Stardew Valley - Foraged Minerals

These minerals lie on the ground in the caves and the desert, ready to pick up without a pickaxe.

Overview

Four crystals underground are picked up rather than broken out. They sit loose on the cave floor among the rubble, and one click lifts a stone exactly the way a daffodil is lifted out of the grass. That one difference decides everything else about them. The pickaxe stays on the belt, the Foraging professions rather than the Mining ones govern the haul, and Gatherer, taken at Foraging level five, gives each stone a chance of coming up twice. Clearing a floor is therefore worth a slow lap with an open hand before the pickaxe comes out at all.

The four of them together make up the Geologist's Bundle in the Boiler Room, and that is the one job in the valley that can be filled entirely off cave floors. Nothing has to be grown, caught, cooked or bought for it. Five Omni Geodes come back for the set, which is a generous return for four stones that were lying in the way.

They also work as a depth gauge. The stone underfoot says how far down the lift has gone, because each kind keeps to its own band of the shaft. A bag that holds all four is a bag belonging to a farm that has been to the bottom.

Groups

The split that matters in practice is between the two that go into a furnace and the two that go into a crafting recipe. Quartz and Fire Quartz both smelt into Refined Quartz, which puts them on the supply side of the farm rather than in the shipping bin. Earth Crystal and Frozen Tear are collected instead towards a fixed number: one crystal for a Mayonnaise Machine, ten for an Earth Obelisk, ten tears for a Warrior Ring.

A second split runs by rarity. Quartz turns up on any floor of The Mines, in the Quarry Mine and all through the Skull Cavern, which makes it the one stone a farm will always have too much of. The other three are banded, so a run that needs a particular one has to go to the right depth and nowhere else.

Order

Quartz arrives in the first week, often before the farm owns a weapon worth the name. Earth Crystal comes with it, since the shallowest floors are where the resinous lumps sit, and the pair of them is usually enough to start the Boiler Room scroll off.

Frozen Tear waits for the lift at floor forty and keeps to the icy stretch below it. If the Shrine of Challenge has been switched on and the dangerous version of the mine is running, that stretch narrows to the last nine floors before the lava, which makes a tear noticeably harder to find on a dangerous run than a safe one.

Fire Quartz belongs to the lava floors from eighty down, and to the Skull Cavern afterwards. A farm that reaches it has usually already got the furnace, the coal habit and the sprinkler recipes that make it worth smelting rather than selling, so the last stone of the four is also the first one that pays for itself.

Locations

Away from the shaft, panning in any river or lake turns the three deeper stones up, and the shimmering patch that marks a panning spot moves daily. Fishing treasure chests carry all of them, which is one more reason the treasure hook pays for itself. Garbage cans in town give them up once the mine has been explored deep enough, and a bin outside the Museum is the most generous of them.

Monsters hand over a few. Stone Golems drop Quartz, Dust Sprites drop a Frozen Tear now and then, and both Duggies and the skull-headed flyers in the lava floors give up Earth Crystals. Geodes are the other steady route: the plain shell holds Earth Crystal, the frozen shell holds Frozen Tear, the magma shell holds Fire Quartz, and an Omni Geode can hold any of them.

Three odder sources are worth knowing. A Ghostfish pond produces Quartz as it fills and an Ice Pip pond produces Frozen Tears. The Wizard posts crystals as presents once he is on speaking terms. Pierre's booth at the Feast of the Winter Star sometimes offers a Fire Quartz or a Frozen Tear at a price that only makes sense to a farm in a hurry.

Uses

The furnace is the heart of the branch. One Quartz and one coal give one Refined Quartz, while one Fire Quartz and the same coal give three, so the red crystal is by far the better feedstock and the clear one is best thought of as the overflow. Refined Quartz is then the quiet ingredient behind a Quality Sprinkler, a Lightning Rod, a Garden Pot, a Solar Panel and the Farm Computer, which means a mine walk early in a run turns directly into watering that the farmer no longer has to do by hand.

The fixed recipes are the other half. An Earth Crystal goes into a Mayonnaise Machine, and ten of them are the organic half of an Earth Obelisk, alongside the iridium. A Fire Quartz is the heat in both a Dehydrator and a Slime Egg-Press. Ten Frozen Tears make the Warrior Ring, which is the cheapest reliable damage boost a mid-run farm can equip.

Beyond the workbench, each of the four has a slot in the Museum, and the description only appears on the item once Gunther has a copy. All four can be duplicated in a Crystalarium, though a gem is a better tenant. All four also go into the Sewing Machine as shirt material and into the dye pots at 2 Willow Lane.

Prices

These are the cheapest minerals in the game, and the Mining skill's stone-selling specialism adds three tenths to all four, which is worth having only if the farm sells its crystals rather than smelting them. The smelting sums are the ones that decide the branch. One Refined Quartz is worth twice a raw Quartz, so the clear crystal should never reach the bin while there is coal in the chest. A Fire Quartz smelted into three bars is worth half again what the crystal fetches raw, and the crystal itself is already the dearest of the four.

Earth Crystal and Frozen Tear are worth keeping rather than selling until their recipes are done, because ten tears is a real hunt and the Earth Obelisk asks for ten crystals on top of a fortune in iridium.

Notes

The expensive mistake in this branch is a bomb. All four stones shatter in a blast along with the rock around them, so a floor cleared with explosives loses whatever was lying on it. Walk the floor with an open hand first, light the fuse second.

Picking these crystals up behaves oddly in the skill books. A long-standing quirk awards Foraging experience only for the duplicate that the Gatherer profession creates, which makes a Gatherer farm level slightly faster underground than the stones themselves suggest.

Fish ponds ask for them as well as producing them. Ghostfish want Quartz to grow their pond, Ice Pips want Frozen Tears, Lava Eels want Fire Quartz, and several river and lake fish want an Earth Crystal or two, so a few spare crystals in a chest save a trip down the shaft later.

All Foraged Minerals

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Price
Earth Crystal		50g
Fire Quartz		100g
Frozen Tear		75g
Quartz		25g