Stardew Valley - Foraging

Foraging covers everything picked up off the ground rather than grown or bought. Wild food appears across the valley with the seasons, the beach has its own finds, and the caves hide mushrooms and roots. Raising the Foraging skill makes wild food better and trees give more wood.

Overview

Foraging is the valley's free harvest. Flowers, roots, berries, shells and mushrooms appear by themselves on the open maps, and anything lying on the ground belongs to whoever picks it up. No seed is bought, no ground is tilled, no watering can is filled. In a first Spring, when the fields are a few rows of parsnips and the wallet is empty, a morning loop of the forest and the beach is usually the best-paid hour of the day.

The same skill also covers the axe. Chopping trees, clearing stumps and cutting the great logs all count towards Foraging levels, and every level adds a point of axe proficiency, so a farm that clears land is levelling the gathering skill at the same time. The skill's own rewards are a steady drip of useful recipes: the wild seed packets, the Charcoal Kiln, the Tapper, the Mushroom Log, the Lightning Rod and the warp totems that shorten every journey afterwards.

Quality is what turns this branch from pocket money into real money. Forage comes in the same four grades as crops, and the grade is rolled against the Foraging level when the item spawns. The Botanist profession, chosen at level ten, ends the rolling altogether and makes every foraged item iridium, which doubles the branch's income permanently and for no further work. Nothing else in the game improves a whole category of items so completely in one choice.

Groups

Four seasonal sets grow across the valley's ordinary maps, and each set is the material for that season's foraging bundle. Spring brings the roots and the yellow flowers, Summer the berries and the sweet peas, Fall the mushrooms, nuts and plums, and Winter the crocus and the Crystal Fruit, with two Winter items hidden under the snow and dug out with a hoe rather than picked up.

The Beach runs on its own list, which pays better than the valley's. Shells, coral and sea urchins wash up there, and the Rainbow Shell in Summer and the Nautilus Shell in Winter are the two prizes. The Mines carry a short list of their own, the Cave Carrot and the red and purple mushrooms, which appear on the ground among the rocks. The Secret Woods, reached once the great log west of the farm has been cut through, is the most generous square of ground in the game and refills its forage daily rather than weekly, while Ginger Island adds a jungle, a mushroom cave and the wild ginger that has to be hoed up.

A few items belong to the skill rather than to any map list. Sap and Grass come off trees and the ground, truffles are rooted up by pigs on the farm, and the Magma Cap grows in the volcano.

Order

The first Spring is the branch's best week relative to everything else a farm owns. Four forageables cover the valley, the Crafts Room scroll wants one of each, and the gold from the rest buys the seeds that the farm cannot otherwise afford. Salmonberry season then arrives in the middle of the month, four days during which the bushes all over town can be shaken for berries, and a farm with a few Foraging levels takes two or three berries from every bush rather than one.

Summer and Fall are quieter on the ground and busier in the bushes, with blackberry season in Fall mirroring the salmonberry days of Spring. Winter is the season this branch carries. Nothing grows in the fields, and the snow hides snow yams and winter roots that come up under the hoe anywhere debris can be cleared. A Winter spent walking the valley with a hoe in hand is the traditional answer to a season with no crops.

The late additions arrive with the map. The Secret Woods opens as soon as a steel axe exists, the desert opens with the bus, and the island opens last of all. Each one adds a forage list that the valley cannot supply, and the island's mushroom cave is the only place several of the best mushrooms appear reliably.

Best

Truffles are the top of the branch by a wide margin, and they are the one part of it a farm manufactures. Adult pigs let out of the barn root them up across the farm in every season but Winter, they sell for more than any other foraged item, and a Truffle in an Oil Maker becomes something dearer still. A barn of pigs is the standard late-run answer to what foraging is for.

Among the things that genuinely lie on the ground, the Magma Cap and the Purple Mushroom are the most valuable, both from underground rather than from the valley. The Chanterelle from the Secret Woods, the Crystal Fruit of Winter and the Rainbow Shell of the Summer beach are the best the open maps offer.

The two permanent upgrades matter more than any single item. The bear's knowledge, earned by carrying Maple Syrup into the Secret Woods, trebles the price of both wild berries from then on, which turns four days of berry season into a serious payday. Spring onion mastery, earned through friendship with Jas and Vincent, multiplies the value of the valley's cheapest forageable by five.

Locations

Cindersap Forest is the richest ordinary map and the obvious first lap, with the Mountain, the Bus Stop, the railroad and the town streets filling out a loop that takes a single morning. The Secret Woods deserves a daily visit of its own because it restocks daily and holds hardwood stumps as well.

The Beach has its own list and its own pattern, since storms wash extra items up, and the Desert and Ginger Island both spawn forage on sand as well as grass, which is why they feel fuller than their greenery suggests. The Forest Farm layout spawns seasonal forage on the farm's own ground, which makes it the one map where this branch runs without leaving home.

Uses

The Community Center is the first use. Four seasonal scrolls in the Crafts Room are pure forage, and the Exotic Foraging Bundle takes the stranger finds from the caves, the desert and the woods. Those scrolls are why the standing advice is to keep one of everything picked up during the first year.

The wild seed packets are the most underrated use. One of each of a season's forageables crafts into ten seed packets, and in Spring, Summer and Fall the packets together are worth considerably more than the items that made them, so the crafting bench is a straight profit on a bag of flowers. Those packets can also be planted, and what grows from them is forage again, which closes the loop.

Cooking and preserving take the rest. Positive-energy forage goes into a Preserves Jar as pickles or a Keg as juice, and foraged fruits and the better mushrooms dry in a Dehydrator. Several of the branch's items are the cheapest energy food available in a first year, which is a use worth more than their price while the farmer is still running out of stamina by noon.

As gifts the branch is narrow but reliable. Harvey, Leah and Linus like almost everything wild, George loves a leek, and Sandy loves a crocus. Those four cover most of what a bag of forage is good for socially.

Strategy

Walk the same loop every day and finish it by Saturday. Each outdoor map holds a limited number of spawned items per week, the counter resets on Sunday, and everything left standing is swept away before Sunday morning and again on the first day of a new season. Anything not picked up by the weekend was never collected at all.

Clear the maps to make them richer. Items only appear on certain kinds of ground, never under objects, and a map choked with weeds and sticks has fewer valid squares than a tidy one. Clearing debris on the maps that are walked daily quietly raises how much they produce.

Take Gatherer at level five and Botanist at level ten. The double harvest pays immediately and the quality upgrade pays forever, and the pair of them is the standard route for anyone who intends to sell forage rather than only chop trees. Forester and Lumberjack are the alternative for a farm that burns through wood and hardwood, and a statue in the sewers can change the choice later.

Let the Farm Cave decide itself. Demetrius offers a choice between fruit bats, which drop foraged fruit indoors all year, and mushroom bins, which produce mushrooms on a schedule. The bats suit a farm that wants bundle items and gifts; the bins suit a farm that wants steady money and dehydrator stock.

Notes

Villagers walk through forage and destroy it, which is why items on the town's paths vanish by lunchtime and why the quiet corners of a map keep their contents longer.

The quality rules have a few exceptions that catch out a Botanist farm. Mushrooms taken from a tapped Mushroom Tree, items dug up with a hoe and seaweed all arrive at ordinary quality however high the skill, so the snow yams and winter roots of a Winter loop are worth the same to everybody.

The Tracker profession is better than its reputation. It puts small arrows at the edge of the screen pointing at every forage item and Artifact Spot off screen, including the ones tucked behind buildings, and a green arrow at any panning spot. On the large maps that saves more walking than the doubled harvest of the alternative.

All Foraging

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Season	Price
Blackberry		Fall	-
Cave Carrot		All	25g
Chanterelle		Fall	160g
Coconut		All	100g
Common Mushroom		Spring (Secret Woods); Summer (Forest Farm); Fall (Stardew Valley; Secret Woods; Forest Farm); All (Dangerous Mines; Ginger Island mushroom cave)	40g
Coral		All	80g
Crocus		Winter	-
Crystal Fruit		Winter	150g
Daffodil		Spring	30g
Dandelion		Spring	40g
Fiddlehead Fern		Summer; All on Ginger Island Jungle, Skull Cavern and Dangerous Mines	-
Ginger		All	60g
Grass		Spring; Summer; Fall	-
Hazelnut		Fall	90g
Holly		Winter	80g
Leek		Spring	60g
Magma Cap		-	400g
Morel		Spring	150g
Nautilus Shell		All (Beach Farm; Dangerous Mines); Winter (The Beach)	120g
Purple Mushroom		All	250g
Rainbow Shell		All (Beach Farm; Dangerous Mines); Summer (The Beach)	300g
Red Mushroom		Summer (Secret Woods); Fall (Secret Woods; Forest Farm); All (other)	75g
Salmonberry		15-18 Spring (bushes); All (the Farm Cave)	-
Sap		-	2g
Sea Urchin		All	160g
Seaweed		All	20g
Snow Yam		Winter	100g
Spice Berry		Summer; All (The Farm Cave)	80g
Spring Onion		Spring	-
Sweet Pea		Summer	-
Truffle		Spring; Summer; Fall	625g
Weeds		Spring; Summer; Fall	-
Wild Horseradish		Spring	50g
Wild Plum		Fall	80g
Winter Root		Winter	70g