Six Tips for Farming Stone in Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley is best known as a farming game. However, there are also non-farming elements that will require stone like crafting rows of furnaces or expanding your preserves shed. For me, I found these techniques to be the most useful when I was grinding stone to finish the Cryptic Note quest. I hope these six tips are helpful for any future stone endeavors!

1. Unlock the Skull Cavern

It may seem weird to go to the Skull Cavern to hunt for rocks to later descend down the same Cavern, but I have found that I am always able to harvest more rocks from the Cavern in a single trip than the Mines. In the Cavern, I average 400-500 stone in a day while in the Mines, I average 300-400 stone a day. There may be higher spawn rates of stone in the Cavern than in the Mines. If you haven't yet unlocked the Cavern, no worries! These tips will still work for you!

Another downside of going to the Cavern is that there are also more dangerous enemies, but here's where the next tip can come in handy:

2. Upgrade your pickaxe as much as you can

You don't want to be stuck hitting the same rock multiple times with your base pickaxe when you could upgrade your pickaxe and destroy the same rock with a single blow. This step has multiple benefits: saved energy, saved time, and a lower chance of enemy attacks. To further increase your chances of staying alive:

3. Drink coffee (or consume any other speed-boosting food)

This tip also has multiple purposes. Speed boosting food will allow you to sprint like Sonic to each rock and will also allow you to get away from enemies faster. Also, it's just fun to zoom everywhere. Coffee is the easiest speed boosting consumable to make, but any speed boosting food will do. You can check if your speed boost is still active by looking at the top right of your screen. The boost wears off relatively quickly, so make sure to bring extra speed boost consumables with you.

4. Focus on the shiny rocks and the large boulders

There are three different types of rocks in Stardew Valley: the normal rocks, the shiny rocks, and the boulders. For grinding stone, you'll want to focus on the shiny rocks and the boulders. The normal rocks don't always drop stone, which is why going through and smashing each rock in every level is not advised. When the normal rocks do drop stone, they only drop a single stone per rock. However, the shiny rocks and boulders will always drop stone. The shiny rocks will drop 3 or 4 stone, which, if your pickaxe is upgraded high enough, will only require a single hit. The boulders will always drop 10 stone, which is also worth a few swings of your pickaxe.

5. Use bombs

A quick way to destroy all the rocks in your vicinity is to place a bomb. This tip requires tons of bombs, so if you are drowning in bombs, consider using them in the Skull Cavern. Bombs can also quickly reveal minerals hiding in the rocks that you can sell. If you plan on using bombs, make sure to place yourself out of harm's way after placing the bomb on the ground. If you need to, destroy a few rocks to create an escape route. 

6. Check the quarry, the forest, and your farm

Moving away from the mines, any rocks in the quarry, the forest, and your farm will always drop stone. Checking these locations every day is a waste of time; stone doesn't regenerate fast enough. Stone on your farm won't appear until the start of the next season, either. Instead, check the quarry once a week and keep your attention on the mines!

Harvesting enough stone for 100 staircases to finish the Cryptic Note quest may not be the most efficient way to finish the quest (alternating staircases and bombs is the way to go), but if you are the type of person who likes to chip away at a long term project, then I wish you the best of luck! Thank you for reading this article!