each plant). It’s very labor intensive. This interferes with other activities like mining and fishing.
2) It’s a trellis crop, so planting it is awkward. You cannot plant nearly as many hops as ancient fruit.
3) It’s not particularly high value on a unit basis, so it’s arguably a waste to put it in your limited number of casks (cellar only). Casks should usually be used on the highest value items (Star fruit or ancient fruit wine), or possibly cheese (not as valuable, but a quicker turnaround).
Casks aren’t good for making money quickly (even putting the really expensive wines in technically makes less gold per day). They’re good for getting a massive chunk of money after a long time, with no additional effort from you.
In terms of gold per day in casks, starfruit wine is the best. For just kegs, pale ale is the best. Really good for early game. In the later game, you’ll likely get tired of the daily grind.
Depends.
i dont calculate in “Money per day” anymore. – i calculate in “money per player interaction”.
and there is ancient fruit wine one of the best things.
You will do nothing but collect hops and fill kegs 3 times a day. Sure, it pays, but at that point you aren’t really playing the game anymore.
Always the pale ale takes a day, A DAY !!! And it’s so easy to harvest.
It’s the king of summer year 1. Get 24 or so and it will fund your whole startup of your farm