How to make money in Stardew Valley: Five fast and easy methods

Making quick and easy money in Stardew Valley can be quite a big challenge with a fresh character, especially if you’re a player who is still new to the game.

Stardew Valley characters who are at Year 2 and onwards will have a pretty good grasp at earning money, with it becoming significantly easier as time goes on to start building up your bank of cash reserves.

But if you’re starting off fresh, it can be pretty difficult to save enough money to prepare you for each season as they come, which is why it’s important to know the best ways of making fast money in the early stages.

There is no magic money cheat in Stardew Valley that’ll get you an instant amount of cash, but there are a few ways you can speed up the process, as well as many other tried and true methods for doing this.

With the upcoming 1.7 update for Stardew Valley looming over our heads, we’ll make sure to revisit as time goes on and more methods are discovered. For now though, here are the best ways to make money fast in Stardew Valley.

1. Go fishing for fast early-game money

A quick and reliable way to start making money in Stardew Valley is to go fishing. To start here, you’ll need to acquire a fishing rod which you can purchase from Willy’s Fish Shop for 25g. More powerful rods can be bought later on, but 25g is all you need to start fishing.

Where to fish at the start of the game

You can fish at any body of water within Stardew Valley, but your catches will be determined by various factors such as the season, the weather, the time of day, and the type of water you’re fishing in.

For players just starting out in Spring Year 1, we’d recommend fishing at the river by Jodi’s House in Pelican Town as it yields the best fish you’ll be able to sell while you wait for your crops to grow.

From this spot, you’ll be able to catch Sunfish, Catfish, Smallmouth Bass, Shad, and Bream which can each be sold for between 30g and 200g. Catfish are the best ones to catch here as they are worth the most, but they’re also rarer than the other fish. They only spawn while it’s raining.

Use a Fish Smoker to increase your profits

Later in the game, you’ll be able to access a Fish Smoker. It doubles the sell price of fish while keeping the same quality, and also multiplies the health and energy restoration by 1.5 if you decide to consume it.

The Fish Smoker can be crafted after you purchase the recipe from the Fish Shop for 10,000g, making it an item you should pick up later on rather than something you need to prioritise towards the beginning.

2. Grow profitable crops in every season

The regular way to make money in Stardew Valley is by growing profitable crops, which means purchasing seeds which are relatively inexpensive but sell much higher to offer you a much larger profit margin.

Rather than buying one specific crop all year round, you’ll have to prioritise a variety of crops which suit different needs. Some will be more expensive than others to grow, and may also take longer to bloom, but offer a much higher sell price once you’re at the end of it. Meanwhile, cheaper seeds may not take as long to grow, giving you a quicker, steadier stream of income.

It’s important to keep an eye on how long each crop takes to grow, and only plant seeds if you know you’ll have enough time to grow them. Any extra seeds you end up with are best kept in storage until the following year.

The best crops for spring, summer, and fall

In your first spring, you’ll want to focus on quick returns which is why it’s a good idea to start planting potato seeds. They take 6 days to grow, and you can sell them for 50 gold each.

Once you’ve done this once or twice, you can also focus on planting cauliflower seeds, which take twice as long to grow, but yield a much higher profit margin at a 175g sell price.

In summer, switch your focus to growing blueberries, which can be repeatedly harvested every 4 days once grown and sell for 50g each, and melon, which sell for 250g each. As melons take 12 days to grow, you’re better off planting some seeds every few days, but don’t plant any more after Day 15 as they’ll go to waste.

Hot Pepper is also a good shout too, as they only take 5 days to grow and can be repeatedly harvested every 3 days after that. They sell for the same price that the seeds cost, so you won’t be profiting from them until you reach the second harvest cycle for them.

As for fall, you’ll want to prepare as much gold as you can to see you through the winter. Get cranberries planted on the first day. They take seven days to grow but will yield crops you can sell for 75 gold every five days after that. Because of the steep price of the seeds (240g), you won’t be profiting from these until the fourth cycle, but they are a good source of money right before winter hits.

Meanwhile, other fall crops to focus on include pumpkin and artichokes, which each have a very high sell price versus a low seed cost.

Reinvest in seeds and sprinklers

With a limited amount of energy per day, the important thing to bear in mind is that you’ll want to scale up your farm so that you’re able to water all your crops without getting tired.

Be sure to invest in water sprinklers to handle your crops, which waters four surrounding tiles every morning. You can unlock the sprinkler at Level 2 farming, and can upgrade it twice to hit more tiles.

If you find that you need to increase your energy, you can do this permanently by eating a stardrop, which raises maximum energy by 34 points. There are seven stardrops in total, where eating all of them can take your base 270 energy up to a total of 508, which will help you to complete your daily tasks.

3. Turn crops into valuable artisan goods

You can turn some crops into valuable artisan goods, which can then be sold on for much more than what the raw sell price is.

Using a Preserves Jar, you can turn fruit into jelly, vegetables into pickles, Sturgeon Roe into Caviar, and other fish Roe into Aged Roe. Most preserves take around 3–4 days to process, but can then be sold for twice the price of the ingredients plus an additional 50 gold. The only outlier here is Caviar, which sells for 500g regardless.

Should you preserve Jars or Kegs?

Whether or not to preserve using Jars or Kegs is a matter of preference. For pure profit, kegs are more profitable for fruit, while jars are the same for vegetables.

However, you need to be aware of what the cost of the base ingredients are in order to take advantage of this. Salmonberry and Blackberry are not worth it due to their low base cost, as is the same for Pumpkin, Red Cabbage, and Rhubarb which only sell for marginally higher.

Jars also take a lot faster to process, with juice taking 4 days to process in the keg and wine taking 6.25 days. We’d recommend going with the Preserve Jars if you need some quick cash.

Make money with the Dehydrator

Introduced in Update 1.6, the Dehydrator takes mushrooms to create Dried Mushrooms, fruit to create Dried Fruit, and Grapes to create Raisins. These items only take one day to process, and will be ready for you the following morning, so you can pretty much do them towards the end of your day and you’ll have them ready to use or sell after going to bed.

Dried Mushrooms and Dried Fruit sell for 7.5 times the base price of ingredients, plus an extra 25 gold. Raisins sell for 600g, making it a quick and reliable way to profit from your grapes harvest.

However, you do need to purchase the recipe for the Dehydrator from Pierre for 10,000g, which means it’ll take a while for you to turn a profit.

4. Sell valuable items found while exploring

In addition to crops and fishing, you’ll also find a lot of valuable items while exploring Pelican Town and its surrounding areas.

Items such as artifacts can be sold if you’re not bothered about donating to the museum, whereas other random objects like algae and seaweed that have fewer uses will also gradually earn you some bank over time at the cost of pretty much nothing. You don’t even use up a lot of energy by hoovering these items up.

Sell forageables throughout the valley

One important thing to note about foraged crops is that while it seems like a good idea to sell them if you find any, you’ll actually turn a better profit by using the Seed Maker to turn them back into seeds, and then sell them on.

This even applies to foraged crops that are gold level, as they’ll sell for a much higher price if you use the Seed Maker to produce multiple seeds from them.

You can craft a Seed Maker after reaching Farming Level 9, making it a late game reward for those who have invested a lot into their crops and farm. However, you can also get a Seed Maker from completing the Dye Bundle on the Bulletin Board.

Sell spare gems and mining finds

Similarly, gems and other items that you find in the mines can also be sold on if you want some quick cash.

While there’s nothing stopping you from simply selling everything you find, we’d recommend at least only getting rid of spares, and prioritising museum donations, bundles, crafting and gifts beforehand.

5. Build reliable income with farm animals

A long-term solution to your money woes lies in the farm animals you can raise. These animals come in several forms. You can adopt a pet dog, cat, and turtle. You can also find various wildlife which can’t be interacted with.

But speaking of animals you can raise for profit on your farm, these can be purchased and kept long-term for lots of profit over time.

Farm animals you can keep range from chickens and rabbits, to cows and sheep, and they each have their own purposes and benefits for you to use.

Start with chickens

When it comes to having animals on your farm, the best ones to start with are chickens. For that, you’ll need to build a coop, which costs 4,000 gold and takes three days to be built.

Chickens can be purchased from Marnie’s Ranch for 800 gold each, which is why we’d recommend holding off on this until later on in the game as they can be quite expensive. However, you can also hatch them yourself if you place an egg in an Incubator and wait for six in-game days.

If you feed your chickens every day, they’ll mature after three nights have passed. After this, a mature and fed chicken will lay a white or brown egg every day. You can use this egg to hatch another chicken in the Incubator, or sell it for 50g.

Chickens that have reached sufficient happiness will also have a chance to produce a Large Egg or Large Brown Egg, which sells for 95 gold.

Earn more from pigs and truffles

Once you’ve mastered the art of raising chickens, it’s time to move onto bigger things. Pigs require you to keep them in a Deluxe Barn, and can be purchased for 16,000 gold from Marnie’s Ranch.

Similar to Chickens, if you have a pig who eats every day, it’ll mature after 10 in-game days. Following this, a mature and fed pig will produce truffles each day.

Truffles sell for 625 gold, making them an excellent source of gold if you keep a few pigs in your barn. You can also use them in an Oil Maker to produce Truffle Oil, which sells for 1,065 gold.

Those are our biggest tips for earning money in Stardew Valley. With these tips in hand, you now have all the tools you need to become a master farmer. Be sure to let us know if there’s anything we missed, and we’ll be sure to update this when the 1.7 update for the game releases.