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Assumptions made for comparisons / balancing:
- Unless otherwise noted, most comparisons are made assuming processing all products where applicable for maximum value, buying Hay for animals kept indoors, and in terms of profit per day per outdoor tile used.
- For interactions required per week ("interactions"), I'm counting every pet, animal sale, tilling, watering, fertilizing, or machine refill as 1 interaction. I'm counting replanting during a season as ½ an interaction, since you can usually do it while harvesting, and it's easy to do in bulk. I assume for the start of Summer, Fall only a 50% chance to need to retill & rewater a square. Because Junimo Huts / Auto-Grabbers are eventually an option, I'm not counting gathers / harvests, except for Pigs (since Truffles can't be grabbed). But because generaly most gather / harvests are accompanied by an interaction with a machine for processing anyways, the relative comparisons between crops / animals should be roughly the same eithr way.
- Assuming petting animals every 3 days for max hearts, or every 6 with Shepherd/Coopmaster, or daily for "Cycled" Coops.
- Not considering space required for processing machines (kegs, cheesemakers, etc.) as most options require them anyway, and between off-Farm options & Big Sheds taking up Farm space for processing isn't a huge concern. However, this does mean that animals gain a "hidden" small benefit: you can use the space inside Barns / Coops for storing Mayo Machines / Preserves Jars / Kegs / Crystalariums / etc. without needing to build additional Big Sheds.
- Mostly for early Y1 scenarios, ROI/day can be a useful metric. This measures how much profit your investment returns, divided by the number of days it took to do so (also can be referred to as "gold/day per cost"). It generally tells you how quickly a particular crop will help you grow your cash-on-hand by investing in it, assuming you have limited funds and aren't limited by energy / space yet.
- Most of the calculations of gold/day for crops assumed the plot was left fallow for the last few days of a season if there wasn't enough time for that particular crop to ripen again before it dies from season change. Thus, for some of the longer growing crops like Cauliflower, Melon, Pumpkin, etc., if you plant a quick growing crop like Parnsips or Bok Choy in their empty plot for the last few days of the season, their performance may be slightly better than expected from the descriptions here.
- I assume no cost for Speed-Gro, and 80g for Deluxe / Hyper Speed Gro.
- Also be aware that each price chart shows the gold/day assuming you are using the listed fertilizer, even if that fertilizer provides no benefit for that particular crop vs. a cheaper one, so you may have to compare between different fertilizer charts for a fair comparison.
- The charts do take into account Farming / Foraging skill level for raw crop value.
Fruit Trees:
Trees now have two main uses, depending on which "tier" of tree you buy; either as a relatively cheap & quick way to get more than half the gold/day of a farm plot, but with much less maintenance, or a very expensive later game, long-term way to get close to the same gold/day of a farm plot with less maintenance (even more than a farm plot in the Greenhouse, but also with more maintenance). As in Vanilla, trees block the use of the 8 surrounding tiles while growing, but once fully grown only take up a single space of land. Each season has a low-tier and high-tier fruit tree, and while some of the high-tiers can make more money as wines, it is unlikely you will want to "waste" kegs on any Fruit Tree Fruit with so many more valuable fruit available elsewhere. The high-tiers do 77-86% (92% for Bananas) of the average gold/day/tile of using that tile to grow hyper speed gro, kegged, non-hops, non-winter, non-artisan crops over a whole year, and low-tiers do 52-62% (68% for Mangos). So during the season they bear fruit, they will be greatly outperforming any of your crops in gold per day per tile, even the low-tier trees, but will do worse than an optimized farm plot over all 3 productive seasons. Low-tier trees take 1/3 season, 2/3 season, or 1 season of jarred fruit to pay for themselves, high-tiers take 2, 4, or 6 seasons of jarred fruit to do so. Mango saplings and Banana saplings are now bought from the Island Trader for a combination of some gold and items.
This means the top Fruit Tree (Banana) jarred will do slightly more gold/day than an Ancient Fruit crop kegged, unless you use Hyper Speed Gro. Remember when planted outdoors on the farm, Fruit Tree fruit "indirectly competes" with seasonal crops as opportunity cost for time / attention / kegs.
In the Greenhouse Fruit Trees perform much better, essentially giving 4x the yearly produce of outdoors. Low-tiers in the Greenhouse will tend to outperform most other crops except for Hops, although Mangos barely overtake Hops. High-tiers beat everything else, with Bananas eventually doing ~+70% better than Hops, or around double the best non-Hops crop. This still comes at the cost of blocking the surrounding tiles while growing, and many kegs needed, but the addition now is a very steep startup price to achieve that optimal setup.
Without SMAPI Changes (Deprecated)
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Trees now are a relatively cheap & quick way to get more than half the gold/day of a farm plot, but with much less maintenance, or more than a farm plot in the greenhouse, but also with more maintenance. As in Vanilla, trees block the use of the 8 surrounding tiles while growing, but once fully grown only take up a single space of land. Fruit trees all make more money as jelly, which reduces the need for kegs if relying on them. If jarred they do 48-59% of the average gold/day/tile of using that tile to grow hyper speed gro, kegged, non-hops, non-winter, non-artisan crops over a whole year. So during the season they bear fruit, they will be greatly outperforming any of your crops in gold per day per tile, but will do worse than an optimized farm plot over all 3 productive months. They generally take between 1/2 to 1 1/2 of a season to pay for themselves, with cheaper trees paying for themselves quicker. Remember when planted outdoors on the farm, tree produce indirectly competes with season crops as opportunity cost for time / attention / kegs.
In the greenhouse they are much toned down from Vanilla, with Pomegranates or Peaches just below kegged Hops in gold/day/tile (though only needing Jars instead of Kegs). This still put them above all non-Hops crops, though some get extremely close to Peaches / Pomegranates while needing far less harvesting / processing. However, the very best Fruit trees available will slightly outperform Hops, though this still comes at the cost of blocking the surrounding tiles while growing, and many jars needed.
In the greenhouse they are much toned down from Vanilla, with Pomegranates or Peaches just below kegged Hops in gold/day/tile (though only needing Jars instead of Kegs). This still put them above all non-Hops crops, though some get extremely close to Peaches / Pomegranates while needing far less harvesting / processing. However, the very best Fruit trees available will slightly outperform Hops, though this still comes at the cost of blocking the surrounding tiles while growing, and many jars needed.
General Animal Rebalance:
Also a reminder that unlike crops or fruit trees, (most) animals produce year-round, which is accounted for in both profit comparisons or weekly interactions needed.
Much of the balancing was done with an option between a "just keep the animals fed and at decent Mood via pastures, but no taking time for daily petting for Friendship" playstyle or a "maximize Friendship with daily pets for all animals" playstyle. Thus, some animals will perform better in one playstyle vs the other, relative to other options. This is similar to how for crops a player may choose between using lots of Speed-Gro fertilizer, and use crops with frequent harvests, processing, or replanting, or instead go a more relaxed route with lower maintenance crops that only need checked on every so often. One thing to keep in mind as in Vanilla is that once animals are at max Friendship, either letting them graze daily in a grass pasture or petting them every 3 days will keep them at max Friendship & Mood. With Coopmaster/Shepherd, you only need to do it every 6 days, or weekly with an extra pet every few months. This means that while you always have the option of the low-hearts "hands off" playstyle with animals, by mid-late game, even max heart animals generally don't need more weekly attention than crops, outside of some specific cases.
Just as in Vanilla, there also exists the choice between buying Hay to Feed animals, vs. using grass pastures / harvested Hay. For my balancing, based on reports such as this one. I planned a bit optimistically around Barns requiring 42 tiles for grazing, and Coops needing 21. However, as you still need to access the front of a Coop/Barn and typically leave that whole row clear, I consider even indoor Barns / Coops using the row of tiles below them. Pigs also need at least a grass-free space to "find" each Truffle before they place it in a space, so at max hearts their pastures are a little larger. Finally, while one Silo with enough Hay stored in chests can get you pretty far, I assume using 1 Silo per 4 Barns / Coops for convenience sake.
Taken together, this results in 3 main "playstyles" for animals:
- Pastures with no petting ever, the "Lazy" method (animals at 0 hearts but good Mood, lowest gold/day/tile, but also least interactions needed)
- Pastures with petting until reaching max hearts, the "Luxury" method (animals at max hearts & Mood, highest total gold/day per Barn/Coop, needs more interactions for gathering/processing than the "Lazy" method but still don't need to pet animals once at max hearts)
- Indoors with Hay, the "Normal" method (animals at max hearts & Mood, highest gold/day/tile but also most interactions needed due to weekly petting to maintain Mood / friendship)
Coop animals only eat the equivalent of 1/2 of a full tile of grass in a pasture per day, while Barn animals will eat a full tile of grass per day. This allows Coop pastures to be smaller, and alongside how eating fresh grass raises friendship and thus sale value, makes Coops gain disproportionate benefits from pastures compared to Barns. In general this means that a Coop will lose less gold/day/tile from using pastures compared to a Barn. However with a large enough number of Coops / Barns grass pastures become hard to sustain. Even when using grass pastures and without Shepherd / Coopmaster, the profit per day per tile for animals will still be competitive with outdoor crops in general, potentially being better or worse on a case by case basis.
Many Deluxe products are better to sell raw if Iridium quality, but not all.
Coop Animal selling:
For the Coop its main draw now is in how selling egg-based animals will generally always be profitable compared to letting it stay and produce. This is most pronounced if you set aside several slots per Coop for "cycling" hatchlings through, raising them until max Friendship then selling them while keeping the incubator runing 24/7, though this method is also the most time / effort intensive. You would use 11 slots for birds, or 5 slots for Dinosaurs + 1 bird slot to do this optimally (However, using pastures without Coopmaster works best with 7 bird slots, or 3 Dino slots + 1 bird slot). An "intermediate" option is to keep 1 slot reserved per Coop for a hatchling, and keep petting it daily while waiting for the next egg in the incubator to hatch before selling it, ideally after it lays at least 1 egg. The "laziest" option is to keep 1 slot reserved as in the "intermediate" option, and still keep the newborns in the Coop until the incubator is free in a week or so, and the newborn laid an egg but not petting it in the meantime. Even without Coopmaster, the "laziest" or "intermediate" options can increase Coop profits by 10~20% or more, and the "cycling" option over +30% compared to not selling any animals. Coopmaster will more than double the extra gold from "lazy" or "intermediate" selling, and roughly increase the entire Coop income of "Cycled" Coops by 50%.
While selling Coop animals can be a significant profit boost, especially when cycling and/or with Coopmaster, it comes with the opportunity cost of cheap expansion. This is because if you're selling your hatchlings, you can't also be using the incubator to fill new Coops and will need to buy Chickens/Ducks instead, or simply wait in the case of Dinosaurs.
Especially with Coopmaster, unless you are "cycling" your hatchlings where they can lay eggs themselves, your incubator may be ready to hatch before your previous hatchling has laid an egg yet, and in that case either leaving the incubator fallow for a day or two for the old hatchling to lay an egg, or having a dedicated slot in a Coop for a "breeder" animal just to lay eggs for incubators can both be valid strategies.
Even Coops just using the "intermediate" selling method will usually have a bit better profits per tile than non-Pig Barns, unless using Hay. The tier goes Chicken - Void Chicken - Duck - Dinosaur from lowest to highest in terms of gold/day for selling.
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