Building a tea empire - Stardew Valley Year 1

Please note: this blog post contains spoilers about Stardew Valley. If you haven't played the game before or have only recently started, I recommend playing your first playthrough without reading any instructions, blog posts, tips or the wiki. It just makes the game so much better. Once you've played the story through and figured out all the fun stuff by yourself, continue reading!

I love Stardew Valley. Outside the sports game genre and table top games (and their digital version), it's the game I've played more than any other. It does get a bit dull at points though but luckily it's so versatile there's so much you can do and change on your game play.

I've been focusing on honing the Year 1 of Stardew Valley. At one point, I started routing paths to complete Community Center by Day 1 of Winter, Year 1 but once that became trivial, I took a break from all that.

After experimenting a bit with different mods, I finally got an idea for something new for year one.

The forgotten seeds

See, there's this one seed type that I've always just chucked into the corner or shipping bin right away: wild seeds. They are seeds you can craft in packs of 10 from a complete set of any season's forageables. They are quite useless since forageables are not very profitable and they take an annoying seven days to farm.

However, when watching ezlilyy's video 96.5% Of Players Don't Know All Of These Stardew Valley Tips, I remembered that tea saplings use wild seeds and they are rather profitable. For 2 seeds, 5 wood and 5 fiber, you can make a sapling that sells for 500. I usually ignored tea saplings until first Winter when you get the garden pot because 1-month growth time for only 7 leaves feels a bit unsatisfying.

This new revelation combined with the fact that you can get access to the tea sapling recipe in week 1 (!) of the game made me wonder if that could be a good way to finance year one. Money is always tight in the first year of Stardew Valley if you're aiming to complete the Community Center during the first year.

Making friends with Caroline

The key factor with this strategy is two-fold: there's an easy access to spring forageables from day 1 and Caroline gives you the recipe the day after her 2-heart event. How do we reach 2 hearts as fast as possible then?

Let's first look at how friendship points are earned in Stardew Valley:

Positive Friendship Actions

• talking to them once per day (normally +20; otherwise +10 if the villager is in the middle of a special animation, like exercising or using a camera)
• completing an item delivery quest (+150)
• giving a gift they love, like, or are neutral towards
• giving the maximum two gifts in one week (+10, awarded on the next Sunday)
• inviting them to the Movie Theater (+200 if loved, +100 if liked)
• purchasing a snack for them at the Movie Theater (+50 if loved, +25 if liked)
• making certain choices in heart events
• kissing your spouse (+10, only for the first kiss of the day); does not apply if Krobus is your roommate

Out of these, in weeks 1 and 2 we only have access to first 4 items.

Negative Friendship Actions

• not giving a daily greeting (-2pts/day)
• giving a gift they dislike or hate
• hitting them with a slingshot (-30 per hit)
• making certain choices in heart events
• rummaging through a Garbage Can when they're within 7 tiles of the player (-25, except Linus who increases: +5).

Out of these, we can easily avoid everything but the first one.

Basic two-week schedule

Knowing those positive and negative actions, the maximum days it takes for us to reach 2 hearts with Caroline is 14 days (assuming we avoid the negatives as much as possible).

The only day we get negative points is Day 3. In Stardew Valley, that day will always be a rainy Wednesday, no matter what. On Wednesdays, Pierre's is closed and on rainy days, Caroline doesn't leave home so we can't talk to her.

The two-week gift-giving schedule restarts on Sundays, which is why we're able to give three gifts on the first 7 days.

Randomized changes to schedule

There are a few things that can give us extra points if the random generator is looking into us positively.

Higher quality

First, we might pick up a silver or gold quality Daffodils. Silver gives a 10% boost and gold quality 25% boost to our friendship score. On my first attempt, I managed to gift her two silver quality Daffodils, gaining extra 19 points.

Loved gifts

Gifts come in 5 different qualities: loved (+80 pts), liked (+45 pts), neutral (+20 pts), dislike (-20 pts) and hate (-40 pts). Daffodil is the only liked/loved gift we can normally get during these two weeks (other liked gift is Tea Leaves which we can't access before her 2-heart event).

However, there's a possibility to get a loved gift from Traveling Cart or Stardrop Saloon. Caroline loves Fish Tacos, Green Tea, Summer Spangles and Tropical Curry.

Tea Leaves and Tropical Curry are not available by any means during these two weeks so that leaves us with Fish Tacos and Summer Spangles.

Fish Tacos can be part of either Traveling Cart's or Stardop Saloon's rotating stock. In Saloon, it can even be possible to be able to buy multiple ones at a time. With good luck, that can be a great way to get better gifts early on.

Summer Spangles can be part of Traveling Cart's rotating stock on Friday or Sunday. This only matters on first week so there's exactly two opportunities for it. In my first playthrough of this route, they actually were available on the first Friday but I didn't have enough money at the point since I had forgotten the possibility for that.

Item Delivery quests on billboard

There's a way to gain 150 friendship points by completing a Help Wanted quest from the billboard.

I learned a while ago from this tomatoanus's marriage speedrun video that the way the billboard works is that it can only have help wanted orders from people you've met.

You'll meet Robin and Lewis in the opening cutscene (even if you choose to skip it from the main menu option) so that's 2. We want to avoid meeting anyone else other than Caroline so our odds are somewhere around 1/3 for each quest.

On my first playthrough, I managed to get a "Give me a Bream" quest from Caroline on day 2 and a "Give me a Carp" quest from her on day 4. Unfortunately the day 2 quest was impossible to achieve since Bream's become available after 6pm and day 3 was a rainy Wednesday so I couldn't deliver it to her in time. I did manage the Carp quest however, netting me an extra 150 points.

These usually come up every 2 or 3 days so keep an eye on the billboard and avoid speaking to other people. If you get a fish delivery quest, you need to talk to Willy to get the rod but that's totally worth it. However, talking to the wizard to trigger Community Center cutscene does not count as meeting him so that's working to our favor.

Skipping days

Given that each day you don't talk to Caroline contributes to a -2pts/day decay, you can skip quite a few days from both of my schedules as long as you keep an eye on the total count.

I didn't want to route those days into this since this is not a speedrun and there aren't really that many days when you're not around the town anyway during the day. But if you do wish to do full-day deep dives into the mines, it's very much possible.

In the worst-case scenario displayed in the table above, you have 13 extra points, so you could skip talking to her on 6 days. On my bit luckier run below, there were 7 points extra so I could have skipped both of the days when I didn't give her a gift or completed a quest.

My first run, day 10 saplings

The tea sapling recipe arrives in your mail on the day after.

This means, on day 10 I was able to start crafting tea saplings to sell for 500 bucks each.

Harvesting spring forageables

There are a few ways to get spring forageables and wild seeds.

1. Gather forageables (Leek, Daffodil, Dandelion, Wild Horseradish) around Stardew Valley on the ground
2. Get 30 wild seed packs from completing the Spring Forageables bundle (one of each listed above) in Community Center
3. Craft wild seed packs (x10 for a set of one each)
4. Plant wild seeds and harvest a random collections after 7 days

A combination of these three is the best way to go. You'll need maximum of 5 Daffodils to become friends with Caroline so don't over-extend when crafting seed packets. I basically kept an eye on my Daffodil count (+ remember you need one of each for the Community Center) until I reached 2 hearts, planting everything I was able to craft and once those grew, I turned them into Tea Saplings and sold them.

The right balance depends on your money needs for your run. The maximum amount of money you'll get by always replanting them until the end of Spring but since you quite often need money during the first spring, especially if you plan to complete Community Center year 1, I recommend selling at least some during the spring while always keeping an eye on wild forageables in the ground.

Good money

I didn't realize I should plant these down until the 3rd day so it was on my 11th day when I got my first harvest of ~30 forageables. I was able to turn those into 25 tea saplings with the wood and fiber I had harvested during the first two weeks and turned a nice profit of 12 500 gold.

The best part of this strategy is that it's fully compatible with doing all the other stuff (other than friendship with people) you'd do anyway. I kept harvesting crops, cutting wood, fishing and exploring and was able to turn a great extra profit while doing it.

And you can repeat this throughout the year. Tea Saplings don't care which season's wild seeds you're using so every forageable you pick up, is a potential 500g in the works.

These 25 Tea Saplings took 50 wild seeds, 125 wood and 125 fiber. If I had sold them separately, I would have netted 35g * 50 (1 750 g) + 2 g * 125 (250 g) + 1g * 125 (125 g), a total of 2 125 g. That's 17.5% of what we actually made.

Few extra tips

Buy extras from Flower Dance

If towards the end of the spring you're running low on Daffodil or Dandelion, you can buy 10 of each at the Flower Dance on 24th for 50 g/10 pcs which can help you turn the remaining spring forageables into money making tea saplings as the spring is closing in.

However, my personal experience is that I'm usually running low on Leek rather than any other but since planting and harvesting them seems to be very randomized, this method is good to remember.

And maybe you can take Caroline for a dance as a thank you for the recipe that enables your new tea empire.

Consider starting at the Forest Farm

When selecting which farm to play at, the biggest consideration should always be what kind of farm you want to build. For a tea empire, Forest Farm offers an added benefit of being able to get plenty of extra forageables from your farm, maximizing the profit your tea saplings can create.

It does come with its own setbacks though, mainly that the tillable area is rather small compared to many other farm types.