Stardew Valley - Locations

The valley is small enough to cross in a morning, and every corner has its own shops, forage and fish. The town sits at the centre, the forest and beach lie south, the mountain north, and the desert and Ginger Island wait further out.

Location Groups

Places sorted by what they are.

Overview

The valley is not one map but a few dozen of them stitched together at the edges, and learning where the seams are is most of what makes a farm efficient. Six outdoor regions carry everything: the farm itself, Pelican Town in the middle, Cindersap Forest to the south-west, the Mountain to the north, the Beach to the south, and far away the Calico Desert, with a tropical island beyond all of them. Every home, shop, cave and dungeon hangs off one of those, and the walk between them is the real currency of a day.

Most of the map starts shut. A new farm can reach the town, the forest, the mountain and the beach on its first morning and almost nothing else, and the rest arrives in pieces over several years. Some pieces are bought with bundles or with gold, some with a better axe, some with friendship, some with a key found at the bottom of a shaft, and one with nothing less than finishing the entire game. That slow unfurling is what gives the valley its sense of depth: the map a farm walks in its fourth year barely resembles the one it walked in its first.

The third thing to understand is the clock. Interiors keep opening hours and the people inside them keep schedules, so a location is only half a place and half a time. The general store shuts its counter in the late afternoon while its front door stays open longer, the clinic closes in the middle of the day, the saloon opens at noon and runs to midnight, and the guild by the mine entrance does not open until the afternoon. A trip planned without the hours in mind is a trip wasted.

Groups

Four kinds of place sit under this heading. The outdoor regions are the ones with weather, foraging, artifact spots and seasonal change, and they are where most of a day is spent. The interiors are homes and shops, each with hours and residents, and they are where friendship and money actually change hands.

The dungeons are the third group and they behave like nothing else on the map. The shaft under the mountain, the short pit beneath the Quarry, the caverns past the desert, the volcano on the island and the bug lair off the sewers all generate themselves anew every time they are entered, which means they are not really places so much as processes.

The last group is the means of getting about. A bus, a network of minecarts, a boat, a set of totems and four obelisks built on the farm each collapse part of the map into a single step, and together they turn a valley that takes a whole morning to cross into one that can be crossed several times before lunch.

Order

The first few days are deliberately small. A landslide keeps the mine shut at first, and a letter on the fifth morning of the opening Spring announces that the rubble has gone. Early in the first Summer an earthquake clears the pass above the mountain and opens the railway platform, with the spa beside it, and that spa quietly removes the energy problem from the rest of the run.

The middle of a first year opens things through work rather than through time. A steel axe clears the fallen log in the north-west corner of the forest and opens the Secret Woods. Finishing the Crafts Room in the Community Center, or paying Joja for the same job, mends the bridge beside the mine entrance and opens the Quarry and the pit beneath it. The Boiler Room mends the minecarts. The Vault mends the bus, which is the single largest change to the map any reward makes, because it opens the desert.

From the desert the branch keeps going downwards. The bottom of the mine yields a key that opens the caverns under the sand, and steady donations to the Museum earn a Rusty Key that opens the sewers and the shopkeeper living in them. A late errand from the Wizard sends a farmer through those sewers into the bug lair and on to the swamp behind the witch's hut.

The last stretch belongs to the island. Repairing the boat in the back room of the Fish Shop opens the archipelago, and golden walnuts paid to its parrots open its western fields, its southern pools, its pirate cove and the volcano at its northern end. Two places sit beyond even that: a cave in the forest that opens only when every skill has been taken to its tenth level, and a summit above the railway that opens only when there is nothing left in the game to finish.

Best

Ranked by what they give back for the time spent, four places stand clear. The Secret Woods is first for a mid-game farm, because its half-dozen great stumps regrow every single morning and hand over a dozen pieces of hardwood for a few swings, with mahogany seeds dropping from the slimes that live there. Nothing else on the map renews that generously that quickly.

The Quarry is second. It lays out fresh rocks and nodes each morning, the number it attempts rises every year, and it is the one open site where every ore and gem in the game can appear. It has a quiet second use as well, because villagers never walk across it, so anything placed there is safe from being trampled.

The desert is third, and it is underrated. Its forage spawns at roughly twice the rate of anywhere in the valley, it has no seasons at all, and its artifact spots are busiest in Winter when the rest of the map has gone quiet. The island is fourth and the strangest: the calendar has no hold on what grows or what swims there, which makes it a greenhouse the size of a region.

The railway platform deserves a mention of its own. Trains pass at random through the middle of the day and spill their cargo onto the ground if the farmer happens to be standing there, dropping coal, ore, wood, stone and sealed shells, with a very slim chance of a pair of magical shoes falling out of any load.

Uses

Each outdoor region grows its own forage and buries its own artifacts, and the lists are worth knowing because they are how the early collections get filled. The town gives a daffodil in Spring, a Sweet Pea in Summer, a blackberry in Fall and three winter flowers after that. The Secret Woods gives mushrooms and a fern that grows nowhere else. The desert gives coconuts and Cactus Fruit all year. Dig the ground in the right region and the artifacts follow the same pattern, with each place holding its own short list.

Fishing divides the map just as sharply, with the ocean, the town river, the forest river, the mountain lake, the desert pond, the sewers and the island pools all holding species that appear nowhere else. A farm chasing a fishing collection is really chasing a tour of the map.

The interiors are where the valley pays out. Two dozen of them are shops of some kind, from the general store and the carpenter to a mouse selling hats, a raccoon family in a stump, a dwarf under the mountain and a trader on the island who deals only in crops. Most of them stock something that cannot be bought anywhere else, which is why a mature farm still walks a circuit rather than settling in one place.

Prices

The map can be bought as well as earned, and the two prices are worth comparing. Every town project that a bundle would pay for can instead be purchased through the development form at JojaMart, with the bridge, the minecarts and the bus each carrying a price in the tens of thousands, one project a day. For a farm with money and no patience that is faster. For a farm in its first year it is ruinous.

Travel has its own small costs. A boat ticket to the island covers the journey out and back, while the walk home from the island's southern beach is free at any hour. Warp totems are crafted rather than bought and are consumed in use, while the four obelisks are permanent and cost a fortune in iridium, which makes them a late luxury that pays for itself only on a farm that crosses the map constantly.

Strategy

Plan a day as a loop rather than a list. The map rewards a circuit that ends where it started: out through the forest, up the mountain road, back through town, down to the beach and home. Shop hours and villager schedules fall into place naturally along a loop and fight against a day spent doubling back.

Learn the minecart network early. Its four stops are the town, the mine, the quarry and the road where the bus waits, and it turns the longest walk in the valley into a moment. Pair it with the totems and most of the map is reachable within the first hour of a morning.

Mind the clock at the far edges of the map. Staying out past two in the morning costs a tenth of the farm's money, and passing out on the island costs considerably more, which makes the island the one region where a return trip has to be planned rather than assumed.

Notes

The Quarry is part of the same map as the Mountain, which is why its forage and its artifact spots match the mountain's rather than having a list of their own.

Behind a fallen column in the Secret Woods, a small shop appears overnight whenever a farm has managed to lose a one-off item, and it will sell that item back at a flat and painful price. It is the only safety net in the game for an irreplaceable thing.

The summit above the railway is the only outdoor area the valley map refuses to show, and standing there hides the interface entirely. Reaching it legitimately plays a long farewell scene; reaching it any other way plays something much shorter and much less friendly.

On the first dry day of the third year a bear arrives in the southern forest, and feeding it what it asks for clears the rubbish out of that part of the map and out of the trailer's front garden for good.

All Locations

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Open Hours
1 River Road		8am to 8pm
1 Willow Lane		9:00am - 8:00pm
2 Willow Lane		9:00am - 8:00pm
Abandoned House		All Day
Adventurer's Guild		2:00pm to 2:00am
Backwoods	-	-
Blacksmith		9:00am to 4:00pm
Bookseller		-
Bus Stop		10am to 5pm
Carpenter's Shop		9:00am to 5:00pm
Casino		9:00am to 11:50pm
Cindersap Forest	-	-
Community Center		Always
Dark Shrine of Memory		-
Dark Shrine of Night Terrors		-
Dark Shrine of Selfishness		-
Desert Trader		Always
Dog Pen		Always
Elliott's Cabin		10am to 6pm
Farm Pond	-	-
Fish Shop		9am to 5pm
Giant Stump		-
Ginger Island		-
Graveyard		Always
Harvey's Clinic		9:00am to 3:00pm
Ice Cream Stand		1pm to 5pm during Summer
Island Farmhouse		-
Island Field Office		Always
Island Trader		Always
Joja Warehouse		Always
JojaMart		9:00am to 11:00pm
Leah's Cottage		10am to 6pm
Marnie's Ranch		9:00am to 4:00pm; (Building open 9am to 6pm)
Mastery Cave		-
Mayor's Manor		8:30am - 10pm
Minecart	-	-
Movie Theater		9:00am to 9:00pm
Museum		8:00am to 6:00pm
Mutant Bug Lair		-
Oasis		9:00am to 11:50pm
Pelican Town		-
Pierre's General Store		Shop: 9am to 5pm; Building: 9am to 9pm
Qi's Walnut Room		Always
Quarry		-
Quarry Mine	-	-
Railroad	-	-
Secret Woods		-
Skull Cavern	-	-
Spa		All Day
Tent		6am to 2am
The Beach	-	-
The Cave	-	-
The Desert	-	-
The Farm		-
The Mines		-
The Mountain		-
The Sewers		Always
The Shrine of Illusions	-	-
The Stardrop Saloon		12:00pm to 12:00am
The Summit		-
The Tunnel	-	-
Trailer		9:00am - 8:00pm
Traveling Cart		6:00am to 8:00pm Friday and Sunday; 5:00pm to 2:00am during Night Market; 12:00pm to 2:00am during Desert Festival
Treehouse		-
Volcano Dungeon	-	-
Witch's Swamp	-	-
Wizard's Tower		6:00am to 11:00pm