Stardew Valley - Minerals

Minerals come out of the mines, out of geodes cracked open at the blacksmith, and out of the ground as the farmer digs. Gems sell well and fill a Crystalarium, the plainer stones mostly go to the museum, and artifacts tell the valley's history.

Mineral Groups

Minerals sorted by where they come from.

Overview

The valley calls a stone a mineral once it is worth carrying home. Everything filed under the heading shares a first destination, and that destination is a glass case in the Museum rather than the shipping bin. A stone lifted out of the rock arrives anonymous, carrying nothing but a line saying that the curator could explain it, and the real description appears on the item only after a copy has been handed over. Mining in this valley is therefore an act of cataloguing as much as an act of digging, and a farm that empties its bag into the bin each evening never finds out what it was holding.

The collections tab follows a rule of its own here. Most records in the game tick over when an item passes through the shipping bin, while a mineral counts only once Gunther has one behind the glass. This is the one collection where selling works directly against progress, which is the whole argument for a chest beside the farmhouse door that nothing is ever sold out of.

Past the cases the branch pays in three different ways. There is gold, taken either at the bin or over Clint's counter at the Blacksmith. There is friendship with the small number of people in the valley who are pleased to be handed a rock. And there is raw material for the spool of the Sewing Machine and for the dye pots. One stone can do all three in turn, because a donation only ever consumes a single copy and the rock keeps producing more.

Groups

The branch divides by the way a stone reaches the bag rather than by what it is worth. Some sit loose on a cave floor and are lifted by hand, with no tool involved at all. Some wait inside a coloured node and come out under the pickaxe. Some arrive sealed inside a rough stone shell that has to be broken before anybody can see what is in it. The shells themselves make up the fourth group, collected and traded as objects in their own right.

Those four routes produce two very different economies. A small set of stones is valuable on its own terms, wanted by machines, by crafting recipes, by particular villagers and by the Forge under the volcano. A far longer tail is worth almost nothing and exists to fill a case, which is why a first year underground leaves a chest that looks like clutter and is in fact most of a finished collection.

Order

The shaft stays shut for the opening days of a save while a landslide is cleared, and a letter announces the day it opens. From there the whole branch runs on depth. The shallow floors give up the common grey shells and the clear crystals, the lift at the fortieth floor marks the start of the icy band, the fiftieth brings the first diamond nodes, the eightieth opens the lava floors, and the bottom of the shaft pays out a key to the desert. The Quarry joins in once the bridge beside the mine entrance has been mended, and from then on it lays out fresh rocks and nodes every morning, with the number it tries to place rising each year.

The Museum ladder paces the branch just as firmly as the mine does. The earliest donations pay seed packets that a first-year farm could not otherwise afford in quantity. Forty items in the cases earn a rarecrow, sixty earn a Rusty Key to the sewers and with it a shopkeeper nobody else sells like, and filling most of the mineral cases earns a Crystalarium outright. A finished collection pays a stardrop, which is the largest single prize in the branch.

Best

Ranked by how many jobs one stone can do, the coloured gems come first by a wide margin. A single gem is money, a welcome present, an upgrade at the Forge and a tenant for a duplicating machine, and nothing else in the branch manages more than two of those at a time. Sealed shells rank second, because they are the only door a long row of the Museum's cases has, and because one kind of shell is also currency with the trader out in the desert. The crystals picked up off cave floors rank third: cheap to sell, valuable to keep, and the feedstock for a furnace and a short list of recipes that pay for themselves. The stones that come out of a shell rank last for usefulness and first for volume.

The machine that copies minerals is where this ranking turns into money. Anything in the branch except a shell and the single rarest shard can be set into a Crystalarium, so the real question becomes how many machines a farm wants and what goes in them. A stone that sells high and reappears quickly turns a shed into an income that asks for no season, no water and no feed, and a farm with a wall of them stops thinking about crop prices altogether.

Locations

Four dungeons and a pair of open sites supply the whole branch. The Mines under the mountain are the backbone, with the stone underfoot changing character every forty floors or so. The Quarry across the mended bridge is the open one, worth keeping completely clear because existing rocks block the morning's new arrivals. The short shaft beneath it is a mine of its own with its own monsters. Beyond the desert bus the Skull Cavern abandons orderly floors altogether and trades safety for density, and the Volcano Dungeon on Ginger Island closes the list.

The farm is the quietest site of the lot and the easiest to overlook. Ordinary rocks on the land hold shells, tilling the soil through Winter turns up more, and a meteorite that lands overnight is a small node waiting to be worked. None of it needs a trip anywhere, which makes clearing the land in the first fortnight the cheapest mining a farm ever does.

Uses

Donation comes first and everything else follows it. After a case is filled the same stone becomes a shirt at the Sewing Machine, since every mineral in the branch fits the spool, and most of them double as dye in the pots on Willow Lane. That gives a chest of duplicates something to do on a rainy day when the fields look after themselves.

Fish ponds are the use that catches farms out. A pond asks for a few named stones before its population will grow, and the stones it asks for are usually the cheap ones that felt safe to sell. Two spares of each common rock in a chest save a walk back down the shaft.

Gifting is a precision instrument in this branch rather than a blunt one. Most of the valley would sooner be handed food than stone, so the exceptions are worth memorising: a scattering of villagers each have one favourite stone, and the Wizard will take almost anything from the geode shelf without complaint. The Forge is the last use and the most easily forgotten, because a gem spent on a sword is a gem that keeps paying every time a monster swings.

Prices

One profession decides what this branch earns. The mining skill's last choice, Gemologist, adds three tenths to the price of every mineral except the four sealed shells, and on a wall of copying machines that bonus compounds for the rest of the run. Clint buys stones over his counter as well as the bin taking them, which matters on a day when the walk home would waste the afternoon.

Two things are worth more than their price. A stone in a Help Wanted request pays well above what the bin gives for the same item, so a request that matches something already in storage is close to free gold. And a stone in a case is worth nothing at all in coin, which is the correct trade: the milestone rewards are bought with items rather than money, and a farm that donates steadily collects them without noticing the loss.

Strategy

Read the cases before choosing a floor. The collections tab in the player menu shows exactly which stones are missing, and because each kind of rock and each kind of shell keeps to its own depth, a gap in the glass is really a choice of which band of the mine to spend the day in. Guessing is how a farm reaches the fourth year still missing three cheap stones.

Donate in batches rather than one at a time. The rewards sit on round numbers, so walking in with a bag of twenty gets several of them in one visit, and the seed packets in particular are worth far more arriving in the first Spring than in the second.

Keep the habit of a spare. One of everything in a chest covers the Museum, the fish ponds, the crafting recipes and the occasional request at once, and the cost of the habit is a chest and a little patience.

Notes

A stone that arrives in a fishing Treasure Chest sometimes fails to register in the collection. Dropping it on the ground and picking it up again fixes it, and so does simply keeping it in the bag overnight.

Daily fortune has a hand in how often a rock gives up a shell or a lump of coal, and in how often a gem node appears at all. What waits inside a sealed shell is settled by the save file and by the order the shells are opened, so a hoard can be opened on any morning.

Gemologist sits behind an earlier decision. The choice made at the fifth mining level decides which pair of professions is offered at the tenth, and the statue in the sewers is the only thing in the valley that will undo that choice, for a fee and a night's sleep.

All Minerals

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Price
Aerinite		125g
Alamite		150g
Amethyst		100g
Aquamarine		180g
Baryte		50g
Basalt		175g
Bixite		300g
Calcite		75g
Celestine		125g
Diamond		750g
Dolomite		300g
Earth Crystal		50g
Emerald		250g
Esperite		100g
Fairy Stone		250g
Fire Opal		350g
Fire Quartz		100g
Fluorapatite		200g
Frozen Geode		100g
Frozen Tear		75g
Geminite		150g
Geode		50g
Ghost Crystal		200g
Granite		75g
Helvite		450g
Hematite		150g
Jade		200g
Jagoite		115g
Jamborite		150g
Jasper		150g
Kyanite		250g
Lemon Stone		200g
Limestone		15g
Lunarite		200g
Magma Geode		150g
Malachite		100g
Marble		110g
Mudstone		25g
Nekoite		80g
Neptunite		400g
Obsidian		200g
Ocean Stone		220g
Omni Geode		0g
Opal		150g
Orpiment		80g
Petrified Slime		120g
Prismatic Shard		2000g
Pyrite		120g
Quartz		25g
Ruby		250g
Sandstone		60g
Slate		85g
Soapstone		120g
Star Shards		500g
Thunder Egg		100g
Tigerseye		275g
Topaz		80g