Stardew Valley Fair
| Stardew Valley Fair | |
|---|---|
| Type | Festival |
The Stardew Valley Fair is the biggest day on the calendar, and the only festival with its own currency. Minigames, a wheel of fortune, a fortune teller and a strength tester all pay out Star Tokens, and the shop by the Bus Stop trades those tokens for things gold cannot buy, including a Stardrop that permanently raises the farmer's energy. The other half of the day is the Grange Display, a contest of nine farm products judged on quality and variety, with a thousand tokens for first place. Between the games and the display a determined farmer can walk away with every item on the stall in a single afternoon, which makes the Fair the most rewarding day of the year by a wide margin.
Event
The Fair is held on the sixteenth of every Fall in Pelican Town, and the way in is to walk into the town between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. The town is sealed before nine, and every home and shop outside the square stays locked before, during and after the festival, so nothing else can be fitted into the day. The Fair ends when the farmer leaves Pelican Town, and the day closes with a return to the farm at ten at night.
Star Tokens are the point of almost everything on the field. Up to 9,999 can be held, they do not carry over to the next year, and the minigames can be played as many times as the money lasts, so a farmer who arrives with a few thousand gold can convert it into a full stall's worth of tokens.
The Fishing Minigame costs 50g a go and pays between twelve and twenty-five points for each fish landed, with bonus points for perfect catches and a single point for the rubbish. A good run can clear 800 tokens from one 50g ticket, which makes it the most profitable booth on the field.
The Slingshot Minigame also costs 50g. Red targets are worth one point, blue two and purple five, and the total is multiplied at the end according to accuracy, with perfect accuracy quadrupling it. Around 500 tokens per ticket is achievable.
The Spinning Wheel is where the real money is made, and it is not a fair bet in the farmer's favour by accident. Tokens are staked on green or orange, and green is about two and three quarter times likelier to come up. The correct play, mathematically, is to bet a little under half the current stack on green every single spin, which compounds a small pile into a very large one within a few rounds. Previous spins have no bearing on the next, and luck modifiers affect the result by changing how fast the wheel turns.
The quieter booths are worth a visit too. The Smashing Stone is free and pays one token for a click timed to the moment the bar reaches the top or the bottom. The Star Token Seller will simply sell tokens at 50g each, which is the worst rate on the field but the fastest. Welwick the Fortune Teller charges 100g to read the farmer's future once a year, and she talks about the two villagers at the top of the social menu and about whichever skill the farmer has the most points in.
Shop
The shop near the Bus Stop entrance is the only place Star Tokens are spent, and the fixed items can each be bought once a year.
The Stardrop costs 2,000 tokens and is the item to prioritise, because each Stardrop permanently raises maximum energy and this one can only ever be bought once in a save. A Prize Ticket costs 1,000 tokens and is redeemed at the prize machine in the Mayor's house. Rarecrow number one costs 800 tokens, which is the Fall entry in the rarecrow set. A Fedora costs 500 tokens, Dried Sunflowers cost 100 and a Light Green Rug costs 500.
Taking the whole fixed stock costs 4,900 tokens in a year that includes the Stardrop, and 2,900 in any year after that. Everything except the Stardrop restocks the following Fall.
A second group of items is sold as whole lots rather than singly, so the entire batch comes for one price. Mixed Seeds go twenty-four at a time for 1,000 tokens, Hay a hundred at a time for 500, a Glowstone Ring costs 1,000, a Triple Shot Espresso 400 and Pepper Poppers 250.
North of the fair, Gus cooks Survival Burgers by the fountains in odd years and over on the east side below 1 River Road in even ones. They refill the energy bar, though the effect is not visible until the festival has been left.
Notes
The Grange Display is the part of the Fair worth preparing for in advance. Up to nine items are placed in the box outside Pierre's General Store, Mayor Lewis is asked to judge, and the score decides the payout: 1,000 tokens for first place at ninety points or better, 500 for second at seventy-five, 250 for third at sixty and 50 for anything below that.
Scoring is simple once it is laid out. Fourteen points are awarded for entering at all. Then come points for how full the box is, running from nine points for a full nine items down to a nine-point penalty for an empty one, which means it is always better to pad the display with junk than to leave a gap. Each of the eight recognised categories represented earns five points up to a ceiling of thirty, so six categories is enough to max that part out: Animal Products, Artisan Goods, Cooking, Fish, Foraging, Fruits, Minerals and Vegetables. Finally every item scores on its actual sale price and quality, up to eight points each, with iridium quality and a price above 200g reaching the top of that table.
In practice, winning needs eight items worth four points and one worth five, alongside six categories, which a second-year farm can manage comfortably. The theoretical ceiling is 125 points, and it needs Deluxe Fertilizer to grow an iridium-quality vegetable; without it the best possible score is 124.
Items are not returned automatically after judging. They have to be picked up off the table, and a farmer who forgets can collect them later from the Lost and Found in the Mayor's Manor.
Placing Mayor Lewis's Lucky Purple Shorts in the display is its own reward. He is appalled, hands over 750 tokens as hush money, and Marnie remarks on the unusual purple lettuce on show. It counts as a disqualification, so the contest itself is forfeit, which makes 750 tokens a better deal than fourth place but worse than winning.
In a multiplayer game the farm shares one display. Only one farmer can handle it at a time, the host starts the judging, every farmer receives the same placing, and each then has to talk to Mayor Lewis separately to collect their own tokens. Games can still be played after the judging is over, which is not true of most festivals.
After the Fair, Jack-O-Lanterns appear in front of several houses in Pelican Town, and four Decorative Lanterns appear in the graveyard, which is one of the few traces a festival leaves behind.
All Festivals
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
