Stardew Valley - Bundles

Bundles are the Community Center's shopping lists. Each room asks for sets of crops, fish, forage, minerals and artisan goods, and every finished room repairs something in the valley. Completing them all restores the building and the town around it.

Overview

Bundles are offerings left for the Junimos, the small forest spirits living in the derelict Community Center north of Pierre's General Store. Each request is written on a golden scroll, and each scroll asks for a set of the valley's own produce rather than gold. Filling one brings a Junimo out to carry the goods away, and filling every scroll in a room earns a larger favour that changes something in the valley outside the farm gate.

Getting in takes a little luck with the weather. The scene that unlocks the door fires only on an approach along the bus road, in the morning, with no rain falling, and not before the fifth day of the first Spring. Mayor Lewis opens the place up, glimpses the Junimos without understanding what he has seen, and settles on rats as the explanation. Reading the first scroll afterwards brings a letter from the Wizard, and his potion grants the Forest Magic that makes the writing legible. Until that potion is drunk the scrolls are nothing but strange marks.

The building opens its rooms gradually. Only the Crafts Room is visible at the start, and finishing a single bundle anywhere brings two more rooms into use, with further rooms following as the count climbs. A farm can therefore unlock most of the building in its first week by emptying a morning's wood and stone into one scroll.

Quality rules are gentler than they look. A scroll that names no quality takes anything, including the odd silver item that happened to be in the bag, and a scroll that does name a quality accepts anything better. Mixed stacks are fine as long as the total adds up. Several scrolls also show more items than they have slots to fill, which means the display is a menu rather than a shopping list, and only enough items to fill the slots are needed.

Rewards arrive at two speeds. A bundle's own reward can be taken straight from the scroll, while a finished room is paid overnight with a scene of the Junimos at work. Rewards left on a scroll are not lost when the scroll disappears. A brown sack appears next to the hut holding everything uncollected, and it stays there until the last item has been taken out, even once the building has reopened.

The other path through this branch is the one that skips it. Paying Morris at JojaMart for a membership permanently replaces the Community Center with a Joja Warehouse, and the same town projects are then bought with gold through a development form, one project per day. The Joja route is faster for a farm with money and slower for one without, and it leaves the friendship reward out altogether. The choice cannot be unwound within a single save.

Order

A farm meets this branch in roughly the order the rooms appear, and the calendar does most of the deciding. The Crafts Room is first because wild food and building material are what a first-week farm actually owns. Its seasonal scrolls then hold the room open for a full year, so the sensible habit is to keep one of everything found and let the room close whenever it closes.

The Pantry is the room worth hurrying, because the greenhouse it restores pays back every day for the rest of the run. Its artisan scroll is usually the brake, since a cask and a few kegs have to exist before anything in it can be made, which places that room near the end of a first year at the earliest.

The Vault is the only room that can be finished in an afternoon. It takes nothing but gold, and a profitable Summer can clear the whole room in one visit. That matters out of proportion to the effort, because the bus it repairs opens the Calico Desert, and the desert is where a sandfish for the Fish Tank and a coconut for the Pantry come from. For that reason the Fish Tank is normally the last room standing even though its early scrolls are easy.

The Boiler Room waits on a furnace and on a little mining depth, so it tends to fill through the second half of the first year as geodes pile up. The Bulletin Board asks for cooked food, dyes, animal feed and the stranger items from the mines, and it needs a kitchen, so it belongs to a farm that has already upgraded the farmhouse.

Beyond the six rooms there is a late postscript. Once the Community Center is restored, the first night before rain brings a lightning strike on the abandoned JojaMart and opens its doors on one last scroll, which asks for the sort of goods only a mature farm makes.

Rewards

The room rewards are the reason this branch matters more than any other collection in the game. One repairs the bridge beside The Mines and opens the stone-rich hillside behind it. One restores the ruined greenhouse on the farm, which is the single biggest change any reward makes, since crops, fruit trees and ordinary trees all grow inside it whatever the season. One clears the glittering boulder choking the stream west of the mine entrance and brings Willy round with a Copper Pan for working the riverbeds. One mends the minecarts and turns the walk between the bus road, the town, the mine and the quarry into a two-second hop. One repairs the bus itself. The last of them is a gift rather than a repair: the whole town warms by two hearts, delivered as a letter from Lewis explaining that long-forgotten parcels have been turning up in people's homes.

The individual bundle rewards are a mixed bag. Some are genuinely useful early, such as the seed packets and the fertiliser that arrive long before a farm could buy them in quantity. Some are convenience items that a crafting table could make anyway, and those are best thought of as a saving of materials rather than a prize. A few are small luxuries, including furniture and a ring that lights the mines.

Finishing everything earns the Stardew Hero Trophy at a reopening ceremony in the town square, and the ceremony has a choice in it: Pierre can either talk Morris out of town or settle matters with his fists. JojaMart closes down either way, which frees Pierre to open his shop every day of the week, while Clint shuts the blacksmith on Fridays because he would rather be at the Community Center. The last scroll in the abandoned warehouse pays for the Movie Theater, which becomes the town's best source of friendship for the rest of the run.

Strategy

The branch rewards one habit above all others: a dedicated chest that nothing is ever sold out of. Every scroll in the building wants something that is also food, also money, or also a cooking ingredient, and the usual way a room slips into a second year is a busy evening at the shipping bin. Hovering over an item in the player menu makes the golden scroll icon pulse when a Junimo still wants it, which is the cheapest check available.

Plan around the seasons rather than the lists. Anything that grows, swims or sprouts in only one season is the real deadline, and everything else can be caught up later. Buying one spare of each seed packet in the week it appears, and keeping one of every fish caught until its scroll is closed, covers most of the risk for very little gold.

Watch the Traveling Cart. Almost every bundle item has a chance of appearing on her waggon, which makes her the escape hatch for a season that was missed, a crop that was eaten, or a fish that refuses to bite. Her prices are unkind, but a single purchase can save a year.

Notes

A new save can opt for Remixed Bundles, which reshuffles which scrolls appear in each room and changes some of the items asked for. The rooms and their rewards stay the same, so the plan above holds; only the shopping changes.

Completing two rooms on the same day shows only one of the overnight scenes, and a room finished the day before a wedding has its scene skipped entirely. The reward itself still arrives in both cases.

The cracked tank in the Fish Tank room starts holding water once its scrolls are closed. Three residents move in, a catfish, a sunfish and a snail, and more swimmers and ornaments can be dropped in afterwards. The clock on the front of the restored building also starts keeping time with the valley again.

All Bundles

Every room of the Community Center, with the number of bundles it holds and what finishing them repairs.