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.
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.

Notes
Replaces the Standard Farm. Initially I was going to make it optional which farm it replaces, but my added fish list only works on the Standard Farm. It would work, if less frequently, if you wanted to change it to the Hilltop, but any other farm will change what fish show up.
Yes, the water filled barrels are water sources.
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. The horse can, however, go through the shortcut to the desert.
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.
This mod adds an edited section to the Desert. There will be compatibility issues if you're using a mod that edits the desert map. If there is a demand, I can add an optional version of this that does not have the desert shortcut.
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.

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.