[Number Crunching] Using the Statue of Uncertainty for Profit!

This post is rated O for Optimization. This post contains scenes of gratuitous min/maxing for profits and explicit on-screen math which may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.

As usual, some caveats before we begin:​

• Credit to OneMoreDay for starting the ball rolling and BentFX for getting me started thinking about it. I didn't come up with this idea, but I did run with it.
  
• This post is about number crunching and profit generation, and makes no apologies for it. However, profit is not the only thing in SDV. There are as many ways to play the game as there are players, and this post should in no way be taken as any sort of statement that there is a 'right' or 'wrong' way to play this wonderful game.

The Premise​

And of course, we can't simply let these sorts of questions remain unanswered, can we? For Science! And Profit! And JojaCo... ahem, sorry about that.

The Mechanic​

In essence, we are taking advantage of a feature which was introduced in the 1.3 update for PC called the Statue of Uncertainty. It resides in the Sewer, so you will need to go artifact hunting until Gunther gives you the key, so this won't be a Day One Strategy(tm), think of it as a refinement for Year 2+ players.

For 10k, the Statue of Uncertainty will reset all of your perks. And the utility of this has gone unnoticed for quite some time, as prior to that perk choices were permanent. It was seen as a way to fix 'bad choices' (subjectively, of course), which was hailed as a very useful feature. Basically, a Respec option in a game that very much needed one. And then we all went along.

However, the true power of the Statue of Uncertainty lies in the Farming perks, namely Agriculturalist and Artisan. You see, the Artisan Perk is 40% bonus on all artisan goods, which should be the vast majority of what you are selling by the time you unlock the sewers if profit is your primary goal. This made Artisan a no-brainer option for anyone who wants more profits, and Agriculturalist, while interesting, was almost completely ignored.

But with the Statue of Uncertainty, you can have your cake, and eat it too. You can turn on Agriculturalist for planting, then switch back to Artisan for selling, thus effectively getting benefit from BOTH perks! However, it costs 20k to do that. So the question is... will 20k be worth the additional crops yielded?

THAT, my friends, is what we are here to determine.

Do keep in mind that using this strategy requires a bit more care as to when you sell your products. You don't want to sell while you have Agriculturalist active, for example, so this may mean holding off a few days to sell your artisan goods instead of being able to liquidate them immediately.

The Calculations​

We're going to break this down into a couple of sections. First, we're going to determine how much extra crop yield we can get out of Agriculturalist per crop, then we will determine how many of those crops would need to exist in order to make the 20k cost for the perk swap to be worth the investment.

Please see attached zipped spreadsheet for more details.

Extra Yield per Crop:

These values are obtained from the Official SDV Wiki.

Ancient Fruit has 8 harvests per year, either Agri or regular SG or DSG gives 9, both Agri and DSG gives 10

Garlic/Parsnip/Wheat has 6 harvests per season, 9 with Speed Gro or Agri, and 13 with both Agri+DSG

Potato/Kale/Radish/Beet has 4 harvests per season, 5 with Agri or SG, 6 with DSG, and 9 with Agri+DSG

Tomato has 5 harvests, unless you use both Agri + DSG, in which case you get 6

Hops gets 17 harvests normally, 19 with Agri or SG, 20 with DSG, and 21 with Agri+DSG

Bok Choy actually surprises everyone by having 5 harvests normally, 9 with Agri, SG, or DSG, and 13 with both Agri+DSG

Artichoke has 3 harvests normally, which goes up to 4 with DSG and 5 with Agri+DSG

Several benefit from either SG or Agri, but not Agri + DSG, such as Strawberries and Blueberries.

Those are really the only ones that might see benefit from this strategy.

Break Even Points:

Agriculturalist perk does the exact same thing as regular Speed-Gro, which costs 100g/ea, assuming you purchase from Pierre. Unfortunately, the cost of crafting is mostly an opportunity cost, you need mass quantities of Pine Tar to make them in bulk, and is not as easily calculated, so we're going to use the only firm number we have.

It takes 20k to swap back and forth with the Statue, so you'd need 200 crops at least to hit the break-even point on the Statue of Uncertainty to be worth the cost of buying the Speed-Gro. More than that, and the Statue is basically cheaper Speed-Gro that you don't have to spend time planting. Less than that, and the price of Speed-Gro will be less, but will require putting the fertilizer down before planting, which can be a timing issue for some people and may be worth using despite the cost as a result.

As a result, in any situation in which you will be using the Statue of Uncertainty in lieu of Speed-Gro to gain an extra harvest, you will be hitting this 200 crop limit well before the profitability of the actual crop itself.

As far as when Agri+DSG breaks ahead of SG or DSG, that's a trickier problem to figure out, however the spreadsheet lets you play around with the field size until you get the numbers you're looking for. In general, most things with a base yield of 6 that are not multi-harvest (Parsnips, Wheat...) and things with a base yield of 4 (Potatoes, Kale...) tend to break even around 25-30ish, simply through sheer volume.

Hops breaks even around 50, but that's more of a competition between DSG and Agi+DSG, and how many extra hops are needed to pay off the 20k for the perk swap.

Most of the rest of the crops either don't benefit from Agri+DSG or don't benefit enough from it to be worth doing.

tl;dr:​

This is perhaps the most convoluted maths I've tried to math out for everyone so far, simply because of fixed cost vs per iteration cost over variable volumes. If you aren't allergic to spreadsheets, please see the attached one which should help explain things more discreetly. But to break it down into a few bullet points

• If it can take advantage of either Speed-Gro or using the statue trick to get Agriculturalist, it only becomes more profitable to use this trick for fields of 200 crops or larger
• Generally shorter growth crops tend to get more use out of the trick, while the only multi-harvest crops that can really take advantage of it are Ancient Fruit and Hops, although Strawberries and Cranberries can at least save a few coins if you are planting in bulk.
  
• Even using this trick, nothing beats Strawberries in spring, although Kale and Potatoes get close
• In Summer, this trick puts Hops over Starfruit, albeit just barely, but nothing else really comes close
• In Fall, using this trick, Wheat actually becomes the most profitable crop by a comfortable margin, followed by Bok Choy of all things, then Cranberries, then Pumpkins.
  
• Remember that you shouldn't sell while you have Agriculturalist up, so you may have to save up most of a season's production and sell it off in a single batch in order to take advantage of this tactic, which may cause temporary cash flow issues if you encounter unanticipated expenses before the end of the quarter.
  
• This makes fields of Ancient Fruit even more stupidly profitable for your outdoors crop because you can get two harvests in Spring with Agri+DSG, plus all four from Summer and Fall. Also you only plant on Spring 1, so you can swap them back on Spring 2 and not risk losing money during the season by being forced to sell things while Agriculturalist is up due to unforeseen expenses.

In Conclusion​

Generally, this trick only really shows its value in large fields of crops, generally in excess of 200 crops. There are specific exceptions, however, where the number of harvests you get are substantially increased by the use of this trick, enough so to be worth the price of admission.

 

I don't agree with the "200 crops" break even point. While it is easy to correlate the 20k price of using the statue to Pierre's price of 200 SG, the actual metric should be the value of artisan goods. 50,000g of base level artisan goods pays for the statue. So the question becomes, at what level of crop production does the agri perk provide additional crop yield greater than 50,000g, once those crops are processed into artisan goods. That 50,000g is satisfied with an additional 12 Starfruit Wine or 500 pickled wheat, which helps to illustrate that some arbitrary number of crops can't define the break even. In the case of starfruit the payoff comes from the stacking of the agri perk with DSG for 35% off the grow time. That 35% perk is something that simply cannot be purchased, except at the statue. It can only be bench marked by examining additional artisan goods yield and sale price, not by the price of basic speed-gro from Pierre.

EDIT: I do like the post. I'm glad someone is trying to break it all down. I just think that the "200 crop" premise is wrong.

 

Yeah, I understood Shneekey's point as "if you're not using it with DSG (i.e. if it's just a replacement for speed-gro), then you need 200+ crops."

EDIT: also, irrelevant to the point, but why would you pickle wheat when beer exists?

 

If you have less than 200 crops, then it is cheaper to buy Speed-Gro from Pierre rather than do the statue trick. Otherwise, break points are moderately difficult to calculate without getting into maths that make most people's eyes cross and glaze over. The spreadsheet gives you the ability to play with the field sizes to get an idea. In general, you get paid back very rapidly with things that dramatically increase in yield numbers, like parsnips, wheat and such. Generally you only need 20-30 to hit a break even point in those cases.

I'm not sure what you mean by pickled wheat. I always assume you turn wheat into beer, which is why it becomes the most profitable crop in Fall using the Agri+DSG trick.

 

Less than 200 crops planted over the entire year though, since you have to refresh Speed Grow each season. So, if you plan on 67 per season you hit that mark, unless you are planting something like ancient fruit.

 

Four starfruit plots pay for the statue. With Agri+DSG, four starfruit plots will grow 12 starfruit. Make that into wine for 12 x 4,500g = 54,000g, then pay the statue, 20k, it becomes 12 x 6,300g = 75,600g.

75,600g - 20,000g - 54,000g = 1,600g Profit by using the statue for 4 plots.

All I was saying above is that using 200 plots as some kind of hard and fast rule is flawed. It has to be figured on how much the Agriculturist perk profits growth and how much the Artisan perk profits sale price. Four starfruit plots destroy your "200 crops" rule.

 

I think you are on to something, but you have to look at how many more fruit are grown. Agriculturalist or either speed grow produces one more fruit per plant than nothing. Agriculturalist and DSP combined produce 2 more fruit than nothing, or 1 more fruit than one of the two.

So between Artisan and speed grow vs Statue Switch and speed grow the break even is more than four plots but less than 10 plots.

Edit: Oops I was confusing Starfruit and Ancient Fruit.

 

You don't need to use Agriculturalist for that. Just Deluxe Speed-Gro by itself will net you your third harvest, with no additional benefit for paying the money for the switching of the perks. And Agriculturalist by itself won't give you any extra harvests. Therefore, this strategy is entirely useless for this scenario. All you are doing is wasting 20k that does no good.

 

The 40% Artisan perk on 12 starfruit wine pays for a year of agriculturist on everything!

EDIT: Also, I think you're missing the bigger point. You credit One More Day and I for starting the conversation, but the original context was about leveraging Artisan+Agriculturist using the statue, in a min/max scenario. You've degraded it to a discussion about 200 speed-gro from Pierre and what does or doesn't make it worth it, based on treating it as a simple 10% growth perk. Given a full month DSG+Agri does nothing that DSG alone doesn't do. What it does though is make 8 day Starfruit. That's 3 starfruit in 24 days. That's 3 harvests, after buying DSG on Thursday, Summer 4. It's not calculus! The discussion deserves to be about how it can be leveraged and not about how many speed-gro, from the general store, it equals.

 

The point is, at least for starfruit you should just be Artisan 100% of the time and never switch to Agriculturalist at all.

 

The pickled wheat was referring to @BentFX's comment

I agree, wheat always gets turned into beer.

The "200 plots" is only a hard and fast rule if you aren't using Agri+DSG and are only using Agri on its own. Then it's equivalent to buying speed-gro, which is where the 200 plot idea comes from. The suggestion is that if you're doing more than 200 plots of something you would usually have speed-gro on, you can use Agri without any fertilizer and save money and time.

 

You miss the point entirely. It's about the artisan good value. I just used pickled wheat as an example of a cheap product. If you would rather use beer as an example, it will take an additional 250 beer to offset the price of using the statue. Or as I stated 12 starfruit wine.

To try to pin the make or break point at "200" is silly. Different items have different values and it is the final artisan good, plus artisan perk, value that decides whether it was profitable.

Hard and Fast? 10% on cauliflower produces nothing! Ramp that up to 200 cauliflower, guess what, Nothing! It's just silly to try to pretend that 200 is a magic number. Sure, if you treat the perk like it just a speed-gro, then you can make 1to1 comparisons with speed-gro. But ultimately it is the value of the additional artisan goods it produced that decides whether using the statue to switch professions, at sale time, is profitable. It takes very few, far less than 200, high dollar items to make it profitable.

 

Firstly, it is 200 crops, but only 67 plots if you spread it out through 3 seasons which is a pretty tiny farm.

The comparison is: 100% Artisan vs switching. For Star Fruit, no amount, not 4 not 200 not 10000000 will make switching at a cost of 20000 better than just staying 100% Artisan for no cost. There are crops that do pay off. Some crops only pay off when you plant enough to make the 20000 cheaper that just buying speed grow, which is where the 200 ballpark figure comes from. Some crops will pay off for under 200, but that gets more detailed.

Edit: if you are growing starfruit in the Greenhouse, on the other hand, then a tiny number of plots will pay for the switch.

 

No, the point is you should always sell your starfruit wine as Artisan. The entire thrust of this conversation is about when the value of the Agriculturalist perk makes it worth it to use the statue to switch professions at sale time. In this scenario artisan goods, are held, sold in bulk, and always sold as Artisan.

That assumes you're putting speed-gro on everything, which is probably not a well thought out strategy.

The original discussion, that this conversation was daisy chained off of, was in a min/max context, and first year min/maxing is probably foreign to you. It all comes down to getting farming 10 and unlocking the bus by summer 3. You choose the agriculturist profession. Then, Thursday, Summer 4, you purchase and plant Starfruit seeds with DSG. The Agriculturist+DSG makes for 8 day starfruit. Three harvests puts you right up to the end of the month. Then you keg it, switch professions and sell it. Even if you only planted 4 plots, the 3 harvests with Agriculturist+DSG would pay to switch professions when you sell.

 

I think you are reading too much into one paragraph and not reading the rest of what is presented here, which is causing a miscommunication.

There are several ways to take advantage of this trick. The first is to use the Statue in lieu of Speed-Gro in situations in which you have 200+ crops, assuming the crop is capable of taking advantage of Speed-Gro. This works for crops like Blueberries or Strawberries that only needs Speed-Gro to get an extra yield. While this isn't pertinent to your discussion in the other thread, it IS an interesting bit of min/maxing that should be mentioned which I had discovered while playing around with the numbers.

The next is more of what you and he were discussing... determining which crops benefit from having Agriculturalist perk for extra yields. Which was also covered. You will see benefit from any of the shorter growth crops like Parsnips, Wheat, Potatoes, and the like. Ancient Fruit also takes benefit from it because you get an extra crop out of having both Agri+DSG. In these cases, the break-even points tend to be around 20-30, which are covered in the spreadsheet that was linked.

You asked 'where would that extra 10% shoehorn in an extra crop', that is the question I answered, in addition to finding a new use for the Statue trick.

Does this make more sense to you?

 

I love how even simple arithmetic, which is unambiguously correct, can still create debate...

My original statement, quoted by @ShneekeyTheLost in his OP, was in response to the question of what perks I take and why. Here it is again.

I think the whole context of my post has been lost, so let's be clear - my brief post was about what I myself do, and why I do it. It will also work well for some other players, particularly those who play the game in a similar fashion to me, but it might not work for all players, because as @BentFX has already pointed out, the conversation came from a min/max point of view.

And in that other thread, in response to BentFX's post also quoted above by Shneekey in the OP, I attempted to further clarify it with a subsequent post

So, while this thread now appears to have an extended discussion about the suitability of the strategy, with arguments for and against it, I think there is a general fixation on applying it to a static situation, and then cherry-picking fairly arbitrary numbers to suit an individual argument. So, I'm going to try and add even further clarity to where it can be used most powerfully, with a slightly more detailed explanation of my approach.




I think the really important thing that I notice here is that most people are apparently missing the fact that you aren't limited to planting on the first day of a given season. While we start Summer with quality sprinklers, I don't just settle for however many I had for the rest of the season. Instead, I continue adding sprinklers, and planting more starfruit, on a frequent basis throughout the season, looking to get to over 2,000 watered plots as I go into Fall. Mostly, it's not actually about getting any extra multiple harvests from a plot. Rather, DSG is so cheap compared to how valuable starfruit wine is, that it is easily worth applying DSG even for a single use, and having Agriculturist allows me to continue that process of adding fresh plots of starfruit for one more day, as late as Summer 20, instead of Summer 19.

This is where having Agriculturist really pays off, being able to continue growing the farm deeper into the month. After the cost of the seed and DSG, the profit on starfruit wine from a fertilized, single-use plot is 2,670g, which means just eight of them will cover the entire cost of the two switches. I'll repeat that for avoidance of doubt - just eight starfruit planted on Summer 20. That's one third of an iridium sprinkler. Everything else it brings throughout the entire year is gravy.

Taking more realistic numbers, even if I only planted an extra half a dozen iridium sprinklers on that day, at almost 65k profit per sprinkler, we're talking about something like 360k extra profit that I wouldn't have got without Agriculturist. In reality it is much more than that, because not only do I get an extra day for single-use plots, I get an extra one or two days for all the double-use plots from earlier in the season as well, depending on whether they had DSG. Agriculturalist means that DSG can be more strategically applied, depending on which day the planting is happening.

After the last starfruit is planted, Agriculturist also means I can also leave it a day later, to as late as Summer 26 on fertilized plots, to switch in wheat to preserve tilling and fertilizer, while leaving enough time to harvest the wheat and replace it with pumpkins on Fall 1. And remember, I can use that wheat to make beer, which is itself ridiculously profitable. Wheat is the fifth best theoretical crop to put in a keg after coffee, starfruit, hops and ancient fruit, and of those top four, all bar the starfruit are impractical anyway, each for different reasons.

On top of those, and over the course of the rest of the year, as long as the greenhouse repair is bought by Summer 20, Agriculturist also helps squeeze in an extra harvest of keggable starfruit in the greenhouse, because they won't die at the change of season. Plus another harvest for Winter 28 that doesn't have time to get kegged, but can still be sold raw. That's yet another 360k profit gained, courtesy of Agriculturist.

And the advantages continue into winter too, as I seek to fill the field as quickly as possible with winter seeds. Agriculturist takes a day off them as well, from seven days down to six. This allows for a nominal four harvests instead of three, although as usual, crops are expanded on a daily basis throughout the season, and the last day for planting winter seeds is now Winter 22 instead of Winter 21. That extra day matters. I've never actually bothered calculating how much value it adds to a season of winter seeds (and I'm not about to do so now) but I'd be surprised if it's less than at least an extra 250k.

For my style, the benefits of the Agriculturist/Artisan switch just keep stacking up, and in total, it all translates to improving the year's earnings by a healthy seven figure sum.

This^

I mean, I'm not even buying anything from Pierre's. The DSG and starfruit seeds come from Sandy, and due to the longer opening hours, and reduced travel time because minecarts are closer, I tend to buy wheat and pumpkins from JojaMart. Pierre's is just scenery after the first few weeks.

Once again folks, the advantage is really from the extra leeway it offers on planting throughout the seasons.

What? It's easily a year one strategy. It's not like you need the complete collection for this; you only need to make 60 donations by Winter 24 to unlock the sewers, and if you get all 53 minerals, you only need seven artifacts. The minerals are going to come from geodes, which are scarfed up in quantity from the mines and skull cavern. Realistically you're finding way more than seven artifacts though, so it doesn't actually need anywhere near 53 minerals.

You don't lose money by selling without artisan, you just don't quite make as much money. You're selling wine made from crops that it wouldn't even have been possible to grow without Agriculturalist. I try to fund everything with iridium bars (plus whatever gems) from skull cavern, which is why Blacksmith perk is so handy, but at a pinch I'll still sell artisan products if I need to, because that expense is going to be ploughed straight back into the farm to make even more money

Lolwut? This is about getting an extra 3k for every bottle of starfruit wine, not an extra tuppence ha'penny on parsnip juice. Have you completely missed the point of this strategy? I mean, yeah, you can break even doing it with DSG on about 50 plots of parsnips, and hence turn a profit on anything above those 50 plots, but I think it rather lacks ambition.

 

Ah, now everything is clear!! Thanks!

 

Yes min/maxing is foreign to me, and I am not familiar with the original discussion. Notice that the first post here starts us in our second year, not our first. Now that you have explained where you are coming from it makes sense. Thanks.

Side question, does anyone min/max on a touch screen?

 

Don't misquote me, you Shneekey! I said 'I'm curious where else that 10% might shoehorn in an extra money crop?' The conversation was never about parsnips, or trying to save the price of a speed-gro. It was about leveraging the statue for pure, unadulterated, record level profits. You turned it into something different, and then misquote me in an attempt to justify it.

 

I think it may be a misunderstanding of the line 'shoehorn in an extra money crop' here, because I just figured out how to get a total of 21 Hops harvests in Summer using both Agriculturalist and DSG, which makes it more profitable than Starfruit in the first place, obviating the need for an early Oasis unlock and the need for extra time to put your starfruit down to begin with. That's shoehorning in extra money crops to me. And because it only cares about the day it was planted, I can immediately switch back to Artisan so I don't have to hold off selling anything. That's... not nothing.

You want profits? I got your profits right here. I don't think you realize what I did with the statue trick. You're talking about being able to plant on successive days. I'm talking about unheard of levels of yield from crops which are already solid profit makers.

It also made Wheat far and away the most profitable thing to do in Fall, because it can be brewed into beer, because you're literally harvesting every other day. You get 13 harvests of wheat per square, at a net profit of 270g/ea (after cost of wheat is taken into consideration) for a total gross (before cost of the 20k) of 3,510g per crop per season. This beats out Cranberries and Pumpkins by a good margin. This is up from 9 harvests from just using DSG by itself for a mere 2,430g, which pays itself off after a mere 20 plots since the difference is right around 1k per plot. The best part is you can increase that on the fly by as much as you want because Wheat is such a rapidly growing crop, and profitable enough per each that it'll still be profitable right up to Fall 26. You just keep Agriculturalist up the whole Fall to max out your harvests, then swap back to artisan to sell your beer at the end of Fall. So not only is it the most profitable per square, it is also the easiest to expand, making all other fall crops obsolete overnight. This is, of course, for your first fall.

Or is an almost 45% increase in fall gross profits not good enough?

Squeezing in an extra eight or sixteen starfruit because of an extra day of planting to still get three harvests in is piddly compared to the massive increases in profit margins I've managed, and without depending on anything from the Oasis. Hell, I can trivially drop 160 Hops on Summer 1, Year 1, on Deluxe Speed Gro with Agriculturalist and top any profits from a similar number of Ancient Fruit. That's with only 20 sprinklers. With more sprinklers, the gap only becomes wider, because you can buy your hops on Summer 1 without needing to wait for Pam to get off her lazy arse. Spacing will be interesting because they are trellis crops, but not insurmountable. It'll take up a larger footprint as a result, but that's not going to be a limiting factor for your first Summer. And the money saved on not needing to unlock the Oasis can be pushed into barn and coop upgrades as needed to complete the animal products bundle early. Or, if you don't care about bundle completion, can be plowed (literally) into even more crops, thus further increasing the snowball effect.

Maybe I misunderstood your initial conversation, but the results are well beyond the figures you were discussing.