Stardew Valley - Gems

Gems are the valuable minerals. They sell well, fill a Crystalarium for a steady income, and several villagers love them as gifts.

Overview

Gems are the stones the valley treats as treasure. Seven of them come out of coloured nodes in the rock, and the eighth, the Prismatic Shard, is the rarest object in the game and behaves like a key rather than a jewel. Together they are the reason a mining run is worth more than its ore, because a gem is simultaneously money, a gift that almost everyone welcomes, an enchantment for a sword and a tenant for a machine that copies it forever.

The branch has a gentler learning curve than the rest of the mine. A gem node is obvious on sight, a single swing opens it, and the stone inside is worth more than a day of early crops. Gem Nodes, the ones that can hold any of the seven, are the generous version and appear from the deeper floors onwards. Crates and barrels hold them too, which is why smashing the scenery on a floor is never wasted effort.

What raises this branch above the rest of the minerals is duplication. A Crystalarium takes one gem and copies it on a loop for the rest of the run, so a single lucky node can turn into a permanent income. That machine is the whole reason to think about which gem to keep rather than simply shipping the lot.

Groups

Three groups sit inside the branch. The common coloured stones, the purple, the yellow and the blue-green, turn up from the early floors, are cheap enough to give away freely and are what the Forge is usually fed. The expensive coloured stones, the green and the two reds, start deeper and are worth keeping for gifts and for trades.

Diamond sits alone in the middle. It has its own nodes from floor fifty down, it is the only gem that every giftable villager either likes or loves, and it is the ingredient in the Ring of Yoba, the Geode Crusher and Fairy Dust. Nothing else in the branch does so many jobs at once.

The Prismatic Shard is its own group entirely. It comes from Mystic Stones, iridium nodes, meteorites, mystery boxes and the rarest monster drops, and it exists to be spent rather than sold. Four of them are wanted for one of Mr. Qi's tests, one buys the Galaxy Sword at the desert's three pillars, and the rest go into the Forge as the material that enchants tools.

Order

A first-year farm meets the purple stone and the yellow stone almost at once, within the first twenty floors. The blue-green one follows at floor forty, along with the pale green ornamental stone, and both become the standard gift for anyone who needs winning over in that first winter.

Floor fifty brings the first diamond nodes, and floor eighty the red stones. By then the useful threshold has been crossed twice over: the Adventurer's Guild has sold a decent sword, and the gems are coming fast enough that the Forge and the Crystalarium are worth planning for rather than hoping for.

The shard arrives on nobody's schedule. Most farms see their first one from an iridium node in the Skull Cavern or in a chest at the top of the volcano, and the sensible instinct is to spend it immediately on the Galaxy Sword, because the weapon changes every fight afterwards.

Best

Diamond is the pick of the branch and it is not close. In a Crystalarium it produces the largest steady income of any gem, roughly the price of a good crop every five days from a machine that needs nothing but to be emptied, and a shed of them is the classic answer to a farm that has run out of things to spend money on. It is also the best gift in the group, since it pleases everybody, and the only gem the valley's two most useful crafting recipes ask for.

The pale green stone is the best of the cheap ones for a strange reason. The Desert Trader swaps one of them for a Staircase on Sundays, which turns a Crystalarium full of them into an unlimited supply of the one item that makes the Skull Cavern descend quickly. For a farm hunting iridium, that trade is worth more than the stone's own price several times over.

The Prismatic Shard is the most valuable object in the branch and the one least worth selling. The Galaxy Sword comes first, tool enchantments come second, and anything after that is a gift that moves a villager several hearts in one go.

Locations

Nodes in The Mines are the main route, and each coloured stone has its own node as well as appearing in the mixed Gem Nodes. The Quarry, the Skull Cavern and the Volcano Dungeon all carry the same nodes, with the volcano adding the Dwarvish Sentry, which drops a gem one time in ten.

Panning is the quiet alternative and needs no pickaxe at all. Fishing treasure chests carry the whole set, garbage cans around town start giving gems up once the mine has been explored, and slimes drop a few: green slimes give the purple stone, blue slimes the pale green one.

Two sources are unique to one place. Gem Birds perch on Ginger Island on rainy days, each holding the gem that matches its colour, and the four of them together open a puzzle in the island's hidden chamber. The Statue Of Endless Fortune, built once a farm has money to burn, produces a gem on a villager's birthday, and in the diamond's case on most ordinary days as well.

Uses

The Forge under the volcano is the branch's most overlooked use. Each coloured gem adds a different property to a melee weapon: the red one raises damage, the green one raises speed, the blue-green one raises critical chance, the pale green one raises critical damage, the yellow one raises defence, and the purple one raises knockback. Three of a kind push the same stat further. A diamond gives one of those upgrades at random, which makes it the gamble rather than the plan.

Gifting is the next use, and gems are unusually efficient at it. Clint, the Dwarf and Emily love almost every gem in the branch, which makes a pocket of stones the cheapest route to the blacksmith's heart events and to the dwarvish translation. Abigail loves the purple one, and the diamond moves eight villagers at the loved rate.

The rest are jobs with fixed shopping lists. The Dye Bundle on the Bulletin Board asks for the blue-green stone, Emily's rock ceremony asks for one of each of the five coloured stones and pays with the Sewing Machine, and the remixed Treasure Hunter's Bundle accepts any gem at all. The Desert Trader takes gems for cloth, cheese, Spicy Eel and espresso on set Days of the Week. Gems also sit in the Museum, and they go into the Sewing Machine and the dye pots like every other mineral.

Prices

The Gemologist profession at Mining level ten lifts every gem by three tenths, which is the single largest change a farm can make to what this branch earns. On a shed of Crystalariums that bonus compounds every few days for the rest of the run.

Help Wanted requests are the other place gems are worth more than their price. The board pays triple the shipping value for a delivered gem, which makes a request that matches a stone already in storage the best-paid errand in town. The harder stones are gated behind mine depth, so the big payments only appear once a farm can fill them.

Notes

The Prismatic Shard has one hard rule that catches new farms out: it is the only mineral a Crystalarium refuses, and a Lost Book in the library explains the refusal as interference from the shard itself. Anyone hoping to farm shards has to go back down the shaft for every one.

A farm holding its first shard should spend it on the sword before anything else. The Dwarvish Headstone in the graveyard carries the riddle that explains the three pillars, and the trade consumes exactly one shard from the stack rather than the whole pile.

Gem nodes cluster by floor rather than scattering evenly, so a level that shows one gem node often shows three or four. Clearing a promising floor completely before taking the ladder is worth more than hurrying downwards.