Stardew Valley - Winter Crops

Winter crops grow outdoors in winter.

Overview

Winter is the one month of the valley's year that the fields do not run, and the game makes the point in the harshest way available. On the first morning of the season the weeds vanish, the tilled soil closes over, and every scrap of fertiliser laid down in autumn goes with it, even on a tile that somehow keeps its furrows. Grass stays where it is but stops spreading, the bee houses fall quiet, and ordinary trees put on growth only where tree fertiliser has been laid. A farm that walks outside on the first of the season is looking at a blank sheet.

Three things can still be put in that frozen ground, and only one of them is a crop in the proper sense. Powdermelon is the valley's single winter plant: a pale melon that swells in a week, pays farming experience like any other harvest, and can merge a block of nine into a giant crop the way a cauliflower or a pumpkin does. Winter seeds grow wild food instead, and fibre seeds grow the material that weeds would otherwise supply. Between them they keep a corner of the farm busy while the rest waits for Spring.

The branch is small and oddly important. It is the only thing keeping a hoe moving outdoors for a month, it is the reason a greenhouse stops being a luxury, and the melon at its centre is the one crop a farm cannot buy its way into. Every packet of its seeds is found, traded or made at home.

Groups

Sort the winter ground by what it is for. The melon is the money and the experience: a seven-day fruit crop, worth a good deal more than the wild food beside it, and the only one of the three that counts towards farming levels. It also jellies well, and a jar of it is worth three times the fruit, which makes a row of melons and a Preserves Jar the whole of a winter field's economics.

Winter seeds are the convenience option. One packet of ten is crafted from a crocus, a Crystal Fruit, a Snow Yam and a Winter Root, so the four things found while foraging in the snow turn into a tenfold supply of the same four grown on tilled soil. The output is random, the Crystal Fruit is the valuable one, and the Community Center hands over thirty packets as one of its rewards. What comes up is forage, so its grade follows the foraging skill rather than fertiliser, which is how a farm grows top-quality wild food at all.

Fibre seeds are the quiet necessity. With the weeds gone, fibre and hay both dry up outdoors, and a patch of fibre answers the first of those problems directly. The recipe arrives from the hermit on the mountain through a commission rather than from a shop.

Outside those three, the season is beaten rather than farmed. The restored greenhouse ignores the calendar entirely, as does the farm on Ginger Island, and a Garden Pot indoors will hold anything a tile will.

Order

The melon has to be planned for in autumn, which is the trap in this branch. Its seeds appear from the twenty-first of Fall and stop on the twentieth of Winter, so a farm that waits until the snow falls has already lost the first week and part of the last. Hoeing the seed spots that appear across the valley in the back week of Fall is the standard answer, and the same swings turn up snow yams and winter roots towards the first packet of Winter Seeds.

Inside the month the arithmetic is tight. Seven days of growth leaves room for three rounds at the very most, which means the first morning and roughly the eighth and fifteenth are the planting dates, and anything sown after the twenty-first will be caught by the thaw. Laying those rounds out in blocks of nine costs nothing and gives each square its small nightly chance of merging into one enormous melon.

Two routes get round the seasonal seed window completely. A Seed Maker fed one melon returns more seeds at any time of year, which is how a farm escapes the autumn scramble from its second winter onwards. The raccoon family in the Secret Woods will also trade a packet for a pair of pine cones whenever their shop is open.

Best

Measured as gold a day the melon is modest, clearing roughly eight and a half gold a tile with no fertiliser and no profession bonus, which is poorer than most of what grows in Fall. That figure is the wrong way to judge it: the seeds cost nothing, the tile would otherwise be bare, and the jelly roughly trebles the return, so the honest comparison is against an empty field.

Among the three sowable things the melon wins on every count except effort, since it alone pays experience and becomes an artisan good worth having. Winter seeds come second, and their case rests on the Crystal Fruit, which is worth more than double the melon raw and makes respectable wine. Fibre comes last as income and first as a material.

The real answer to this branch is the greenhouse. Twelve tiles by ten of soil that ignores the season turns the valley's dead month into its most profitable one, and the plants to fill it with are the ones that never need replanting. A farm with a working greenhouse treats the outdoor winter field as a hobby.

Locations

The Melon Seeds come from an unusually long list of places, and nearly all of them close outside the autumn and winter window. Hoeing seed spots is the common route, and those spots appear on tilled and untilled ground all over the valley. Golden fishing treasure chests give them up now and then, mystery boxes hold them, and crates and barrels smashed underground occasionally drop a packet. The iridium golems of the deep floors drop them half the time they die, which quietly makes a winter spent underground a winter spent seed-shopping. The prize machine in the Mayor's Manor lists them as its cheapest reward.

The forage used in the winter seed recipe is spread across the map by season. Crocuses turn up in the town itself more than anywhere, Crystal Fruit along the railroad and through Cindersap Forest, and holly is thick in the Secret Woods. Snow yams and winter roots are not lying on the ground at all: both come out of the soil under a hoe, which is the same swing that finds the Melon Seeds.

Uses

The melon is a decent gift and a poor one depending on who is asked. Demetrius, Elliott, Harvey, Jodi, Kent, Leah, Linus, Pam, Robin, Sandy and Shane all like it, which is eleven residents pleased by something that costs nothing, and with nine birthdays falling in Winter that overlap is worth planning around. Abigail, Haley, Jas and Vincent dislike it.

It eats well for a crop, which matters in the season when the mines are the main activity and food is the limit on a deep run. A save using Remixed Bundles may ask for five melons as one option on the Bulletin Board's Winter Star scroll, so the first handful are worth setting aside before the jars start.

The Sewing Machine takes it too. Fed into the spool with cloth it makes the dyeable farmer trousers, and against a dyeable garment it works as a white dye. The seeds themselves give an orange dye at the pots in the sisters' house on Willow Lane, and a brown one in the machine.

Strategy

Spend the month on everything except the fields. A winter morning begins with a full energy bar and an empty diary, which is why most saves push to the bottom of the mine in Winter rather than in Summer. The same free hours suit a farmhouse extension, a tool left with the blacksmith, and the long fishing list that only Winter offers.

Look after the animals first. They stay indoors in the cold, so the barn and coop have to be fed by hand from the silo every day, and a heater in each building keeps the occupants happy enough to keep producing. Hay is the pinch point once the grass stops growing, and the three ways out are the ranch counter, a parcel from Marnie and wheat cut inside the greenhouse.

Keep the melons in squares and leave them standing. A giant melon falls to three blows of an axe and yields far more fruit than the nine plants it replaced, and the only way to court one is to plant in blocks and resist tidying up.

Stock the seed chest in autumn. One melon put through a Seed Maker, a pair of pine cones traded in the woods, and a morning of hoeing seed spots in the last week of Fall between them remove the whole problem from every winter afterwards.

Notes

The seeds make a dreadful present. Practically the entire town dislikes being handed a packet of them, so the chest is the right place for a surplus rather than a birthday.

The can comes out every day regardless of the snow. Winter seeds and melons both want watering exactly as a summer crop does, which surprises farmers who assume the weather is doing the work.

At the Feast of the Winter Star, Pierre's stall sometimes puts a single ripe melon on sale for two and a half thousand gold. That is many times what the fruit sells for, which makes the stall a curiosity rather than a supply line.

All Winter Crops

Each of these crops with its season, growth time and normal-quality sell price.

Crop	Image	Season	Growth	Price
Powdermelon		Winter	-	60g