Are you bothered that the late game optimal money making strategy is to sell bottles and bottles of starfruit/ancient fruit wine and nothing else? Where are the fresh veggies, fresh fruits, even fresh eggs that a typical real world farm is known for?

While there are mods that attempt to solve these problems by either introducing a fluctuating supply/demand system, or straight up spoiling items to discourage hoarding everything for kegs/jars, in my opinion they're a little too exploitable, punishing and game-y for my taste. Instead, I want to simply reward players for selling a variety of raw produce, and make converting things into artisan goods not always the best option available; specifically, farmers are now encouraged to sell gold and iridium quality crops, and process the low quality remainders into juice/pickles/what-have-yous, just like a real farm!

This is accomplished by two features that work together in harmony:




Freshly harvested organic goods (fruits, veggies, fish, milk and egg, etc.) now have their sale prices increased. The increase is lesser for lower quality, but greatly improves as quality also rises:

Regular (aka Stale) item prices (Stale items have the same prices as regular items with this mod installed)

• Base: 1x
• Silver: 1.25x
• Gold: 1.5x
• Iridium: 2x
  

Fresh price modifiers (Before reading the "Stay Fresh!" Book, Purchasable at the Bookseller):

• Base: 1.05x (5% more)
• Silver: 1.375x (10% more)
• Gold: 1.725x (15% more)
• Iridium: 2.4x (20% more!
  

Fresh price modifiers (After reading the "Stay Fresh!" Book):

• Base: 1.25x (25% more)
• Silver: 1.75x (40% more)
• Gold: 2.5x (66% more)
• Iridium: 4x (100% more!)
  

As you can see, fresh items can sell between 25% more to double that of regular item prices! This has several balance implications:

• Fresh gold items are now more profitable than many vanilla artisan goods, and iridium items more profitable than all but modded ones. While the (very overpowered) Artisan profession still makes processing all but iridium items into artisan goods the most profitable route, the opportunity costs and diminishing returns are now worth considering for all but the latest, largest, Shed-iest of farms.
• Deluxe Fertilizer, an otherwise completely useless item in a late game farm, is now seriously worth considering over Hyper Speed-Gro on a per-crop basis. A fresh Iridium Starfruit sells for 3300g - that's a lot of money!
• Artisan, as strong as it is, now have serious competition from its peer profession Agriculturalist for those favoring a crop-based playthrough. Rancher is now also worth considering for an animal-based playthrough, because getting fresh iridium produce from animals is trivial at max friendship.
  

For the number crunchers, see the collapsible below on analysis on specific artisan goods:



Be warned however - if you don't immediately sell fresh items the day of harvest, they will go stale (marked as such in their display name) after you go to bed and revert to boring base game prices! Thankfully, they don't spoil or change further, and outside of their sell price (which reverts to base), display name and their ineligibility for the competition (we'll get to that), they are identical to their fresh counterparts and can be used for every other purpose. Feel free to turn that years-old apple in the back of your fridge into a bottle of refreshing apple wine.

Items inside Junimo Chests also never spoil, which gives you an incentive to use these otherwise underwhelming items. Fridges will also slow the spoilage process to 3 days by default.

Here is a list of item categories affected by freshness:




So now farmers are encouraged to process low quality produce while directly selling gold and iridium stuff, but what about variety over a field of just Starfruits? That's where the Farm Of The Season competition comes in!

Once your farm gets featured in the Stardew Valley Tribune (ie. earns a total of 27000g), on the second day of every season you will receive a letter that says you are entered into the Farm of the Season, a month-long competition to find the best farm in all of Ferngill, with great prizes and amazing perks for those who achieve a good score. Then, you can open the competition tracker window by clicking on the Farm of the Season quest in your quest tracker.


Competition Details

• Shipping fresh (unless not applicable) items will contribute points equal to what they'd earn at the Stardew Valley Fair to a single category. A category is won once its overall points threshold is reached. For example, for the "Vegetable Farm" category, shipping 10 Gold-Quality Parsnips will contribute 40 points.
• Each unique item type can only contribute a certain amount to the overall category. Past that amount and they'll contribute only 25%, so you can spam a crop if you wish, but it alone likely won't carry you through the finish line!
• Flavored items have special handling - all items of the same base type are considered the same, but every unique flavor shipped extends the individual threshold by 5%. As an example, if the threshold is 100 points and you ship pickled parsnips, pickled kale and pickled cauliflower, pickles can contribute 115 points before the slowdown. So you're still rewarded for selling multiple types of pickles, but customers still don't like it if you sell only pickles and nothing else!
• You will get half credits for completing at least 50% of a category.
  

The following is a list of categories in the competition's default Variety preset, and the amount of points needed:



As of version 2.0.0, the Farm of the Season competition can now cycle between 1 of 9 unique Presets, for an even more varied gaming experience. Be warned, some presets may require you to grow lots of out-of-season crops - better put that Greenhouse and Island Farm to good use! You can enable/disable/force presets in the config menu.

Competition Rewards

When the next season begins, the competition will end and you'll receive rewards through mail depending on how many categories you managed to achieve:

Bronze Medal (25% of categories):

• 20,000 gold
• Nothing else, better luck next time :(
  

Silver Medal (50% of categories):

• 50,000 gold
• +0.2 heart with every villager
• A voucher that when used grants a month-long subscription to JojaFresh(tm) Daily Meal Kit, allowing you to use the phone to order one free food item of your choice from JojaFresh every day. You can only order from JojaFresh(tm) once per day, and the subscription expires at the end of the season.
  

• NOTE: If you go the Joja Route, you'll also receive lifetime free JojaFresh! Feel free to toss these vouchers in that case, they have no use.
  

How to use JojaFresh(tm):


Gold Medal (75% of categories):

• 100,000 gold
• +0.5 heart with every villager,
• JojaFresh(tm) Voucher
• Iridium Swag Bag: contains a random assortment of items, including Magic Bait, Qi Seasoning, rarely a Tea Set, and random items that you have yet to ship/donate/cook/fish for Perfection (cooking and fishing will count even if you haven't done the work yourself). If you already achieved perfection, you'll get extra Magic Rock Candies instead.
• + 2 Fame
  

Iridium Medal (every category, wow!):

• 200,000 gold
• +1 heart with every villager
• JojaFresh(tm) Voucher
• Iridium Swag Bag
• Pride of the Valley: A buff that lasts the entire month. Adds +2 to all skills and attack/defense, +1 move speed and +1 Luck.
• + 5 Fame
  

Fame: a new stat viewable in either the competition screen or the special powers tab. See below for details.

• Download and install SMAPI, Content Patcher, SpaceCore and StardewUI.
• OPTIONAL: Also install Button's Extra Trigger Actions Stuff (BETAS); with BETAS installed items sold directly to shop will also count towards the competition.
• Then unzip this mod into the Mods folder as usual.
• This mod is safe to install mid-save! If installed mid-save:
  

• Every existing item will be fresh, only becoming stale on sleeping the next day. You can exploit this by immediately dumping your fridges and make big bucks, so I'll gently request that you don't ;)
  

• The competition immediately start if your farm meets the requirements, which does make completing it very hard if you receive it near the middle or end of season. Future competitions should properly start on a season's second day.
• OPTIONAL: If starting a new save, also highly recommend setting profit margin to a lower value, since this mod does increase the amount of money you can make.
• This mod is safe to uninstall; all fresh and stale items will revert to being regular items and have regular prices, and other items added by this mod will become error items that can be trashed. The farm competition order might still linger harmlessly though, and will do nothing once expiring at the end of the month.
  

• Disable JojaFresh Flashing: Disable the flashing after ordering from JojaFresh.
• Disable Staleness: Disable the stale mechanic. All items will be considered fresh regardless of their age.
• Show Freshness in Display Name: Instead of showing stale crops as "(Stale)", show fresh crops as "(Fresh)". True by default.
• Show Eligible Categories in Item Description: Show competition categories this item is eligible for and the amount of points it can contribute in the item description. True by default.
• Disable Fresh Price Increase: Disable the price increase from fresh items.
• Fresh/Fridge Fresh Days: Choose how many days an item will remain fresh outside/inside of fridges. Defaults 1/3.
  

• Enable Competition: Whether to enable the competition. True by default.
• Enable Fame Price/Difficulty Increase: Whether fame should increase sell price and/or difficulty. Both are true by default.
• Enable Difficulty Randomization: Whether to randomly modify each of the competition's category by +-50%. Disabled by default.
• Price Modifiers: Fine tune the price modifiers of fresh item.
• Preset Settings: Change competition preset settings here; choose whether random presets are enabled and which preset can be chosen for a competition.
• Iridium Swag Bag Item Count: Choose how many perfection cheaters you get per iridium swag bags (defaults 4). Adjust it up if you have lots of mods that add extra items, or set it to 0 if you want to do perfection 'legitimately'! The prizes of Qi Seasoning, Magic Bait and Tea Sets are unaffected.
  

This mod should be fully compatible with other mods, with special interactions noted below:

• Cornucopia: This mod's competition categories are adjusted depending on what's installed:
  

• If More Crops is installed, the veggies and fruits category will have their max individual threshold lowered to 100. Gotta make use of all those added crops!
  

• If More Flowers is installed, the flowers category will have their threshold lowered to 100, and the required points bumped up to 800. Veggies and fruits will also have their max points lowered to 800 to compensate.
• Wildflour Atelier Goods: This mod will make the Artisan category slightly harder with WAG installed! Better make use of all the artisan goods.
• Machines Copy Quality and other similar "copy quality mods": Compatible, however NOT recommended. This mod's balance is deliberately dependent on artisan goods not copying quality from the input.
• Any other custom crops/animals/trees/artisan goods mods: Fully compatible, as long as they set item categories correctly. Mod authors may also choose to add more explicit compatibility, as instructed below.
• Other economy mods like Longevity or Ferngill Simple Economy: Fully compatible; this mod's fresh price adjustments are dynamic, and thus should fully stack with other mods' price modifiers.
• Spoilage (1.6 unofficial update): Fully compatible, the two mods' spoilage timers are independent.
• Mods that extend special order expiration dates will also extend this competition's duration and make it not expire at the end of a season. As a result it's not recommended to use those mods unless they can be temporarily disabled before accepting the quest.
  

For Mod Authors
This mod is designed to be extensible; you can detect fresh items, specify other "fresh-able" items, add your own categories for the competition, or even
replace this mod's own with your own categories! See below for guide and technical details.

https://github.com/zombifier/My_Stardew_Mods/tree/master/FreshFarmProduce


Mods shown in screenshots:

• Cornucopia - More Crops
• DaisyNiko's Earthy Interface
• Several furniture mods made by Wildflour and HimeTarts