Looking for a new, unique experience in Stardew Valley?  Then why not farm in the desert!  This desert farm will be a challenging piece of land to tame, as it has limited space and the desert sand does not allow for sprinklers.  But give it time and you might start to find some special features to this farm.

Specific Features

• While initially your access is blocked, as you upgrade your tools you can unlock new areas, including two small grottos and a plateau overlooking your land. These new areas each include water sources and tillable soil that does allow for sprinklers.  These locations are still on the farm map, so farm buildings can be built or moved to any of these.
  

• A locked door with a mysterious, skull-shaped keyhole will eventually give you a new cavern area, this one counting as an indoor location, thus allowing out of season crop growing and casks.
• A thin pathway by the cliffs and past a river will eventually give you a shortcut to the desert, but it does not fully open up until you've completed the vault bundle and restarted the bus.
• While water is scarce in the desert, each area features a small pond, and the main area features a thin river.  A limited selection of river fish (and the sandfish) are available in all these bodies of water (Note, this only works if you replace the Standard Farm).
• While keeping a naturalistic aesthetic, I tried to add a bit of space optimization to the map.  The tillable land in the grottos and plateau will have extra spaces, but I tried to make sure there would be plenty of solid 3x3 or 5x5 spaces.  Similarly, a lot of cliffs have flat spaces for barns, coops, silos, fish ponds, or the greenhouse to be placed against.
  

Instructions
Download and place in your mods folder.  Requires Content Patcher.
Note: The main file has a shortcut to the desert that can interfere with other mods that also edit the Desert map.  It is incompatible with Stardew Valley Extended.  There is an optional file that is the desert farm without the shortcut to the desert that should be compatible with SVE and other desert editing mods.

Notes

• By default, replaces the Standard Farm.  You can choose which farm to replace (any but the Beach Farm) in the .config file, but keep in mind, this changes a few things.  The custom fish list only works on the Standard Farm, but will change on any others.  On the Forest Farm, the tree stumps will grow back daily (these can be blocked by placing objects on top of them).  On the Wilderness Farm, monsters will attack.
• I don't have an exact number of usable tiles, but the initial area you have access to (and that will not allow sprinklers) is a little less than half the size of the standard map.  The additional areas are comparable to the mid to largest islands on the Riverland farm.
• Yes, the water filled barrels are water sources.
• Because of the way the mod works, once you've completed the conditions needed to unlock either the Cavern or the Desert shortcut, the game won't patch them in until the next start of the next day.
• Crops and Casks work in the locked Cavern because it's indoors, but because it's technically a non-farm location saplings and tea saplings cannot be planted.
• You will probably end up moving a lot of stuff around, depending I guess on how quickly you build vs how quickly you unlock the locked areas.  I've playtested for the first year and a half, and I moved just about every farm building at least once.  I'm curious how other people will place things.
• Due to the size of cave entrances, the horse cannot enter any of the grottos.
• I'm using a couple tiles from Andrewist's Desert Farm, specifically the desert grass and grandpa's shrine on a desert wall.  I added several more tiles to the set and added seasonal variations for the appropriate ones.  If anyone wants to use them, feel free.
• The main version of the farm map adds an edited section to the Desert.  There will be compatibility issues if you're using a mod that edits the desert map.  There is an optional file that does not include the desert shortcut, if you're using an incompatible mod.  This includes Stardew Valley Expanded.
• Because of the use of original tilesets, there will likely be compatibility issues with palette mods.  I'll try to add compatibility files in an update later.
• Currently, the Farm Obelisk on the Island will send you to the default Warp Totem location on a regular farm (48, 7).  This is a bug in the game and will be fixed in an upcoming update.  In the meantime, as long as you don't surround that tile with machines, you'll be fine; it's in the north exit, so you probably won't do that, anyway.
  

Suggested Mods
Chests Everywhere: I will pretty much always suggest this one, but it's particularly helpful as there are several highly separated areas on this map.
Smaller Fish Ponds: Small farm deserves small buildings.
Custom Cask Mods: You've got additional cask space, you might as well expand what you can do with it.

Updates
1.0.1 Added NPCBarrier tiles at the entrance of the caves to prevent farm animals from walking too far in (they cannot get stuck or lost, nor do they block the farmer, they just look weird under the Front tiles).  Also edited the area on the other side of the fence behind the house to prevent debris from spawning there (it's a small area, and you should be able to clear it with a bomb, if necessary).
1.0.2  Corrected the base location of the Spouse Area on the farm.  Reduced the width of the bridge that crosses the small river, therefore preventing the horse from going to the desert.  I'm doing this because riding the horse through the desert shortcut was triggering the bus animation, with both farmer and horse on the bus.
1.0.3 Added a couple rows of tiles along the bottom of the farm so that at max zoom out you won't see the black space between the farm and the grottos.
1.0.4 Added a .config file that allows you to pick which map this will replace.
1.0.5 Fixed a mistake in a couple file target fields; the issue would have prevented the desert shortcut and desert cavern being loaded onto the correct farm in the event that the player was using a farm other than the Standard.