Stardew Valley - Fall Crops

Fall crops are planted and harvested in fall. They die when winter begins.

Overview

Fall is the season the valley saves its best soil for. Ten plants belong to it alone, and between them they cover every job a field can do: cheap leaves that turn over in four days, roots and buds worth more each than most Summer produce, two plants that keep giving until the frost, a flower grown for what the bees do with it, and one seed worth more than a barn.

The season runs on a hard deadline. Everything in the ground dies on the first morning of Winter, and the longest of these crops needs most of the month to finish, so the planting order matters more here than in any other season. A fall field is really a set of countdowns started on the first morning and collected before the last.

What makes the branch rich is the set of machines waiting at the other end of it. A keg turns a pumpkin into juice worth three times the vegetable, a Preserves Jar turns an artichoke, a beet or a grain of amaranth into pickles worth three times again, and a mill turns a single beet into three pieces of sugar for the kitchen. Fall is also when the Community Center's Pantry asks for its seasonal set, and when the valley's one farming contest is judged, so produce left unsold has somewhere useful to go.

The season's other quirk is that two of its best plants are not sold by Pierre at all. Beet seeds come from the desert, and the seed behind the valley's most valuable crop appears only on the travelling cart, which makes a fall plan partly a matter of who turns up at the farm gate.

Groups

Four shapes sit inside the branch. The single-harvest crops are the bulk of it: yam, beet, artichoke, amaranth, Bok Choy and pumpkin all give one picking and then leave the tile free. Those are the plants a farm plants in waves, and the fast ones can be sown twice in a season.

The regrowers are the two that pay rent. One berry bush yields a pair of berries every five days and keeps going, and one bush yields a single fruit on the same cycle. Both ask for the first morning of the season and punish a missed collection, because a harvest skipped is a harvest lost rather than postponed.

The flower stands alone. It takes nearly a fortnight to open and sells for a good price, but its real job is sitting within five tiles of a Bee House, where it turns ordinary honey into the most valuable honey in the game.

The fourth group is one plant. A Rare Seed takes most of the season to swell into a single berry worth several times anything else grown outdoors, and a Seed Maker fed one berry produces more rare seeds, so one purchase can become a field.

Order

The first morning is the one that counts. Cranberries sown on the first day mature in a week and then yield four more times before the season ends, and every day of delay costs one of those pickings. The same morning is the deadline for the Rare Seed, because twenty-four days of growth leaves no slack at all.

Pumpkins want planting inside the first half of the month, since thirteen days of growth means the second sowing has to go in by about the fifteenth. The fast crops fill the gaps afterwards: Bok Choy finishes in four days and can be turned over several times, and beet and eggplant are not far behind.

The one awkward plant is the artichoke, whose seeds reach Pierre's shelves only from a second year onwards. A first-year farm reaches it another way, by sowing Mixed Seeds in fall and feeding whatever comes up into a Seed Maker, which turns one lucky artichoke into a steady supply.

Best

Measured by gold a day, the Rare Seed is in a class of its own, earning roughly four times what anything else in the season manages. It is also a gamble on the travelling cart appearing with one, and the berry is worth so much that most farms give the first one away rather than sell it.

Below that the field is tight, and amaranth and pumpkin are the practical anchors. Amaranth is cheap, quick and turns into unusually valuable pickles. Pumpkin has the highest single price of any ordinary crop in the season, becomes juice worth over a thousand gold in a keg, and is one of the handful of plants that can merge into a giant crop.

Cranberries have the reputation but need discipline. Harvested on schedule for the whole season they are among the best earners in the game, and harvested once they lose money outright, because the seed costs more than three berries fetch. Bok choy sits close behind on daily profit with none of that risk, which makes it the safe filler for any corner of the field.

Beet is the margin champion. The seeds cost twenty gold at the Oasis and the root sells for a hundred, which is a return no other crop in the season comes close to, and pickled beets are worth more again. For a farm short of money in its first fall, a bus ticket to the desert pays for itself several times over.

Uses

The Pantry's seasonal scroll asks for a yam, a pumpkin, an eggplant and corn, which is the one reason to keep a few of each aside before the kegs get them. The quality scroll in the same room will take gold-grade pumpkins, eggplants or yams, and the dye scroll on the Bulletin Board accepts amaranth or beet when a save has shuffled its lists.

The kitchen gets more out of fall than out of any other season. A yam and a pumpkin together make the most energy-dense dish of the season, a yam and sugar make a sweet that sells well, and Bok Choy with cranberries and an artichoke makes the dish that raises maximum energy and walking speed at once. Cranberries alone cover a candy, a sauce that helps in the mines and a stuffing that adds defence, while pumpkin covers a pie and a soup that raises luck.

Two plants do jobs nothing else does. A beet dropped into a mill comes back the next morning as three pieces of sugar, which is the only farm-grown route to the ingredient half the dessert recipes want. A Fairy Rose and a diamond make Fairy Dust, which finishes whatever a keg, furnace or cask is working on instantly.

The flower stall at the Spirit's Eve festival teaches the jack-o-lantern, which takes a pumpkin and a torch, and the Fair's judging panel rewards exactly the variety and quality a fall field produces.

Strategy

Plan the season around machine capacity rather than around field size. A farm with ten kegs and ten jars should plant whatever those machines pay best for and sell the rest raw, because an unprocessed crop sitting in a chest earns nothing while it waits.

Plant the giant-crop candidate in blocks of nine. Each three by three square of pumpkins gets a small chance every morning of merging into one enormous plant, and the only way to court it is to lay the field out in squares and leave them standing.

Keep the gifts in mind before the kegs run. Evelyn loves a beet, Linus loves a yam, and a pumpkin pleases Abigail, Krobus and Willy, which makes fall the cheapest month of the year for buying goodwill. The flower is loved by Evelyn and Jas as well, and a single bloom is worth more as a birthday present than as a sale.

Notes

Amaranth is cut with a scythe rather than picked by hand, which catches out a farmer sweeping a field clean with the harvesting swing and finding the grain already in the bag.

The Fairy Rose grows in six colours with equal odds, and each colour takes its own inventory and chest slot, so a large planting fills a chest faster than the count suggests.

Yams turn up underground as well as in the ground: the small digging creatures in the mines occasionally drop one, which is how a farm sometimes meets the crop before it meets the seed.

Two neighbours write letters in fall asking for this season's produce. Marnie wants amaranth early in the month for her cows, and Caroline wants a pumpkin late in it for carving, and both pay a full heart of friendship on top of the gold.

All Fall Crops

Each of these crops with its season, growth time and normal-quality sell price.

Crop	Image	Season	Growth	Price
Amaranth		Fall	7 days	150g
Artichoke		Fall	8 days	160g
Beet		Fall	6 days	100g
Bok Choy		Fall	4 days	80g
Cranberries		Fall	7 days	-
Eggplant		Fall	5 days	60g
Fairy Rose		Fall	12 days	-
Pumpkin		Fall	13 days	320g
Sweet Gem Berry		Fall	24 days	-
Yam		Fall	10 days	160g