Stardew Valley - Clothing

Shirts, trousers and skirts, made at the sewing machine, dyed at the pots or bought from the shops.

Overview

The wardrobe is the one branch of the valley that answers to taste rather than profit. A shirt, a pair of trousers, a hat, a pair of boots, two rings and a trinket can all be worn at once from the player menu, and only the boots, rings and trinket change what happens in a fight. Everything else is there to be looked at, which is why the branch is built around a machine for making clothes and a set of pots for colouring them rather than around a shop.

The whole thing opens with a single piece of Cloth. Carrying one and waking to a sunny day brings Emily out to the farmhouse door, and from that conversation onwards the Sewing Machine and the dye pots in the house she shares with Haley on Willow Lane are both available. A second Sewing Machine arrives later as the payment for the Rock Rejuvenation commission, which is worth taking purely so the kitchen and the wardrobe sit in the same building.

Cloth is the currency of the branch. Wool left on a Loom becomes Cloth in a few hours, so a barn of sheep quietly funds every garment a farm will ever make. Emily sells Cloth from her own stall at the Desert Festival for anyone in a hurry, and a Recycling Machine turns a Soggy Newspaper into a piece as well, which is the cheapest route for a farm that fishes more than it shears.

Groups

Four kinds of thing hang together under this heading. Shirts, trousers, skirts, shorts and hats are the cosmetic layer, made at the machine and recoloured at the pots. Boots and shoes are the layer that matters in the caverns, since they carry defence and immunity and show on the character as well. Rings sit in two slots and hand out passive effects from light to combat bonuses. Trinkets are the newest slot, opened by Combat Mastery, and each one does something odd and specific on its own.

Order

A farm meets the branch in the order its materials arrive. The first Cloth usually turns up before the first sheep, either from a recycled newspaper or from a gift, and that is the moment the machine opens. Early tailoring is a matter of feeding in whatever the day produced and seeing what comes out, because the item on the spool decides the garment.

The random drops come next and keep coming for the rest of the run. Felling a tree, smashing a crate, tilling an Artifact Spot and killing a monster each carry a small fixed chance of dropping a cosmetic item, and panning a riverbed carries a much larger one that climbs with pan upgrades and with the day's luck. A fifth of those drops are furniture, a fifth are hats and the rest are shirts, so a farmer who pans regularly fills a dresser without trying.

The Oasis is the shortcut for anyone who wants a specific look. Sandy puts one random shirt on the shelf each day for a thousand gold, and that shelf is the only place several of the character-creation shirts can be bought at all.

The last garments are tied to the island and to friendship. Seven shirts are made from items that only exist once the boat is running, and Emily's own outfit waits behind marriage and her final scene.

Best

Rank the branch by what a garment changes. Boots are the only clothing in the game that can decide whether a trip to the Skull Cavern ends well, and the machine's best trick is custom-tailoring: putting the boots with the good numbers on the spool and the boots with the good look in the feed moves the stats across and keeps the appearance. That one operation is worth more than every shirt in the dresser.

Among the one-off garments, Emily's Magic Shirt is the hardest to earn and the most sentimental, since it arrives with a hat, boots and matching trousers in a single scene. The Luau Skirt is the one that rewards planning, because fifty Taro Roots grown beside island water pay for it without any gold changing hands. The Mystery Shirt is pure patience at the blacksmith's counter, and Tight Pants come down to three visits a year to a festival hut.

The dye pots are the real prize, though. They are the only tool in the valley that puts an exact colour on an item, and they cost nothing but oddments.

Uses

The pots want one item for each of six colours, red through purple, with a coloured dot in the corner of an item showing which pot it belongs in. Once all six are loaded a bottle lights up and opens hue, saturation and value sliders, which reach black, white and grey as easily as anything else. The worn garment is the one that changes, each piece is dyed separately at no extra cost, and the quality star on an item used as dye is ignored entirely.

The Sewing Machine dyes differently and more bluntly. One item on the spool blends its colour into whatever is in the feed, so a blue shirt dyed with a red item lands on purple. Each item carries a strength of a quarter, a half or the full amount, which means a weak dye needs up to four passes to saturate. A Prismatic Shard or a Rainbow Shell skips all of that and opens the full colour picker.

Tailoring proper takes one Cloth plus one other item, and the other item decides the garment. A Dinosaur Egg becomes a Dinosaur Hat, a Jack-O-Lantern becomes a Pumpkin Mask, a Treasure Chest becomes a Pirate Hat, a Sweet Gem Berry becomes a white silk turban and a Prismatic Shard becomes one of five prismatic pieces at random. Bones of every sort make the same skeleton shirt, which is a tidy use for a museum's leftovers.

The branch is also useful for two jobs. Mr. Qi's Prismatic Grange wants one item of each dye colour in its dropbox, and the dye pot lists are the quickest way to work out what counts.

Strategy

Keep a box of ugly oddments near the pots. Since quality is ignored and the items are consumed, the sensible dye for a red pot is the bruised apple rather than the gold-star cranberry, and a single trip can colour a whole outfit if every piece is worn in turn.

Tailor first and dye second. A garment made at the machine may take dye even when the version chosen at character creation would not, so the route to a specific colour usually runs through making a fresh copy.

Notes

A dresser holds everything in this branch except trinkets, which keeps the backpack clear for work.

Mayor Lewis's lucky purple shorts have a wardrobe secret of their own: feeding them to the machine with a Gold Bar produces a trimmed pair that can still be handed in for his errand and can be worn, which draws a reaction from both Marnie and Lewis.

All Clothing

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Price
Dyeing	-	-
Emily's Magic Shirt		-
Luau Skirt		-
Mystery Shirt		-
Tailoring	-	-
Tight Pants		-