Should You Use The Dehydrator In Stardew Valley? – Now with MATH

Should You Use The Dehydrator In Stardew Valley? – Now with MATH

Hey everybody, let’s do some math today. The  dehydrator is a brand new artisan machine   added in Stardew Valley’s 1.6 patch. That  means there are going to be quite a few 1.6   spoilers in this video, or at least a couple.  Anyway, be warned. Along with the fish smoker,  

This gives us new ways to process artisan goods to  make a little extra cash on the farm. I think the   fish smoker is actually pretty cut and dry. Maybe  we’ll go over that later if there’s interest,  

But I don’t think it’s that tough. Today though,  I want to go through some math on the dehydrator   instead. If you’re just here for the TL;DR  though, dehydrators are best for high value,   low quality fruits like a normal quality  star fruit for example. But you’re probably  

Not going to want to get rid of your kegs  because you’re going to still make more   money from kegs in the long term. You also  need to make raisins with the dehydrator,   so you’re going to want one no matter what, and  those are for something special in the game that  

I don’t really want to get into. Mushrooms are a  completely different animal, but in my opinion,   once you have artisan and botanist, there’s no  reason not to use the dehydrator for every single   mushroom unless you need it for some specific  purpose. If that’s all you needed, thanks for  

Stopping by, if you want to like the video on the  way out, that would be awesome, and if you want   to check my math or look at anything, there’s  a link to the sheet in the video description.  

So, we can now purchase the dehydrator recipe from  Pierre for 10,000 gold, or you can get one for   free for choosing mushrooms when Demetrius  asks what you want to do with your cave.   Coincidentally, that’s actually the exact same  price as buying both an apple and a pomegranate  

Tree from Pierre, so if you want to roll the dice  hoping to find fruit for the community center,   you can pick up the recipe using the money  you would have spent on the trees anyway. I   still think it’s kind of a toss-up, though you’re  probably going to want a dehydrator at some point,  

And it might be nice to get it in spring if you’re  making that money early, and then plant the trees   in summer so you can get the fruit in fall, but  it’s your call, it doesn’t matter. That said,  

I don’t really think that the dehydrator is the  be-all end-all, you don’t necessarily need to rush   for it because it’s probably not going to like  blow your whole game wide open. But let’s head   over to the spreadsheet here and just take a look  at maybe a couple of things you might not expect.  

On our first page here, we’re just going to  compare the different artisan machines for fruit,   right? So we have the preserves jar, we have the  keg, and we have the dehydrator. This is old info,   so if you actually already know the math for  the preserves jar and the kegs and you want to,  

You can just skip to the next timestamp. Anyway,  we have the preserves jar here, which creates   jellies worth twice the value of the base fruit  that you put into there plus 50 gold. The lower   your fruit’s base price is, the better the value  of the preserves jar. This artisan machine takes  

About 2.5 days to finish, with a little bit of  wiggle room depending on when you go to bed and if   there are any festivals and a couple other things,  but I’m just going to assume 2.5 days just for the  

Math. The wiki says that the breakpoint for the  preserves jar versus the keg is when you have a   fruit value of about 50 gold here, so I went ahead  and I marked those in both bold text and in a blue  

Background. The problem with that is that when  we’re looking at these, you’re getting an item   that’s the same value whether you go preserves  jar or keg, but there’s more to the story. We also   want to know how much additional value per day  we’re getting. You’re not always going to want to  

Necessarily keg your inexpensive fruit, so we’ll  kind of dig into that a little bit as well.   The keg works in a pretty similar way, right?  Fruit goes in and wine comes out seven days later,  

Technically 6.25 days. I am going to use seven  days for the math here just because as a player,   that’s what’s easiest for me, though that  does devalue the keg just very slightly on   my spreadsheet compared to like the wiki, but the  keg is still far and away a better value for your  

Fruit than the preserves jar is at least once  you have fruit that’s actually worth something.   So the dehydrator though works a little bit  differently, right? Instead of seven days   or two and a half days or whatever, it just takes  one day. And instead of one fruit, you need five,  

And you get 7.5 times the value of the fruit  that you put in plus 25 gold. That means that our   calculations for the dehydrator are kind of like a  weird Frankenstein’s monster of keg and preserves   jar calcs. With preserve jars, a lower base price  fruit is more efficient since more of the value  

Ends up coming from the 50 gold rider where with  the kegs you want to utilize a higher value input   fruit and that’ll create a higher value wine. But  the tricky part is that since we do need five of  

Any fruit with the dehydrator, the additional 25  gold is actually really only five gold per item,   which we’ll kind of see in an interesting way  later. And the 7.5 times multiplier is really   more like a 1.5 times multiplier. That means that  the preserves jar is definitely still the king  

For low valued fruits. And honestly, I would  argue that in most cases it’s just as good as   the keg anyway, but that’s a different video.  But we’re here talking about the dehydrator.   Is that even worth it since the keg has that  three times multiplier instead? The answer,  

Unfortunately, is it kind of depends. Let’s look on the first page at ancient   fruit here and just looking at the numbers, it  looks like if you have enough fruit to dehydrate,   you should, right? After all, dried ancient  fruit is worth 1,400 gold more, right? We go  

From 2750 to 4150. We get 1,400 gold more for  doing a dehydrated fruit and we’re adding 280   gold of value per item per day, where the keg adds  about 157. And again, that’s not quite as generous  

Because I’m assuming the keg takes seven days,  not 6.25. But either way, the math makes it look   like we should probably be using the dehydrator  for our ancient fruit. If you had an empire of   ancient fruit growing such that you could refill  these every single day, it might be worth it. But  

The problem is that the dehydrators are going to  consume more crops than you can reasonably grow.   Ancient fruit are actually the perfect example for  this because they take seven days to regrow. One   fruit takes one week to grow and by the end of  the week you can have one bottle of wine worth  

1,650 gold with no modifiers. If you had five  ancient fruit produce on Sunday, you could turn   them into 4,150 gold by the next day with our  dehydrator. Or if you’re willing to wait a week  

And use the kegs (and you have five kegs open)  you could have 8,250 gold the following Sunday.   For a lot of you, that probably puts the  nail in the coffin right away. Like that’s   like twice the value. But if you’re thinking  about how to squeeze the most money out of  

Each individual day as opposed to trying to  get the highest value at the end of the week,   it still might be worth it. But it kind of  changes once we get some modifiers involved.  

Let’s start on the left side here and I’ll just  say first of all, if you’re using higher quality   fruit in your dehydrators, you’re literally going  to start losing money at iridium. So you could   take five iridium ancient fruit, chuck them in the  bin for 4,400 gold, or you could dehydrate them  

For 4,150. So yeah, that sucks, right? But hey,  we don’t really grow iridium crops very often,   right? So what about gold? Well, when I said  earlier, we’d see this weirdness with the number   five being split out among them, this is what  I’m talking about. This is when you have your  

1.5 times multiplier from having a gold quality  crop. So you’re making 25 gold more tomorrow if   you dehydrate your gold fruit than you would if  you just sold them today. And that 25 gold is   just the bonus for using the dehydrator. So it’s  not looking good for the dehydrator. On the other  

Hand, if you have the artisan profession, the  value of your dried fruits will increase by 40%,   which is nothing to sneeze at. In order to get  artisan, you have to have the tiller profession   at five, which increases the value of your crops  by 10%. Unfortunately, the dehydrator still uses  

The absolute base value of the fruit, but the  increased value from artisan does mostly cover   the difference until iridium quality kicks in once  again. So for example, with our star fruit here,   we’re getting to this 7910 value, not from  the 825 gold from the star fruit with tiller,  

But from the base 750 gold of the fruit itself.  That’s kind of disappointing, especially with the   fish smoker retaining the quality of the item,  which is again another conversation. But a lot   of the math that Concerned Ape has used does  work this way, so it’s not super surprising.  

So as exciting as 7.5 times the value of fruit  plus 25 gold sounds when you say it out loud,   and it also takes a second, the dehydrator is  not really a game changer. If you have the kegs   available, you’d almost certainly prefer to have  11,550 gold from five ancient fruit wine right at  

The end of the week, than the 5,810 gold tomorrow.  And if you have something of lower value, like a   cranberry, you’re probably going to want to use  the preserves jar instead because you’re getting   more value day by day. So the dehydrator is kind  of in an awkward place. My recommendation as far  

As fruits go is to use it for overflow crops. I  wouldn’t build a quarry worth of dehydrators. But   I’d use them for extra crops that would normally  not make it to the kegs or to the preserves jars   anyway, and for bananas. I actually think  that those are like the perfect fruit for  

The dehydrator since they grow back every day, and  their value at even gold quality is still pretty   comparable with the preserves jar. If you had  five banana trees and three dehydrators, you’re   set on a perfect loop, but I would be really  surprised if anyone is building their entire  

Farm around the banana crop in particular. I mentioned the mushroom cave at the beginning   and that you get a free dehydrator if you pick  that option. That’s because the dehydrator can   also be used to make dried mushrooms. The math  here is quite a bit easier because there’s  

Nothing to compare, you can’t use the preserves  jar or the kegs or anything else. You should   always use the dehydrator for mushrooms,  unless for some reason you have botanist,   so you’re getting iridium mushrooms, but you don’t  yet have artisan, so you’re not getting that 40%  

Bonus. That’s the only time that I would not use  this for all your mushrooms unless you need them   for something specific like a quest or whatever. I mentioned a TL;DR at the beginning, and here’s   the medium length version of that. High value,  low quality fruit is going to make the best use  

Of the dehydrator, but the problem with that is  that those items are also best for the keg, which   is going to give you more money, albeit a little  more slowly. If you have enough kegs to turn every  

Single high value fruit on your farm into wine,  you should probably still do that. If you have   more fruit than you can keg, the preserves jar is  actually still the next best for value. And the   dehydrator, I think, is a good way to burn through  your 600 cranberries, you filthy hoarder. But  

Mushrooms should always go in the dehydrator  if you have artisan. Easy, got it? Good.

I love new artisan equipment in Stardew Valley. And it’s always exciting to figure out just how efficient different methods of processing are. The dehydrator is one of the newest machines in Stardew Valley 1.6 and it’s… interesting?

Spreadsheet here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Etxpr1NmB4jT4a0CcgX7IxdrxxtVABT6cGBGVVD8WB8/edit?usp=sharing

My Standard Mod List:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9US-o_MiJ56zChRKU_QycnbLcXtvWhEnqFIIwYkagE/edit?usp=sharing

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