This Post is rated "N" for Number Crunching. This post contains scenes of graphic math and explicit optimization content. Viewer discretion is advised. As per usual with these posts, a few caveats so that people don't misunderstand the purpose here: All I'm doing is crunching the numbers on profitability of this specific crop, as it compares to others, and publishing my results and conclusions on a pure profit basis. Just because a plant is or isn't unprofitable, even from the perspective of opportunity cost, does not mean that it should or should not be planted. That is up to each individual farmer. I'm not trying to tell you what you should, or should not, plant. All I'm doing is projecting profits. This field study made possible by generous donations from JojaCorp. This is completely unconnected in any way to JojaCorp's decision to end their JojaCoffee product line, and is purely a coincidence that this report was made public one month after the announcement. Right, with that out of the way, let's begin, shall we? Initiating Coffee.jar Coffee was introduced in the 1.2 update, and there was quite a lot of excitement around it when it came out. Prior to that, you had to buy your coffee from Gus, who will charge you appropriately for it. The initial positives from Coffee are that it produces a ton of beans per harvest, it spams out harvests every other day, and it lasts for not one but TWO seasons: Spring AND Summer. In addition, it produces coffee beans that, by themselves, can be replanted to spread crops at a geometric rate. On the negatives side, however, are the twin crippling problems of low selling price and inability to take advantage of the Artisan perk since Coffee is considered to be a Food item rather than an Artisan Good. Now, let's get into some hot and heavy calculating... The Numbers For this experiment, we will be looking at an established farm, one that is at least on Year 2 or onward. While it is certainly *possible* to get coffee beans growing in your first year, it isn't particularly likely, barring either a multitude of resets to 'force' the Cart Vendor to have one, while also playing optimally enough to have the 2.5k on hand to buy it from him on the first Friday of the season, or extreme luck in the mines assuming you get that far in your first spring. In either case, you really won't have time to do much more than set up beans for a few growth cycles. Frankly, it wouldn't be fair to compare it to other plants that can get going from day one. We're not going to figure in initial costs here, for several reasons. First, there's several ways to get your first coffee bean, and costs can range from free (soot sprite drop) to very expensive (cart vendor). However, the truth is, because you can plant coffee beans straight from the bush, propagating your beans is a fairly easy process, especially once you get your greenhouse up and running, and you can amortize your initial purchase over so many iterations that it would eventually get lost in the rounding anyway, even for the 2,500g cost. We are also not going to factor in star quality, for ease of calculations. Besides, if we did that, brewing coffee would be a non-starter anyway, for reasons we'll explain in a bit. In your first month, your coffee bean plant(s) will produce a total of 9-11 harvests, depending on if you use Deluxe Speed Gro or not. For purposes of this experiment, we'll assume the 11 harvests, and that you have a significant surplus of Deluxe Speed Gro (or at least are willing to pay Pierre for them). You then get another 13 harvests in Summer, for a total of 24 harvests over the course of the growth season. 24*4 = 96 beans. Selling them raw nets you a profit of 15g/ea*96= 1,440g over the course of two months. You can also brew them into actual Coffee. It takes 5 beans to brew Coffee in a mere two HOURS, which then sells for 150g/ea. So you can brew 19 coffee with 2 beans left over, for a total profit of 2,880g for the two seasons. So how does that compare with other options? Rhubarb is available from the Oasis, and since we're assuming a year two onward strategy with all options on the table, let's start there. With Deluxe Speed Gro, you can get three plantings per season. They cost 100g/ea and sell for 923g/ea as Wine. So 823*3 = 2,469g. For a single spring season. Strawberries are even more unfortunate for the poor Coffee, ringing in 6 harvests at just over 500g/ea tops 3k... just for the spring. It's already beat both season's worth of growth for Coffee in a single season. That's where we are. The Unfortunate Truth Here's where things get really bad for coffee... it is actually more profitable to NEVER brew coffee, and simply buy it from Gus. How do we calculate this? Well, it's really quite simple, we assume that each coffee you brew is worth the 300g/ea that Gus sells it for. That's twice the price, that's got to be nice, right? Wrong. With 19 coffee brewed per two seasons, at 300g/ea, you're only looking at 5,700g (plus the 30g from the 2 spare beans, can't forget those!). Unfortunately, it is also competing with some of the heaviest hitters in Summer. I mean, Starfruit Wine sells for 3,150g/ea. And even without Deluxe Speed Gro, you get two of them per season. Even subtracting the albeit expensive price of 400g/ea, you're still looking at 2,750g/each or two for 5,500. And that's without Deluxe Speed Gro. With it, you're looking at 8,250g. And now your entire two season's growth of Coffee, assuming you double the coffee's price to match what you pay Gus for it, has been eclipsed... just in one season. Furthermore I... I'm really not trying to bash Coffee here, but there's another huge problem. Occasionally, you'll get someone who says something along the lines of "Yea, but you can exponentially grow your field to enormous levels!", and yea... you can. But there's a logical fallacy here. You see, you can do the same thing with parsnips. That doesn't mean they're a particularly *good* crop to plant. The problem is that each crop you have in the ground, you're going to have to water, which costs Stamina, each and every day. Before you can do literally anything else, you have to water your crops. And by the time you get to the point where you have Quality Sprinklers... buying enough crops isn't a problem anymore, it's space. So in the early game, you'll screw over your ability to descend in the mines to get the gold for the Quality Sprinklers if you try an exponential growth strategy, and once you have the sprinklers to avoid that, you've got MUCH better things to plant. It's really a poor argument when calculating profits. And for those on iOS or other mobile platforms? I weep for your fingers if you try to grow Coffee in any substantial quantity. In Conclusion I'm not trying to rag on Coffee Beans. They're pretty cool, and trust me, I love my coffee. However, it would be literally more profitable to grow something else and BUY your coffee from Gus than it would be to grow your own. And, unfortunately, I've pretty definitively Done The Math on that to back it up. Numbers, like hips, don't lie. Having said that, just because it would be more profitable to do so in no way means you have to do it that way. After all, part of the fun of Stardew Valley is playing it how YOU want to play it. If you want to plant fields of Organic Certified Fair Trade Coffee... by all means, do just that. This isn't a judgement call. I'm not trying to be mean or pick on coffee or those who grow it. You aren't any less a farmer for having planted coffee. But, for pure greedy profit, from the JojaCorp Shill perspective... planting Coffee is a sucker's bet, even for personal consumption.
What about the fact that things can be grown outside the farm itself? Could that alter the equation in any decisive way (presumably not for touchscreen but I'm still curious in the abstract)? Thanks for another great run-down of the raw numbers and some good guidelines on where to slot them into a playthrough's calculations!
You generally can't grow much outside the farm itself because it requires unusual means to do so (typically an exploit requiring a worm dig spot), but that still would only go further away from favor of coffee beans because you have an even more limited number of spots to plant things, which means profit per square is even more important. And, in general, the larger the planting area, the further against Coffee Beans the equation gets, because soon you hit a stamina limit. I mean, maintaining, say, a thousand squares of crops. That isn't easy. So, you can either get coffee beans from those thousand squares, or you can get either Strawberries or Starfruit from those thousand squares... even if you weren't able to keg/jar them all, you could keg/jar enough of them that it would still crush coffee beans. Coffee Beans are the star at exactly one thing: Exponential propagation. Once you have a fully mature coffee plant going, it will be producing on average 2 coffee beans *per day* that you can plant directly, for free. Which is the trap. Here's the math, and also why despite the numbers being correct, the logic is wrong: Assuming you can obtain a Coffee Bean on Spring 5th from the Cart Vendor (however you manage to do it). It takes 10 days for it to grow, which means it produces its first set of beans on the 16th of spring. Then you plant those four. And then each day after that, you also plant those four. That means 24 coffee bean plants... just from that one plant, and just in spring. On the 27th, your first four coffee plants produce their first yield, so that's an extra 16 beans every other day, for a total of 20 beans total per day. And that number goes up by 4 per day per every other day. Until the ones you planted on the 27th mature, then it goes up even faster. You could have hundreds, possibly thousands of coffee plants by the end of summer just from that single bean... And you'll never be able to keep them all watered. You will run completely out of stamina trying to keep up with that many crops in your first spring and summer. AND because you're spending all your stamina on THAT, you won't be able to go mining for iron and gold to get sprinklers to alleviate that burden, except on rainy days. AND... you actually won't net that much profit, realistically, because you are plowing all your beans back into the ground, so you only get the last few days of summer as actual profit-generating crops. Which, granted, is going to be significant, but not as significant as a more standard play, or even just plain fishing.
Even without doing hard calculations (which you've done masterfully), I think it's pretty clear that coffee can't compete on profit with the big-name crops like ancient fruit. For me, the main interesting thing about your calculations is that even if you're only brewing the coffee for your own consumption it still isn't worth it. (In pure money terms anyway. There's still a pretty powerful flavour argument for brewing your own coffee. Buying a big pile of pre-made coffee from Gus to store in a chest or something does not sound very nice.) Actually, in my current play-through I haven't been using coffee at all. I've estimated that the speed-boost you get from drinking it doesn't really make up for the money and time and inventory cost it takes to buy it. ... Maybe in the late-game when it's easier to buy in bulk, and you've got a huge income - then maybe it's worthwhile. (Or again, it could be worth it for game flavour reasons!)
I don't suppose enough Junimo Huts could alter any conclusions for late-game? I recently placed enough Huts to basically never harvest again (aside from the Greenhouse since they can't be placed to harvest from in there), but to maximize coffee like you're talking would take an awful lot of Huts since their range is so limited, and with such intense Keg turn-over, even just collecting from the Huts might prove a bit of a bear relative to other options.
That and, again, you could be doing the same thing with either Strawberries in the spring or Starfruit in the fall (or just using Ancient Fruit for the whole year) with the same setup for more profit and less work. Any setup you could set coffee in, you can also set up more profitable things in the exact same area, and be more profitable just buying coffee in bulk from Gus.
