Stardew Valley - Trinkets

Trinkets sit in their own slot and fight alongside the farmer, each with a rolled stat the anvil can reroll.

Overview

Trinkets are the last piece of equipment a save ever unlocks, and they are the only one that gives the farmer something to fight alongside rather than something to wear. There are eight of them, the farmer carries one at a time, and each does a job no ring or pair of boots can: a companion that heals, a companion that eats monsters, a companion that drops coins, a wand that freezes a corridor, a quiver that shoots on its own, a spur that turns a lucky hit into a sprint, a paw that shrugs off every curse in the mines, and a tube of gel for spectacular hair.

The slot they sit in has to be earned. Mastering combat at the cave in Cindersap Forest opens it, and that cave only accepts a farmer who has taken all five skills to their tenth level and then kept earning experience afterwards. The same reward hands over the recipe for an anvil and for a forge small enough to stand in the farmhouse, which is a strong hint about how the branch is meant to be used.

The anvil is what matters most here. Seven of the eight trinkets have a hidden stat that was rolled at random when it dropped, and three iridium bars put through an anvil roll it again. A fairy comes with a level between one and five, a quiver comes as one of four patterns, an Ice Rod comes with its own firing rate and freeze length, a parrot comes with a level tied to how much the farm has earned, and a frog comes in one of eight colours. Finding a trinket is therefore only the start; making it good is a question of how much iridium the farm can spare.

Groups

Three of them summon something that follows the farmer about. The fairy drifts along and heals during fights, more often and more generously the higher its level, and it sheds a little light while it does so. The frog hunts: anything within four or five tiles gets grabbed by the tongue, swallowed whole and digested for twelve seconds before the frog is hungry again. The parrot simply profits, giving every slain monster a chance of dropping a gold coin worth two hundred and fifty gold, with a further chance of another coin behind each one.

Two of them attack without being told to. The quiver sends an arrow at the nearest monster inside seven or eight tiles, passing through rocks and weeds on the way and knocking the target back a little. The Ice Rod does the same at a longer range and deals no damage at all, freezing everything in the orb's path instead, which is as close to a crowd-control spell as the valley gets.

The last two are passive. The paw makes the farmer immune to every debuff a monster can inflict, which covers the slime that slows a walk and the curse that blocks healing. The spur gives a short burst of walking speed every time a critical hit lands, which makes it a partner to daggers and to critical rings rather than a tool of its own.

The gel stands outside all of that. It cycles the farmer's hair through the colours of a Prismatic Shard and is sold by Alex at his Desert Festival stall for a hundred calico eggs, which is the only trinket bought rather than found.

Order

Nothing in this branch can be met before combat mastery, so the whole of it belongs to the back end of a long save. The first one to arrive is whichever one the Skull Cavern happens to hand over, and that is genuinely random: every trinket other than the gel has roughly the same small chance of sitting in a Treasure Chest down there.

After that the sensible order is dictated by the anvil rather than by luck. A farm that is still short of iridium keeps whatever dropped and uses it. A farm with iridium to burn picks the trinket whose rolled stat matters most and spends bars until the roll is good, and the parrot is the one to leave until last, because its ceiling rises with the farm's lifetime earnings and a poor farm cannot roll a high level at all.

The Desert Festival in Spring is the one fixed date in the branch, and the gel is the one trinket a farmer can simply decide to own.

Best

The Fairy Box is the pick for anybody who actually goes down the ladder. Healing arrives during a fight without opening the bag, which matters enormously against the monsters that block eating outright, and a level five fairy heals faster and harder than the stacks of food it replaces. Rolling for that level is expensive, since it turns up on fewer than three rolls in a hundred, but a level four is nearly as good and far more common.

The Magic Quiver is the damage answer and the heavy pattern is the one to chase, since it hits for around thirty to forty at the cost of a slower cycle. The perfect pattern fires quicker and hits almost as hard, and it is rare enough that most farms settle for whatever they have.

The Parrot Egg is the pick for a mature farm with nothing left to buy, because the coins it generates are pure profit on a trip that was happening anyway. At its highest level it averages well over a hundred gold per monster, which adds up quickly on a Skull Cavern run.

The Basilisk Paw is the specialist's choice, and it is the one trinket that can be slotted and forgotten. For a farmer who has been slimed, jinxed and weakened once too often it is worth more than any amount of extra damage, and it cannot be re-forged, so there is nothing to chase.

The Ice Rod and the Golden Spur are the two most often left in a chest. The rod is excellent in a corridor and idle in open ground, and the spur only earns its slot on a build already stacked with critical gear.

Locations

Monsters drop trinkets everywhere once the slot exists, with the odds rising a little with the monster's health. Flying monsters with a decent amount of health are the best targets, spiders are the worst, and daily luck and any luck buff in the bag raise the chance on top. Trinkets are spawned separately from a monster's own loot table, so the ring that multiplies monster drops and the compendium that studies them leave these odds exactly as they are.

Crates and barrels are the other route, and their odds scale with how deep the container is. That scaling makes the Quarry Mine the single best place in the game to smash containers for trinkets, well ahead of either the Mines or the Skull Cavern, which is easy to miss because the Quarry Mine is otherwise a short and shallow place.

Treasure rooms in the Skull Cavern round out the list, with every trinket sitting at roughly the same chance in a chest.

Prices

Every trinket sells for a thousand gold at the Adventurer's Guild, which makes the duplicates worth carrying out rather than leaving behind. Since they do not stack, a farmer with four spare frog eggs is losing four inventory slots, and the Guild is the tidy answer.

The real cost of the branch is iridium rather than gold. Three bars a roll adds up fast when the target is a level five fairy or a heavy quiver, so the anvil tends to live beside the farmhouse furnaces and get used in bursts after a cavern trip.

Strategy

Pick the trinket for the trip rather than keeping one in the slot forever. A Skull Cavern descent for iridium wants the parrot or the fairy, a monster eradication goal wants the quiver, whose kills count towards the tally, and a floor full of serpents wants the Ice Rod.

Mind the frog's appetite on a goal run. Anything it swallows leaves nothing behind and is not counted as a kill, so the frog is the wrong companion while a request or an eradication goal is being filled, and the right one while simply trying to survive. It will eat almost anything, including the armoured bugs that ordinary weapons cannot hurt and the mummies that normally need a bomb, which is a fine trick in the right place.

Roll the parrot after the money, not before it. Its level is capped by what the farm has earned over its whole life, so the same three bars buy a far better parrot in a fourth year than in a second.

Notes

A fairy's appearance is fixed per save and has nothing to do with its level, so an anvil changes how well it heals and never how it looks. A frog's colour is purely cosmetic in the same way, with green the most likely and the void and prismatic frogs the two rarities.

An Ice Rod has a small chance of coming out of the anvil as a perfect Ice Rod, which fires on the shortest cycle and freezes for the longest, and it is renamed accordingly.

The paw holds off everything a monster can inflict and leaves the farmer's own tipsiness alone, so a drink before a fight still slows the walk.

Trinkets can be handed over as presents, though they leave no trace in the gift log afterwards. Abigail and the Wizard are the two who like receiving a Basilisk Paw, and most of the valley would rather not be given a monster's foot at all.