This wiki is a read-only version of the Stardew Valley Wiki. The official editable wiki maintained by ConcernedApe can be found at stardewvalleywiki.com

Talk:Shed

From Stardew Valley Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
This talk page is for discussing Shed.
  • Sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~).
  • Put new text below old text.
  • Be polite.
  • Assume good faith.
  • Don't delete discussions.

Shed, Barn, Coop comparison

The page says, "Optimal layout provides 67 spaces, whereas a deluxe barn provides 136 spaces. Meaning that the shed is only preferential to the barn for cost or aesthetic reasons." But isn't a barn with no upgrades both cheaper and at least as big? That would mean even cost wouldn't give the shed an advantage. Also, if cost is a factor, shouldn't the cheaper coop be considered?

Where shed does have a slight advantage over the barn is that it takes up less one less row on the exterior side. Coop may win here, though, since it takes up both a row and a column less. Bladeoflight16 (talk) 05:23, 28 December 2018

Yes, the initial barn is both cheaper and provides more space. I had to go to the Keg page to find this info. Some rewriting is definitely in order! I don't have any info. about the coop at the moment, however. margotbean (talk) 18:40, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
I think there's a bit more to it than that. Firstly, how well do they each do the job of creating space? A shed will occupy 7x3=21 plots, plus a row of seven in front for access is 28 plots, and can accommodate 67 machines, which is 67/28 = ~2.4 machines per plot. A basic barn occupies 7x4=28 plots, plus a row of seven again, and can accommodate 90 machines, which is 90/35 = ~2.57 machines per plot, so the barn already has the slight edge here. On the surface, it seems the barn is a no-brainer at 9,000g cheaper to start. And the barn can be upgraded to hold 136 machines, still in the same 35 plots, which is ~3.9 machines per plot. But if you're buying the materials instead of sourcing them yourself (which is likely, because time is money and all that) then it changes somewhat. In year 1, the shed costs 18,000g total, the barn costs 12,500g, so the gap has closed a little, but the barn is still winning by some way. But in year 2+, after Robin's price increases, the shed now costs 30,000g and the barn leaps to a massive 38,500g. Which one is better now? And if you then want to upgrade your Y2+ barn, the total cost of going deluxe is an eye-watering 175,500g, almost as much as six sheds. Depending on your playstyle, that might well be a bit too much.
Furthermore, there's the issue of unloading and reloading. An optimal shed is all straight lines, nice and easy, in and out in under half an hour, but an optimal barn can be a bit of a maze, and you can spend hours winding about and retracing your steps to do the machines you missed.
As for the coop, IIRC the optimal layout for a deluxe coop is 75 machines in 24 plots, at a density of ~3.12, so not as good as a deluxe barn, but better than a shed.
Because of this, there's no objective way of picking a winner here. Without adding qualifiers, I think that changing it to say the barn is better would be just as bad as saying the shed is better, because it depends on the player. I think the article(s) should just provide the facts, maybe some pictures of optimal layouts in all three buildings, and leave the assessment of which is more suitable to the reader/player One More Day (talk) 06:49, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
You may be right about leaving assessments to the player. But I think it can be helpful to look at various approaches. Consider the following alternative and see if it doesn't open the possibilities.
I have always considered sheds a waste of farm real estate, compared to barns. It's just factual that deluxe barns give a far superior number of machines per exterior farm tile, the largest for any farm building. In the long run, I consider that to be the overriding objective. Why build at all unless the goal is solid? The rest is: "how to get there".
As an aside, it is worth considering other internal layouts in deluxe barns. The "optimal" 136 is optimal only in the number of machines it holds, not optimal in the amount of work required to service the machines. I use a 135-machine layout instead that provides considerably quicker access to most machines and thus lessens work. I consider that trade-off more properly "optimal".
As for building cost, I've never liked buying the materials *ever*. Foraging and mining skills are very useful to build early on, so collecting your own provides benefits way beyond the materials themselves. And now with the post-year-one prices so high, buying is prohibitive, until maybe year 4 or after, when most things are ticking along and buildings generally built already. 10,000g is quite substantial in the first season, but 100,000g is less significant when incomes rise to sufficient levels. The thing is, you (I?) generally want to build these machine-production buildings in order to arrive at those big incomes, meaning you need to get them built without so much money on hand.
So from day 1, I always have it in mind to fell trees all over the place, especially off the farm, where they regenerate automatically. Great for forage skill, the sooner the better for accumulating wood, which can only be found in limited (if substantial) quantities. I'd never buy stone, since that regenerates daily and can be mined at will. Trees take time to regrow.
So, with the ambitious building program on my farm, I still run out of available wood by winter year 1. I can even use all I can grow by saving seeds and planting a forest on the farm, even through year 2. I make 4 deluxe barns, 100 kegs or more in year 1, more in year 2, preserves jars, bee houses, around 50 tappers, and eventually, casks. It's many thousands of wood pieces, and I can't afford to buy it.
As a compromise with myself, I have bought a few tens of thousands of g worth at the end of year 1, to give a boost. It's a bit dubious how well this works to speed the development of the farm. The buildings and equipment is made faster, but the financial strain puts timing restraints on the quantity and purchase of other items, like fruit trees, starfruit seeds, and the like. I say this despite being able to top 1 million g earned in year 1, which seems like pretty decent progress to me.
So that's my assessment, and not the only one to consider by any means, but it proves quite successful if you like its way of doing things.
Another aside: I stress foraging because I make sure to earn up to level 4 in the first 17 days. That's so I can get two salmonberries off each bush, which I greedily grab during all four days of the season. It's not money I'm after. The berries are a very cheap source of food, and can sustain me almost by themselves through to blackberry season (Fall 8-11), by which time I make sure I'm at Foraging level 8 in order to get 3 berries per bush. I can end up with around 500 salmonberries the first season, almost 800 blackberries, and in year 2, with Foraging 10 and a food buff, can get 4 berries per bush. By then, they can be double the food per berry if you choose the route to iridium quality. The stacks of the berries make for a huge food cache for mining (or any purpose). How big a stack of cooked food would you need to get the same food value? How hard is it to get the supplies to make that food? Cost? Yeah, time is money and all that. And berries make a good and cheap gift for many villagers too.
So this does "feed into" getting supplies for barn building, because you burn a lot of energy foraging for wood, especially early on, and need refreshment. Beats eating green algae. (For 17 days, I take anything.) Cheers. Butterbur (talk) 08:29, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
By the time you're far enough along to consider dropping 132,500 gold on buying all that wood, you're probably doing a ton of artisan work with high value crops. Just to get a rough idea of how the investment works out, let's do some computations with kegs making ancient fruit wine. Let's also assume you have Artisan profession because you probably do if you're constructing buildings to hold kegs. An ancient fruit wine is worth 2310g with Artisan profession. Just for this back of the envelope calculation, let's assume that selling the ancient fruit raw averages 687g per fruit (the silver quality value). That means that a keg provides an additional 1623g per fruit. The deluxe barn has space for 69 additional kegs over the shed. 69*1623g = 111,987g per week. This means that even buying all the wood for a deluxe barn, the extra space pays for itself in just 2 weeks. That assumes you have 136 ancient fruit plants to fill the entire barn of kegs, of course. If we drop it down to 120 ancient fruit plants (a greenhouse full of them), it's 53 additional spaces making an extra 86,019g per week, which still pays off more than the difference in 2 weeks.
On top of this, it doesn't make sense to use 175,500 gold as the cost for comparisons. You don't have to upgrade the barn, so any analysis on whether to upgrade should be done separately from whether to buy a shed or barn initially. In that context, the 30,000g vs. 38,500g comparison is the only meaningful pair of costs. With the same numbers above, the additional 23 spaces full of kegs making ancient fruit wine generate 37,329g per week. This nearly pays for the entire cost of the barn with just the additional spaces over a shed, obviously making the additional 8,500g worth it!
My point was not that there is one absolute best way to do things. My point was to start a discussion about the fact that the more carefully you look at it, the less appealing the shed becomes. It seems to be a clear loser in the vast majority of cases. In particular, this page used to claim cost might be a reason to prefer a shed, but the shed only wins by that metric if you're buying all the wood after year 1. It also requires completely ignoring any return-on-investment calculations which are extremely likely to add up to more than a mere 8,000g. I found that misleading.
I think the edits to the page over the past week pretty much sort out the concerns I had, but we could present a lot more information (even if we leave return on investment for the player to figure out). Would it be worth doing that somewhere? Would it be better to put it another page if it's worth it?Bladeoflight16 (talk) 01:10, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
We're very much on the same "page" here. Nice analysis, by the way, and you're quite right in basic assumptions. I put 6 iridium sprinklers in my greenhouse (two on the borders), for 116 growing spaces. To support more keg production, I grow lots of Starfruit in summer and parcel it out over the year. I also grow considerable Hops: more Keg work, but nicely profitable. Sprinklers everywhere for watering, and Junimos can help with harvesting. The biggest difficulty is getting two growths done in one season, because of the time it takes to clear land, till, and plant. With iridium tools and buying seeds in advance, I have managed to put over 1000 plants in the ground in 2 days. But I'm not a speed demon with the controls, and that's a push. It's also not much fun forever, so when I'm sated, I let all the production go begging for a while and just keep the casks busy. I limit the cellar to 125 kegs: max fill without having to remove the casks themselves in order to harvest. (Too much tedious work doing that.) I can indeed make tons of gold anyway, and enough is enough already. Even farm life is too short, which is why we always want one more day, right?
In any case, the point about sheds being a poor choice seem clear to me too. I've looked at this a number of ways, and like you, it keeps coming up short everywhere. If you want a place you can decorate and make into a cozy spot, ok. That's it as far as I can see. Butterbur (talk) 02:22, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
Oh, forgot! As for writing these analyses up and putting them somewhere, seems alright to me, although that would be an auxiliary page rather than the main Shed article. Now, if you can figure out how to do it! I'm not sure I could make an objective case. And therein lies the problem. Just about any analysis is going to be rather subjective. But lots of luck if you want to try. Butterbur (talk) 02:27, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
Actually, I think the most useful thing is to leave discussions like this lying around on the talk pages so people can read them, think about them, and decide for themselves. Who knows what will prove to be most significant to another? It all counts, but it weighs differently with different people. Butterbur (talk) 03:09, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

New look in PC version 1.3.36

Just so you know, the exterior of the shed was updated in this version so that the door is properly centered. Not sure if this change appears on other platforms yet, but it might be worth updating the image on this wiki page to match. Overlord Odin (talk) 02:28, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Uploaded, thanks for pointing that out! margotbean (talk) 17:25, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Optimal Layout for console and mobile

Since console and mobile players can't reach kegs or similar in corners, would it be worth having two optimal layouts on the page, one for pc and one for other devices? Overlord Odin (talk) 00:37, 22 April 2019 (BST)

Short answer: yes. Long answer: If you upload a mobile/console image, I can clean it up if need be. (I don't know if there's a correlate to the keyboard "F4" key to go into screenshot mode on console or mobile). margotbean (talk) 01:10, 22 April 2019 (BST)
The best layout I can find that doesn't use any corners is the same as the PC layout, just remove the keg at the end of each walking row for a total of 129 kegs. I did find a slightly better layout for console which utilizes bottom corners, allowing for 131 kegs. That said, the best layout I can figure for deluxe barns is 128 with bottom corners, so big sheds are still the better option.
P.S. The ability to take screenshots was added to console in 1.4 through the options menu; not sure if it's built into the mobile version but you could just take a screenshot on the device itself. Kaori kins (talk) 00:51, 25 August 2020 (UTC)