Talk:Skills

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Level 10 Fishing Skills

(This was at the top of the page before the index, figured I'd move it into it's own place to clean up a little. I also added their username and post date from the revision history for reference, but it looks like the account no longer exists.)

The level 10 Fishing Skill reward is : Angler - Fish worth 50% more, and Pirate - Double chance to find treasure. I don't know how to do all the formatting to enter this info in. Why can't this site be WYSIWYG?

Oath2order 14:45, 5 March 2016 (EST)

Profession Codes in save file

I screwed up my profession choices because I was a noob and didn't know we had a choice, mapped these out and found it useful when save-editing to "rechoose" my profession choices, not sure if someone wants to incorporate these values but feel free to use them if you do. LaznAzn (talk) 14:45, 5 March 2016 (EST)

Efficiency/Proficiency

What do the level up bonuses actually do with the various tools? Is it strictly energy consumption, or does it vary? (I can see the fishing rod proficiency increase making the catch bar bigger, and watering can getting more uses, etc) Rashkavar (talk) 04:00, 12 March 2016 (EST)

I've confirmed through the game's source code that higher skill levels don't change anything but the energy used for the watering can. When refilling, the code uses a switch but it's a linear formula:

Charge = 40 + (UpgradeLevel * 15), where UpgradeLevel is 0 through 4 for a max of 100

The amount taken per use is:

Charge = Charge - (Power + 1)

Meaning it takes 1 to 5...water units? per use, depending on how long you hold the button down. No player levels involved~

This information can be found in Tools/WateringCan.cs @ StardewValley.Tools.WateringCan.DoFunction, lines 60 to 140.

Regarding the fishing rod, higher skill levels do actually affect other things. In particular, it affects maximum casting distance, the maximum amount of time before a fish bites, and the size of the bar while reeling them in.

The casting distance when facing left or right is:

Level 0: 4 tiles
Levels 1-3: 5 tiles
Levels 4-7: 6 tiles
Levels 8+: 7 tiles

When facing up or down, these values are 1 tile less. If I were to guess the reasoning behind this, it's due to the farmer's fishing rod aligning with their sprite when vertical, but "taking up an extra tile" when horizontal.

Fishing level does slightly effect the max amount of time between casting and getting a bite, and the formula is...oddly complicated. First, it calculates a max fishing time using this formula:

MaxBitingTime = 30 - (Fishing Level * 2.5) - (Spinner Equipped ? 5 : 0) - (Dressed Spinner Equipped ? 10 : 0) seconds

The game picks a random value between 0.3 seconds and MaxBitingTime, reduces it by 25%, reduces it by another 50% if bait is used, another 25% after that if the bait was Wild Bait, and finally, it ensures it's no shorter than 0.5 seconds

I've went ahead and calculated out what this means in the end. Basically it will take between 0.5 seconds and the value from the following before you get a bite:

With neither the spinner or dressed spinners:

No bait: 22.5 - (Fishing Level * 0.1875) sec, or between 20.625 and 22.5 sec
Bait: 11.25 - (Fishing Level * 0.09375) sec, or between 9.375 and 11.25 sec
Wild Bait: 8.4375 - (Fishing Level * 0.0703125) sec, or between 7.03125 and 8.4375 sec

With the spinner:

No bait: 18.75 - (Fishing Level * 0.1875) sec, or between 16.875 and 18.75 sec
Bait: 9.375 - (Fishing Level * 0.09375) sec, or between 8.4375 and 9.375 sec
Wild Bait: 7.03125 - (Fishing Level * 0.0703125) sec, or between 6.328125 and 7.03125 sec

With the dressed spinner:

No bait: 15 - (Fishing Level * 0.1875) sec, or between 13.125 and 15 sec
Bait: 7.5 - (Fishing Level * 0.09375) sec, or between 6.5625 and 7.5 sec
Wild Bait: 5.625 - (Fishing Level * 0.0703125) sec, or between 4.921875 and 5.625 sec

At most, fishing level lowers your max waiting time by 1.875 seconds, whereas wild bait reduces is by 14.0625 seconds, and the dressed spinner by 7.5 seconds. So not a huge advantage? But I mean it goes up anyway, so whatevs.

This information was in Tools/FishingRod.cs @ StardewValley.Tools.FishingRod.DoFunction, lines 179 to 339.

The "Bobber Bar" as I've come to find out is the name of the bar during the fishing minigame, is affected by your fishing level. The height is determined as such:

Height = 64 * 3 / 2 + FishingLevel * 8

Meaning at fishing level 0, it's 96 pixels, and at fishing level 10, it's 176 pixels. The Cork Bobber adds an additional 24 pixels, which is equivilent to adding 3 to your fishing level. I THINK the max size of the fishing area is 568 pixels, which means that the total area covered by the bar can be calculated by:

SizePercent = (96 + FishingLevel * 8 + (Cork Bobber ? 24 : 0)) / 568

Base: ~17%
Max: ~35% (More than one third, holy smokes!)
Per Level: ~1.41%
Max From Fishing Level: ~14.0845%
Cork Bobber: ~4.225%

It does not effect the amount of time it takes to real in a fish, though. This information was in Menus/BobberBar.cs @ StardewValley.Menus.BobberBar.BobberBar, lines 74 to 160.

Hope that helps. :)

Svanire (talk) 19:37, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

Profession chance values

stardew valley v1.1

Geologist: 50% chance
Gatherer: 20% chance
Lumberjack: 40% chance

Ashpool (talk) 17:21, 14 October 2016 (BST)

Regarding mining experience

In regards to this line in the mining category:

"You also get a bonus when busting generic rocks if the rock drops something other than basic stone. Coal gives you a +5 bonus, and random gems probably award points as well. It's hard to measure these bonuses since they can't be gathered in a predictable manner."

I decided to dig through the game's source a bit to see if I could get some information on this. From what I was able to determine, at least in v1.1, gems dropping from generic stones provide no experience. However, the game is *supposed* to provide experience to luck when any kind of geode is dropped. I say supposed to because when I checked Farmer.gainExperience, it immediately exits out if the stat to gain experience in is Luck, meaning it doesn't really do anything. Coal does provide the 5 point experience bonus to mining, however, I was able to confirm that.

If you have the source available and would like to check for yourself, I found this information in MineShaft.cs @ StardewValley.MineShaft.checkStoneForItems, lines 1675 to 1747, with item IDs being found in Data/ObjectInformation.yaml

I've went ahead and updated the page with this information as well.

Svanire (talk) 16:43, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

Improving the Page

The area I've found this page (and the Wiki) the most lacking wrt skills is in providing context to the professions. Choosing those correctly is critical to continuing the game in the direction you want to go, but there's nothing to help anyone make the choices. I may step in to do some of that work when/if I find the time, but I thought I'd mention my observation here so anyone else who wants to step up to it can give it a shot also. Thanks. Butterbur (talk) 09:57, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

So we're going to give other players the information we never had, eh? Nice.

I have one small request: I wouldn't mind if this page and the individual skill pages were kept in-sync. They seem to have grown in separate directions (to the point that I'm not sure which is meant to be the main page, this or the Farming page? This or the Combat page?)

So perhaps you wouldn't mind copy/pasting whatever you add here to Farming, Fishing, Combat, Mining or Foraging, as appropriate. :) margotbean (talk) 23:47, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Very nice indeed! ;) Actually, I think even now we can spell out the implications of the choices better and give readers something to think about. When I rewrote Staircase, I ended up doing a bit of that, and I think it worked out well. I'm not sure that more information is always the thing most needed. Sometimes, it's just some perspective. The need is not necessarily to know more about how something works. It is often about knowing how to make decisions for oneself, applying what you know to your own situations.

Agreed about keeping things in synch. However, to me, it doesn't seem like those other articles are naturally in a hierarchy with this one. Skills are more of an adjunct topic relevant to each of the others. So, I don't see either this one or any of the others as a "main page". And, in fact, skills are not the same thing as professions, which lacks its own page. I see Skills as a natural "main page" to a real "Professions" page.

I think Skills should contain all the information (details) about what skills are, like the levels and points scheme, and about what matters to the leveling-up for each of the specific skills. The Farming, Fishing, Combat, Mining, and Foraging pages should provide a short sketch only of what touches on the skills, with a reference then to the details in the proper section of the Skills page. For example, Farming#Skill should say the skill level affects proficiency with the hoe and water can tools and is boosted through harvesting crops - no more detail than that. This reduces the burdens of maintaining cross-over information, which is, after all, a major advantage to linked presentation systems.

A new Professions page would then describe (principally) just that at skill levels 5 and 10 for each skill, the player must make permanent choices among options. It then goes on to describe what the choices are in each case, and the effects each choice has, with care to how a first choice affects what choices one gets in the second round. At level 5, one needs to know which level 10 profession one wants (and why), or else one may be very disappointed later. There's the rub, and the reason this mechanism is problematic in a standard RPG setting. It's one thing to have to figure stuff out as you go. It's another to make permanent choices and be stuck with them even if you didn't understand. (Not that that's not also one of the particular challenges of real life! lol But this is a game, and one doesn't like to be stuck with a bitter taste during entertainment. I digress.)

Back to the activities pages. There, the reader can be forewarned of upcoming choices that will affect the future engagement in the activity, and name those choices as being about "professions", with a link to that page. The skills page should have a similar pointer to professions, with perhaps a little more detail, like the names of the professions themselves. The professions and skills pages both should have convenient target sections to receive incoming transfers from links: intros to the dispersed details of each specific information module. And now you have a hierarchical system of information embedded within a non-hierarchical set of pages. Like it? If so, I'm going to keep this in mind as a desired structure to work towards when I make changes in the articles.

Which gets me to another topic. How does one create a page here? Are there things we want to have on each page that should be sure to be included? Also, I don't see any sandbox mechanism available for preparing a new page, and I just don't operate well without some foundation to build from. I guess I don't believe that a new page is going to be either complete or perfect when it hits the Wiki, but neither should it be a mess. It's unfair to make anyone else wade through something that's really a construction zone. But rather than explain all the details of page construction on this Wiki (which is a little past my normal commitment level), I'd be very happy if you wanted simply to create a Discussions page almost empty but with a proper framework set up. I can contribute easily to filling that. Ready to go whatever direction you'd like, though. Butterbur (talk) 21:22, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

To create a new page, just decide on the title, then type it into the url bar. If you want to create a page called "Professions" then type in http://www.stardewvalleywki.com/Professions. The wiki will take you to a page that says "this page does not exist..." Just click the "Edit" button and you're up and running.

You can create a sandbox page by typing in http://stardewvalleywiki.com/Sandbox/Professions in the same way. If you prefer, you can also put your username http://stardewvalleywiki.com/User:Butterbur/Sandbox/Professions. If and when you're ready to copy the page from the testing area to the main wiki, create a new page (as above) and put {{delete}} at the top of the sandbox page, to mark it for deletion.

This is where I learned to create a page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page

Mediawiki help is wildly helpful if you already know the exact syntax of what you're looking for, but not always so helpful if you don't. It's kind of like the UNIX man pages.

p.s. Once the page is created, you can put {{stub}} or {{construction}} at the top of the sandbox page if you like. I'll let you try those out and decide for yourself. :) margotbean (talk) 02:44, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! This doesn't sound bad at all. I never did anything with Mediawiki, but Wikipedia was filled so full of policies and requirements, I just never found enough need to acquire all its extra baggage. Glad to hear it's still straightforward here. UNIX man pages! Woah! That's the point I usually want to take another path. Sounds too much like real engineering grunt work. I've always preferred working at higher levels of abstraction, where there's air to breathe. :) I lived in the mines long enough. lol But one of these days I expect I'll start on Professions, probably when I begin another round of compilation and analysis. (That's what drives me to the corners of this Wiki.) Butterbur (talk) 04:18, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Skill Energy Usage Discrepancy

There is a conflict with how skill energy usage is calculated with proficiency between this page and the farming page. This page says that energy cost is reduced by .1 per level, rounded to the nearest integer. The farming page says that skill cost is reduced 5% per level, with no rounding (rounding only done for UI, but internally each fraction is saved). I feel like the farming page is correct, but I have not done any testing yet. Anways just wanted to let you know about the discrepancy. --Auhfel (talk) 19:14, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I've fixed the discrepancy by removing the incorrect info. The Farming page now links to "proficiency" the same as the other skill pages, without a separate section. Thanks for pointing that out! margotbean (talk) 19:26, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Title thresholds

I currently have level 10, 9, 9, 9 and 8 in the five skills respectively. Add these up and divide by 2 and you get 22.5, which would seem to make me a Rancher, but I'm actually a Planter, the next lower rank. Either the thresholds given are incorrect (should be 1 higher and >= instead of >), or the game is using integer arithmetic so the numbers get rounded down before the comparison (which has the same effect). Thrawcheld (talk) 22:53, 22 May 2018 (BST)

The game is casting the value of the calculation to an int, so it's truncating the decimal portion. I've updated the page. margotbean (talk) 23:20, 22 May 2018 (BST)

Watering Can Proficiency

No, @Margotbean, you have misunderstood and returned the article to incorrect information.

The second sentence of the Proficiency section says: "Each increase in skill decreases energy requirements for specific tools by 0.1 points.". Ok, except that the Watering Can is not one of those specific tools. Stated in these terms, the Watering Can rule is "Each increase in skill decreases energy requirements by 0.1 per upgrade level to which it is charged. Thus, at skill level 10:

A starter charge uses 2 minus 0.1*10 or 1.0 energy.
A copper-level charge uses 4 minus 0.2*10 or 2 energy.
A steel-level charge uses 6 minus 0.3*10 or 3 energy.
A gold-level charge uses 8 minus 0.4*10 or 4 energy.
An iridium-level charge uses 10 minus 0.5*10 or 5 energy.

At skill level 5, an iridium-level charge uses 10 minus 0.5*5 or 7.5 energy.
At skill level 7, an gold-level charge uses 8 minus 0.4*7 or 5.2 energy.

The base energy use increases by 2 per upgrade. The net energy use decreases by 0.1 per upgrade per skill level.

Try it out. At farming skill level 10, water a 12 by 12 plot of land with an iridium sprinkler at maximum charge, and compare your beginning and ending energy levels. If you are right that one release of water onto a 6x3 area costs 9 energy, then your total energy depletion ought to be 72 energy. If I am right, then it ought to be 40 energy.

But I have done that testing, long ago. If you are working off of a code reading, then you have mis-read the code, probably by missing the added factor that watering cans bring into the picture. Butterbur (talk) 06:43, 6 September 2018 (BST)

I tested in-game. At farming level 10, one full charge of an iridium watering can uses 9 energy. margotbean (talk) 16:10, 6 September 2018 (BST)

Very well, you are right. I have just re-tested. But I also have the data from my original tests way back when- many tests at various levels. The current behavior is a change from the past. I'm not sure just when it happened, but I suspect version 1.3. I sure didn't notice a large increase of energy required for watering before then.

Originally, the energy required to use any tool was reduced by what amounted to 5% per skill level, equivalent to -0.1 for hoes, axes, pickaxes, and base watering cans, as indeed they all are now. The difference lies in upgraded water cans. Now, there is no reduction in the extra 2 energy required for each extra charge used. So the reduction amounts to as little as 1% per skill level (with iridium can). There's something about that that seems inequitable to me. Why should additional charges require the full energy cost, even when the farmer's skill level is at maximum?

Is this a bug? I would call it so. If not, then it must have been intentional. Did you ever hear an announcement about that? This sounds to me more like an oversight that happened in the midst of massive code changes required for a major release. v1.3, yes?

Well, thanks for your patience. Just trying to help. Butterbur (talk) 21:49, 6 September 2018 (BST)

I hate to say it, but I tested with v1.2 (no mods) when I made the original edits, and again with v1.3, and found the same results. margotbean (talk) 22:32, 6 September 2018 (BST)

Well, have no regrets for getting the facts right. Well done for that. I would have liked to have done so well. Butterbur (talk) 03:09, 7 September 2018 (BST)

How is any of this discussion of the game mechanics consistent with the current article, namely the sentence:

Fully charging an upgraded watering can increases its energy cost by 2 points per upgrade, but each increase in skill decreases those energy requirements by another 0.1 points per upgrade

That sentence says that an iridium can (4 upgrades) at level 10 would have an energy cost of 6: 2 for base cost + 2*4 (2 points for each of 4 upgrades) - 0.1*4*10 (0.1 decrease for each of 10 levels for each of 4 upgrades).

But the text of the article and this dicussion both conclude that the energy cost is 9, not 6. Therefore the decrease is not "per upgrade".

Furthermore, this sentence also typifies the confusion on this article that I was trying to clean up. The increased energy cost is not "2 points per upgrade", rather it is a function of the power level (e.g., is the can being used to water one tile or eighteen tiles at once). Even if you don't like the term "power level", the article needs to use different terms for the different details of the game mechanics. Nebulous Maestress (talk) 23:04, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Brute profession clarification

The Brute profession does 15% more damage, but is that an additional 15% on top of the 10% damage from the (required to branch into Brute) profession of Fighter? Or is it 15% more damage overall? Was confused by this. fourdollaremo (talk) 03:24, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't know offhand, will have to look that up in the code! Good question --margotbean (talk) 17:05, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Profession Price Increase Timing

I'm not sure if it has always been the case, since this page has stated that profession price increases apply immediately for as long as I can remember.

However, as of testing this out today (2/8/2020), professions that increase prices will not increase the value of items placed in the bin before selecting the profession. Like if you place fish in the bin, go to sleep, select the fisher profession, those fish won't get the price increase. I made this edit to the page without fully knowing that this applied to all price increasing professions, as I didn't test them all, but I suspect it's true.

I was very careful to check to see if it was a display bug, tracking my gold beforehand, manually adding up the values of fish, cross checking the values of fish with the wiki, checking all values on the shipping bin sell screen, and then checking my gold in the morning as well.

The displayed value of the fish on the shipping bin sell screen is indeed the lower profession-less value. The gold added to my character is also the lower value, so it appears this either changed at some point or this information has been wrong for some time. I think many people already know this - for example, min-max guides advise you to save your fish and sell them the night after selecting the profession. NorthDakota (talk) 17:03, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for finding that incorrect info. I've rewritten the intro in order to address additional matters, and primarily to make it all clearer. It appears that the offending text was written when v1.04 was current. I can't say if it was correct then, but it certainly has not been for the more than three years I've been playing. Nice catch. Butterbur (talk) 05:13, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks so much for fixing that and for commenting here, NorthDakota! I wish everyone was as thorough! margotbean (talk) 16:11, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate the help with clarifying the wording and also the kind words. Thanks. NorthDakota (talk) 00:33, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

As of 15 August 2020, the level 5 price bonus for fishing took effect on the same night that I chose the "Fisher" profession. Silver carp sold for 46 gold that night, instead of for the base price of 37 gold. I'm on mobile (android) - the different outcome might be a discrepancy between platforms, if it's not due to a recent update. --MissSlaughter (talk) 06:57, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Talk:Skills

Contents

Level 10 Fishing Skills

Profession Codes in save file

Efficiency/Proficiency

Profession chance values

Regarding mining experience

Improving the Page

Skill Energy Usage Discrepancy

Title thresholds

Watering Can Proficiency

Brute profession clarification

Profession Price Increase Timing

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