Stardew Valley - Special Orders

Special orders are posted on the board outside the Mayor's Manor, and on Mr. Qi's board on Ginger Island. Each sets a longer task than the bulletin board does, for a reward worth the week it takes.

Overview

This branch fills a gap the rest of the valley leaves open. Daily errands are too small to shape a week, and the Community Center's scrolls want one of a thing rather than a hundred. The order boards sit in between: single commissions big enough to be the reason a farm spends seven days in the mines, on the river or at the kegs. There are two of them, one pinned up in Pelican Town during the first autumn and one kept behind a hundred Golden Walnuts on Ginger Island, and together they are the main source of machines in the game that no shop stocks and no skill level teaches.

The two boards are built the same way and aimed at different stages of a run. The town board is written by neighbours who want something plausible: eggs for an omelette, hardwood for a bed, crystals for a ceremony, bone for a museum case. Its jobs are difficult in the way farming is difficult, through volume and timing. Mr. Qi's board drops the pretence and simply sets tests, and his pay is a currency of its own that buys things gold cannot.

What makes the branch feel different from every other to-do list in the valley is that it runs on its own weekly calendar instead of waiting patiently. A commission is a slot in the diary rather than an item on a list, and the farm has to arrange itself around it. That is also what makes the branch worth engaging with: it gives a mature farm, which has long since stopped needing the money, a reason to pick a direction each week.

Order

The town board turns up roughly when a first-year farm is ready for it, with a greenhouse still a dream and the mine only half explored. At that stage the short commissions are the ones to chase. Clearing out bats or dust sprites, pulling rubbish out of the lake, or filling a bin with bug guts all fit inside a week with basic tools and pay better than anything else a first-year farm can do with the same hours.

Mid-run the longer commissions come into reach, and they overlap with what the farm is doing anyway. A hundred of a seasonal crop is a reasonable ask once the fields are large, and twenty-five gold-star vegetables follow naturally from a fertiliser habit. The gem commission and the bone commission both wait on mining depth. The hardwood commission wants a decent axe and a patch of stumps that regrow.

A few sit behind unrelated progress. The island commissions need the boat running and the resort rebuilt, two of them only appear in Spring, and the one that unlocks the Sewing Machine needs Emily's friendship high enough to be inside her house in the first place. Reading the board for a season or two before a farm is ready is normal, since nothing on it disappears forever.

Mr. Qi's board belongs to the stretch after the island is largely explored. By then the farm has iridium tools, good rings and the money for staircases and bombs, which is roughly the minimum his commissions assume. Taking one of his tests before that point mostly means watching a deadline pass.

Rewards

Rank the rewards by what they change rather than by what they cost. The best of them removes a bottleneck that has no other answer: a machine that makes batteries from daylight ends the wait for thunderstorms, and a mill that grinds bone into fertiliser gives the museum's surplus a second life. A crusher that opens geodes at home turns a daily walk to the blacksmith into a tray left running overnight.

The next tier saves effort rather than unlocking anything. A bin on the far side of the farm, a fridge beside the stove, a chest that cannot be blown up, a coffee that arrives free each morning: none of these changes what the farm can do, but together they shorten every day by a few minutes. The bobber that holds up a catch's quality is the pick of this group for anyone who fishes seriously.

A third group is situational and easy to misjudge. The musk that draws monsters in is excellent for a farm hunting drops and a nuisance for one that is not. The paired warp posts are superb on a sprawling farm layout and pointless on a tidy one. Fibre seeds matter only until a farm has more fibre than it can use.

Qi's gems are the one reward with no in-between. They buy from his own shelves, and the single most useful thing there is the key that opens the town's doors at any hour, which quietly removes shop opening times from the rest of the run.

Underneath all of it, every completed commission on either board counts towards the valley's help-wanted tally, which is the slow road to the achievement hats sold by the mouse in the forest.

Strategy

Treat the branch as one decision a week rather than a list to work through. The decision is made best on Monday morning, before the farm's plan for the week is set, because an accepted commission and a week's plan should be the same thing. A commission that pulls against what the farm was going to do anyway costs more than it pays.

Match the commission to the season's shape. Spring, with its short crops and its spare hours, suits the monster and fishing jobs. Summer and Fall, with the big fields, suit the shipping jobs. Winter is when the mines are the only thing happening, which makes it the natural home for the bone, gem and monster commissions.

Prepare equipment rather than stock. The counters mostly ignore what was already in the chest, so there is little point hoarding ahead. What does help is a sharpened axe, a stack of bombs, a keg or two standing idle, bait wound onto the rod and empty space in the bag.

Keep the long commissions and the short ones running together. A month-long shipping job sits quietly in the background while two or three week-long jobs come and go above it, and that layering is where most of this branch's value is actually collected.

Notes

A failed commission is a delay rather than a loss, which makes the branch forgiving of an ambitious choice. Anything already handed in waits to be reclaimed, and the commission itself returns to the board on some later week, so the worst outcome of overreaching is a week spent learning what the farm cannot yet do.

The gold on the town board scales with the era it was written for, which means the early commissions stay valuable for exactly as long as a farm is poor. By the third year the money on all of them is a rounding error, and only the recipes, the friendship and the achievement progress are worth the walk. Commissions that can be taken again keep paying their gold forever, which makes a repeatable crop or fish job a decent filler for a week with no other plan.

Qi's commissions never retire, so nothing on his board is ever missed. A test failed in the second year can be taken again in the fourth with better gear, and the gems paid out are the same either way.

All Special Orders

Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.