Fall
| Fall | |
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| Type | Mechanic |
Fall is the third season of the year, and it is the one most farms make their fortune in. The leaves turn red and orange, the music slows, and Mushroom Trees start appearing on the farm, but the real change is in the soil: Pumpkins, Cranberries and Grapes are all worth more per day than anything Spring offered, and the Sweet Gem Berry sold by the Traveling Cart is worth more than any of them. Two festivals break the month, the Stardew Valley Fair on the sixteenth and Spirit's Eve on the twenty-seventh. Foraging gets rich as well, with Blackberry Season in the second week and Hazelnuts shaking out of Maple Trees from the middle of the month. Winter follows and kills everything growing outdoors, so Fall is also the season to spend rather than save.
Overview
The crop list is shorter than Summer's but the money is better. Pumpkin is the headline single-harvest crop: it takes most of a month to ripen so there is only room for two plantings, and it sells for more than anything else grown from a shop seed. Planting Pumpkins in a block of nine tiles gives a chance of a giant one growing across the whole patch. Yam and Artichoke are the steady middle of the list, Amaranth sits beside them, and Bok Choy is the quick filler that pays little but turns over fast. Beet seeds come from the Oasis in the desert rather than from Pierre's, and Artichoke seeds only appear on the shelf from the second year onwards.
Repeat crops are where Fall quietly beats every other season. Cranberries ripen in a week and then come back every few days, and each plant drops two berries at a time, which makes a bed of them the best gold-per-day crop a farmer can buy outright. Grapes grow on a trellis and regrow faster than anything else on the list, so one planting lasts the whole month. Eggplant is the cheap option, costing almost nothing per seed and regrowing steadily, which makes it the sensible filler for a large field.
Three crops cross the Summer boundary. Corn, Wheat and Sunflowers all survive the change of season, so a Summer planting of any of them keeps producing into Fall. That makes Corn far better value than its Fall-only figures suggest, and it is the reason experienced farmers plant their Corn in Summer. Wheat is grown for Flour and Beer rather than for its sale price, and Sunflowers are grown for the seeds that press into Oil.
Two flowers are worth planting for reasons other than selling. A Bee House set within a few tiles of a fully grown, unpicked Fairy Rose produces Fairy Rose Honey, the most valuable honey in the game by a wide margin, and the bees keep working right through Fall before stopping for Winter. The honey's type is decided at the moment it is collected, so the flower has to be left standing until the jar is emptied.
The Sweet Gem Berry is the gamble of the season. Its seed is only sold by the Traveling Cart, it takes most of the month to grow, and it sells for several times the price of a Pumpkin. One planted on the first day of Fall ripens with a day or two to spare; one planted much later is simply lost when Winter arrives, so the seed has to be bought early or held over.
Foraging rewards a walk. Blackberries cover the bushes through the second week of the month, thickest in Pelican Town and the Cindersap Forest, and they make Wine worth far more than the berries themselves. Hazelnuts start falling out of Maple Trees when they are shaken from the middle of the month, and they turn up on the ground around the Backwoods, the Mountain and the Bus Stop. Wild Plums are the Bus Stop and Railroad speciality. Mushrooms are everywhere: Common Mushrooms through the forest, Chanterelles in the Secret Woods, and the valuable Purple Mushroom and the strange Red Mushroom on a Forest Farm or out of a farm cave set up for mushrooms. Between them, a Blackberry, a Common Mushroom, a Hazelnut and a Wild Plum fill the Fall Foraging Bundle, and the same four items craft into Fall Seeds.
Fishing changes as much as farming. Salmon runs up the rivers in Fall and nowhere else in the year, and Tiger Trout joins it in the same water. The ocean brings Sea Cucumber, Albacore in the early morning and late evening, and Super Cucumber after dark. Midnight Carp appears in the forest pond and the mountain lake after ten at night. Rain opens the best of it: Walleye in the afternoon and evening, Catfish through most of the day, Shad from mid-morning and Red Snapper and Eel in the sea. The Angler, one of the legendary fish, can only be hooked in Fall, from the plank bridge north of JojaMart, and it needs a few fishing levels behind the rod before it will even bite.
The calendar fills up too. Penny, Elliott, Jodi, Abigail, Sandy, Marnie, Robin and George all have birthdays in Fall, which makes it a strong month for friendship, since a loved gift on a birthday is worth far more than one on an ordinary day. The Bookseller passes through twice. The Stardew Valley Fair on the sixteenth wants a Grange Display assembled from the farm's best produce, and Spirit's Eve closes the month on the twenty-seventh.
Notes
Everything outdoors dies when Winter begins, so the back half of Fall is an exercise in arithmetic. A crop has to be in the ground early enough to finish, and anything that will not ripen by the twenty-eighth is wasted money. The greenhouse is the escape: crops planted inside it ignore the season entirely and keep producing straight through Winter.
Fall is also the right time to turn produce into something that keeps. Kegs and Preserves Jars do not care what season it is, so a month of Cranberries and Grapes going into Wine and Jelly becomes a Winter's worth of income while the fields lie empty. The Mushroom Trees that start appearing on the farm in Fall add to the haul, since an axe takes mushrooms out of them as well as wood.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
