In Stardew Valley, it can often take a long time before you’re making enough of a steady income to leave your farm and properly explore the other things Pelican Town has to offer. However, with a few small changes and a solid system, you’ll soon be earning enough gold to forget about it altogether!

Read More: Stardew Valley: Best Crops Per Season

If you’re always struggling to make more money in Stardew Valley, keep reading.

How to Make More Money in Stardew Valley

Artisan Goods

Even though selling your base crops and animal products as they come will get you a steady income, turning them all into artisan goods is one of the best ways to make more money in Stardew Valley.

As you level up your skills, you’ll be able to craft a range of machines that will process your grown and foraged items into higher quality produce after several days. You can make a wide variety of items like preserves, pickles, caviar, cheese, mayonnaise, oil, cloth and even drinks like wine, juice, beer, ale, green tea and coffee. It’s a good idea to save some of your produce to process during the winter months when you can’t grow anything outside if you want to keep earning money.

Although the process can be time consuming, turning your items into artisan goods will significantly increase their value so it’s definitely worth it in the long run. In my current farm, I reserve the bulk of my produce for this and I’m earning over 10,000 gold every single night from artisan goods alone!

Fields of Bees

Once you’ve reached farming level three, you’ll unlock the crafting recipe for bee houses. Each bee house will produce a single jar of wild honey every four days, except during the winter season. While you can place the bee houses inside any of your farm buildings, they will need to be outside in order for the bees to produce any honey. Jars of honey can be sold in the shipping container, used in cooking or tailoring recipes or even turned into mead to make more money in Stardew Valley.

If you’d like to increase the sale price of your honey, you can make different types of flower honey by having certain kinds of fully-grown flowers within 5 tiles of your bee houses. Flowers won’t be used up in the production of honey so one flower can supply a lot of hives at once. Be careful not to harvest your flowers until the end of that season, otherwise your honey will revert to the cheaper, wild kind if the flowers are harvested first.

Just remember that not every plantable flower will influence the price of honey and neither will foraged flowers like daffodils or dandelions. 

Recycling Your Trash

One of the most surprising ways to make more money in Stardew Valley is by collecting and recycling trash.

While Joja Cola cans can be immediately sold for coin, the other types of trash will need to be turned into a more useful item in the recycling machine first. General trash or driftwood will give you a resource like wood, stone, coal or iron ore while the soggy newspapers will either give you torches or cloth. However, the best trash items by far are the broken CDs and glasses which will give you refined quartz when recycled! Each of these items can either be used in crafting or sold in the shipping container.

The most reliable way to find a lot of trash is by fishing in locations with lower levels of fish like the mines, fountains and farm ponds; but it can also be found in crab pots or by sifting through each of the eight trash cans around Pelican Town. You can obtain a recycling machine as a gift by completing Demetrius’ field research bundle on the bulletin board of the community center, but I’d recommend saving all your trash in a chest until you can craft a whole bunch of recycling machines at fishing level four.

Fishing for Funds

Personally, I do not care for the fishing minigame, but I cannot deny it’s a great way to make more money in Stardew Valley, especially in the early stages of the game. You can sell any of the fish you’ve caught in the shipping container for decent amounts of money, but I’d recommend turning any of the fish that sell for less than 75 gold into sashimi for more profits.

Fish can be found in the many oceans, lakes and rivers around Pelican Town, as well as in the underground mining caves and at the bottom of the sea in the Night Market Submarine. While you can spend time fishing in any body of water on the map, some places have much lower rates of success so if you’re fishing for money I’d recommend focusing on the beach or the river by the Joja Mart.

Berry Picking

I always make the same mistake on my farms. I spend way too much time and effort trying to grow a little bit of everything, when being selective about which crops I’m growing would actually help me make more money in Stardew Valley.

Berries are the way to go if you want to maximize your profits. A single plant will continue producing berries for the entire season and each time you harvest a berry bush, there’s a small chance of getting multiple berries. Almost every type of berry can be processed into artisan goods like jellies and wines using preserve jars and kegs and the berry wine can also be aged further in casks to earn even more money per berry.

You can grow strawberries in spring, blueberries in summer, and cranberries and sweet gem berries in fall; as well as spice berries, grapes, wild plums and blackberries in the seasonal seed packets. You’ll only be able to access strawberry seeds after the egg festival so make sure to earn as much money as you can before the 13th of spring to make the most of them. Don’t forget to improve the quality of your berry crops by using fertiliser and to grow your berries in a greenhouse for continuous income despite the seasons.

One of the best tips I can give you is that large amounts of berries can be foraged from the salmonberry and blackberry bushes that grow all over Pelican Town during the corresponding berry season. There are a fair amount of these bushes in each area of the map, so make sure you spend some time collecting them all for a free source of income. Salmonberry season is during the 15-18 of spring and blackberry season is during fall 8-11, but these dates are always announced during the Livin’ off the Land TV show if you forget.

Do you know any other ways to make more money in Stardew Valley? Let us know in the comments below.

Check out our bumper list for more Stardew Valley guides or if more detailed farming simulators are your thing, check out our guide to successful farming in Farm Tycoon

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