How to make a profit in 1.1: a number-crunching and theorycrafting thread

I'd like to see the math on each of those (full season without kegs and a full season with kegs). I don't see how other crops that underperform would accumulate to make an overall higher return profit vs all Ancient Fruit (especially since Starfruit requires reinvestment). And since we're talking trees, might as well throw those in with Ancient Fruit, too. Not mention you're spending even more time revisiting the Greenhouse which could be spent elsewhere.

Also keep in mind that you're assuming Pale Ale takes a day to produce, when in fact it's 40 hours (closer to two days). Your 2100g per week actually becomes 1200g (technically 1260, but since you can't harvest 4.2 times per week, round down to 4, then add 300g per every 5 weeks), where Ancient Fruit is bringing in 1650g.

Weekly per crop, without keg, without artisan:

Hops: 175g
Ancient Fruit: 550g

Weekly per crop, with keg, without artisan:

Hops: 1200g (add 300g every 5 weeks)
Ancient Fruit: 1650g

If you have Artisan, then Hops becomes 1680g (add 420g every 5 weeks), and Ancient Fruit becomes 2310g.

No, I think Ancient Fruit still takes the cake.

On a side note, it's nice to know you have all those kegs, but we have to think about the people who don't as well.

@Xylia , the Traveling Cart carries coffee beans. First day I visited her, she had one. Still, I guess you can't really maximize profit from Coffee early game because only a single piece must be bought from the traveler, which then must be grown into more, etc. So that rules out coffee as being a good crop early game.

 

Have you factored in time lost replanting melons because the seeds don't yield more than one crop? And the extra fruit you get from the blueberries, which can see you through the winter using preserve jars?

 

I haven't taken a math course in 8 years, but I'm sure your math is definitely off @ShneekeyTheLost

Berries w/o fertilizer

50 base x 3 per harvest x 4 harvest = 600 - 80 seed price = 520

Melons w/o fertilizer

250 base x 2 harvest = 500 - 2(80) seed price= 340

Melon w/ basic fertilizer

Basic fertilizer chance is 1/3 for all 3 grades
[250 base + 312 silver + 375 gold]/3 = 319 average gain
319 average x 2 harvest = 638 - 2(80) seed price = 478 average profit

Melons w/ quality fertilizer

Spread for quality fertilizer is 10% basic 30% silver 60% gold

[250 x (0.1)]+[312 x (0.3)]+[375 x (0.6)] = 343.6 average gain

343.6 x 2 harvest = 687.2 - 2(80) seed price = 527.2



Summary
Melons only barely beat out unfertilized blueberries with quality fertilizer (if the fertilizer was free/homemade). I would calc giant crops, but I don't know the percentage chance and generally depends on size of the field as well. Obviously if you had a field of exactly 9 melons and it turned giant the numbers would be skewed, but in the average I'm trying to make a living field it's not going to make a difference. An abundance of quality fertilizer is also something most players don't have laying around on their first summer and if they did, the cost would have to be factored into it as well.

 

That's assuming you see ANY Coffee Beans at all from the Traveling Cart.

I didn't see any myself. Oh, and most things you buy from that Cart are 200-500G+.

So you buy one single bean, plant it, and what is it 6? days later, you get 4-5 more... yeah it takes awhile to build up and won't work for Year 1.

 

That's what sheds are for. Even with just ancient fruit, I always have 120 kegs to turn them all into wine. There's really no reason not to, especially not now that we have sheds. That's just two sheds full of kegs. As long as you have more than twice as many kegs as you have hops, you can keep them going flawlessly without any slowing of the profit train

If we are talking about ancient fruit, why bother with looking at NOT kegging anything? By the end of the first year, 120 kegs is pathetically easy to do.

So, again, here's the numbers, using ancient fruit turned into wine versus hops:

Per week, Ancient Fruit Wine brings in 1650

Per week, Hops brings in seven pale ale at 300 each for 2100. It's really that simple.

 

I see what you're saying - you want to double the amount of kegs you use for Hops, while also having an additional amount of kegs for Starfruit/Ancient Fruit. So that's 144 kegs + kegs for Starfruit/Ancient Fruit + kegs for trees. I thought you were talking a 1:1 scenario. But for a 2:1, you're correct.

If 1:1 Kegs/Hops, you're getting 1200g per week (plus 300g added by the end of the fifth week). Otherwise, if 2:1 Kegs/Hops, you're getting 2100g.

In short, Hops>Ancient Fruit if you have double the amount of Kegs to keep up with Hops. Otherwise, if you use the same amount of Kegs for Ancient Fruit, then Ancient Fruit>Hops. After that it becomes a matter of "do I want to tend to my crops and wine every day or every week?". If you don't mind the daily routine and/or have time to kill, go Hops. If you don't have much time and/or prefer not tending to your crops and wine too often, go Ancient Fruit.

Optimally, Hops is the way to go, but because money is so simple to make as it is, you can't go wrong either way. Both produce a high amount of coin and it comes down to effort put in.

Correct.

 

I did Joja in one save... played until grandpas evaluation and never touched it again - my heart bled when the Junimos were gone q.q Plus it was boring, i had bought everything after the first Blueberry harvest....

To get the greenhouse in CC is actually not that bad. There's only three things you have to watch out for:

1) Plant 40 Parsnips with Fertilizer in Spring for the Quality Bundle, as well as 40 Melons with Fertilizer in Summer and 20 Corn, then 40 Pumpkins in Fall + ofc one of each crop to hand in every season
2) Get the bat cave (im not a fan of shrooms and life potions, i usually go full Sashimi and Omelet Mode for food in Skull Cavern) for 4/6 of the Artisan Bundle, build one Bee House and one Preserve Jar and make a jelly
3) Check the Traveling Cart as soon as you got more then 10k gold every Friday and Saturday. You are bound to get all the items you need for the Animal Bundle~

And about the going crazy, i consider my playstyle now quite calmed down. When i played Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town i was going all out in Fall and usually planted 300 Sweet Potatoes.... except for the rainy days i was usually Harvesting them from 6am to 9pm. Sometimes i even got 500 crops and went for Harvesting 166 every day....
In SDV i only do that in the first spring and summer, because thats where i get the money from so i can automate my watering in Fall/Winter with Sprinklers from Krobus and the Traveling Cart.
Basically, im just plain lazy, i want to stop to water crops asap - and for that i sacrifice ~70 days of aweful work so the rest of my playthrough is as easy as possible~

^o^

 

I see lots of min/max calcs in this thread which only consider cost/sale value and I echo @Terradel thoughts with a couple more of my own.

As simply as I can state:

1. Gold is far from the only currency in the game (energy is the critical currency in the first month or 2, game time thereafter)
2. Early automation is the key to maximizing all 3 currencies
3. The major constraint on automation is mines depth

I haven't seen much written on making mines depth the key priority, but it is and lvl 80 with significant gold ore farming is easily obtainable in Spring 1. Do so, and you'll virtually never have to water crops after the first month.

 

Really enjoying this thread for digging into analysis of the various crops / processing setups! Sort of an aside, but just wanted to point out that assuming you are getting your info for the quality chance of fertilizers from the wiki, it is a little off (as it is on a number of details regarding skills & other things). Actually, Basic/Quality Fertilizer stacks multiplicatively with Farming Skill Level, rather than having a set value.

Those wiki values are reasonably close to the actual values at Farming Level 10, where Basic Fertilizer yields 15% basic, 44% silver, and 41% gold, and Quality Fertilizer yields 10% basic, 29% silver, and 61% gold. For comparison, using no fertilizer at Farming Level 10 yields 46% basic, 33% silver, and 21% gold. Of course, at lower levels of Farming Skill the yields will be lower, even with fertilizer, which is probably where the "1/3 for all grades" idea for Basic Fertilizer came from, since most players will be using it with lower Farming Skill. The basic formula is

For other crops: gold = 20% * farming / 10 + 20% * fertilizer bonus * (farming + 2) / 12 + 1% and silver = the remaining percent * (twice the percent change of gold to a maximum of 75%)

You can read a little more about it here.


UPDATE: Well, it looks like that's not really the whole story; the issue is a bit broader than I thought! Apparently (outside of the partial effect from Basic/Quality Fertilizer), the game considers you to either be at Farming Level 0, or Farming Level 10, with nothing in between, or past 10. So in actuality, while below Farming level 10 your quality chances when not using fertilizer will always be 97% regular, 2% silver, and 1% gold. When you hit farming Level 10, suddenly your crops jump to 46% regular, 33% silver, and 21% gold.

More details are in this thread, but essentially it means that using Basic/Quality Fertilizer is comparatively much more useful when below Farming Level 10, and if you are at Farming Levels 7, 8, or 9, eating a + Farming buff food to reach Level 10 can have a HUGE impact. For example, in my test with 263 Radishes with no fertilizer, at Farming Skill Level 8 I get 97% regulars, 2.7% silvers, and 0.4% golds. However, with a +2 Farming Skill buff to reach Level 10, I instead get 45.6% regulars, 33.5% silvers, and 20.9% golds!

 

Oi. That has to be a bug or something. Probably some sort of oversight as to how it is calculated. Otherwise, why even HAVE farming levels?

Might explain why no matter how many Turnips I planted, I could never get 10 golds by the end of spring without buying fertilizer. Didn't matter if I was farming Level 1 or 2, or even Farming 3, still no change to how many golds I'd pull up.

 

Yeah, my assumption is that it is a bug, since the reddit user who pointed it out to me from the code also seems to think it may be a bug. I'd already submitted bug reports in the forums and on the official website some time ago back when I thought the issue was only with + Farming food buffs, so I've updated the post in the Support Forum to include this new information.

 

Ahhh, okay. That would be rather nice if that got fixed, lol. It would sure make farming a lot more interesting. Come to think of it, I always wondered why during my first year, trying to get silvers and golds seemed so.. terrible.

Then around Spring of Year 2, suddenly, golds and silvers everywhere!

LOL.

Now I know why. I usually hit Farming 10 around mid first Fall and that's about the time I slack off on planting stuff in favor of getting other junk done. Then, of course, Spring 2 comes and me with my Farming 10 self, starts seeing all kinds of golds/silvers.

A question though.......if you plant berries (or any other multi-harvest plant) while having Farming 9 and you ding Farming 10... do the plants "remember" what level you were when you planted them, or is your level calculated when you actually pick the berries?

 

The short answer is that your level is taken into consideration when picking them out of the ground, not when planting.

The longer answer is that the "base" quality for each crop (or forageable, or tree, etc.) gets set the night before you pick them out of the ground at the moment you go to sleep, and then any fertilizer / Farming level / food buffs get calculated on top of that at the moment you harvest it. You can read the nitty gritty details in my previous thread.