InStardew Valley, your most important items are far and away the tools you use to get things done. All of them can be upgraded from their basic form to their Iridium form, but all of those upgrades will cost you.
You usually need a hefty sum of ore, money, and a few days for every individual upgrade, and it will usually take well over a full in-game year before everything at your disposal is up to Iridium grade quality.
That said, it’s a great help to know what you should prioritize first. I’ve listed these in the order I think is most important, and I’d typically recommend going for the first upgrade in most tools before going all in on one.
It is very beneficial to prioritize one tool above all else during the early game though, so if you’re going to gun for one thing in particular, this is the order I’ve come up with to maximize your efficiency.
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Stashed Away
I feel it should be obvious, but the backpack upgrades are the easiest of all the upgrades to obtain, as well as the most useful ones in the entire game for every skill and every playstyle, no matter what.
Doubling and eventuallytriplingyour inventory size lifts a massive burden of inventory management off your shoulders, letting you carry more crops, ores, fish, berries, and monster loot.
Whenever I start a new playthrough, the first big purchase I make is always the Large Pack, and I then go scrape up enough money to afford the Deluxe Pack before I’ve upgraded any other tool.
This saves you on trips back home, mitigates the issue of throwing away potentially valuable items to save on inventory space, and is all around the obvious best choice for your first priority.
Mining Away
While I’m writing this guide from the perspective of a player that tries to prioritize all skills equally, Mining is the obvious choice to invest in first if you’re after tool upgrades, as almost all of them require some ore.
you’re able to get by perfectly fine in the first few layers of the mines with a default pickaxe and some bombs, but once you get to mining Iron, Gold, and especially Iridium, you absolutely have to upgrade.
A gold pickaxe canbreeze through the entirety of the normal mineswith complete ease, making it a far easier task to collect ores for your pickaxe upgrades, as well as your other basic tools.
I’d heavily recommend going all the way to Iridium, as the Skull Cavern becomes a far bigger blockade if you aren’t mining at maximum efficiency, and breaking every rock in a single hit is simply satisfying.
3Fishing Rod
Hook, Line, and Sinker
This may come as a bit of a curveball, but I can heavily recommend diving into Fishing Rod upgrades whenever you get the chance. This is mostly because fishing is great for early game money, and it’s easy to get.
You can buy the first rod upgrade at fishing level 2 and the Iridium Rod at fishing level 6, which is a skill that is rather easy to level up. The rod only costs a mere 7500g with a massive improvement in fishing ability.
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It allows you to attach both bait and tackle, which dramatically improves catch rate on top of whatever your tackle’s ability is, making fishing an even more lucrative use of your time than it was before.
If these upgrades were attached to ore, then they’d likely be lower, but due to the relatively low cost and high profitability, I think this should be a big priority if you want some easy early game money-making methods.
Breaker Buster
Getting a Steel Axe is a pretty big priority, as you’re able to’t chop down any of the huge logs taking up residence on your farm without it. Given they can occasionally block important areas, that’s a big deal.
These logs block the Secret Woods that you’lllikely want to get into before Summer, meaning mainlining Axe upgrades to get it to Steel ASAP is something I see many people do, including myself at times.
That said, there is barely any reason to ever make a Gold Axe, and it’s especially ineffective to make an Iridium Axe, as they simply improve your efficiency when chopping trees rather than any unique benefit.
You can cut down all normal trees by just placing a few Mega Bombs near them, which has far more range and is way more efficient than chopping them manually will ever be, making the upgrade rather unnecessary.
5Watering Can
Sprinkled On
While the min-maxxers may call the Watering Can a waste of effort to upgrade, I think for the vast majority of people that don’t want to spend 100% of their time making Iridium sprinklers, a Gold Watering Can is incredible.
You go from watering one tile to watering 9 once you’ve gone all the way up to Golden, and you’re able to double that range by going to Iridium, making manual farming far less of a huge time-wasting hassle.
That said, it would be far higher if sprinklers weren’t so incredibly good. If you’re already setting up sprinklers and automating your farm, I can only really recommend going to Steel or Gold level here.
But for the majority of us that have a massive crop field to manually water every day, this upgrade is a life-saver and lets you make the most out of your time and energy, rather than wasting it all on crops.
Till We Part
Aside from the very beginning of the game, the Hoe is a pretty superflous upgrade. You can do the same job of tilling large areas with bombs, and they’re far more effective at it, if you have the cash.
The Hoe is more of a long-term, money-saving investment to get the same thing done, and getting it upgraded is also really useful for Clay and Snow Yam farming. But that’s the extent of it.
Onceyou have your farm laid out, you really have very little reason to use your Hoe on large areas, making an upgrade past Steel nearly unjustifiable, as that’s really all you’ll ever need if you hate bombs.
The only reason I’ve ever upgraded my Hoe to Iridium is because I had more of the purple stuff than I knew what to do with, and I wanted all of my toolset to be the same color, which is a rather meaningless thing.
7Trash Can
Tossed Aside
Upgrading your Trash Can to the right of your inventory is completely unnecessary, and I rarely ever do it. It gives you a bit of a rebate whenever you throw away items, but you may simply not throw things away.
The hits to your overall profit you take by throwing away clutter in your inventory that isn’t worth much is barely anything, and getting 10g back from that pile of rocks isn’t a great help to your income.
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If you’re really worried about losing money from whatever you’re throwing away, it doesn’t even matter that much, as you will still be losing 40% of the item’s value in the absolute best case scenario.
In the early game, it’s much more effective to just head back home and stuff your items in your collection bin if you’re worried about losing out on money. In the late game, you already have so much money that this is completely worthless.
Death Be Upon Ye
While I’m far less passionately opposed to Scythe upgrades as they don’t cost you any money, they are still a rather worthless thing to prioritize. They’re only really given out as rewards for difficult things.
You get your Golden Scythe from completing the small dungeon by the Quarry, which is a bit of a pain to get through, and only rewards you with a bit of extra range and more hay obtained from cutting grass.
The Iridium Scythe, on the other hand, lets you tear through all your crops and collect them a tiny bit quicker, but that addition is nowhere near worth the effort of getting 100,000 mastery points just for the addition.
Instead, more often than not, I go through the struggle to get these two upgrades and receive the Scythe upgrade by pure happenstance. It is never a priority or something I’d recommend actively attempting to go for.
Sifting Through Trash
I’ve made myvehement contempt for the Panning mechanicrather clear before, but I’ll say it again for the people in the back. Panning is terrible, and is one of the worst ways you can possibly spend your time.
The only reason I’d ever recommend getting these upgrades is when you’re attempting to maximize your ring combinations, as panning on Ginger Island for the Luck Ring is the most effective way to get it.
That said, at no point other than the very end of the game do I ever recommend doing this. The upgrades make the experience slightly more bearable, but only if you’re lucky enough to proc the chance at getting another panning spot.
This is a terrible way to get ores, a far less effective use of money and ore than any other option in the entire game, and a completely worthless prospect that only benefits the most dedicated players.
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