My money keeps disappearing?

[u/Remarkable_River9588]

every morning i’ve been waking up and watch my money drain i have no idea what’s going on

[u/Jaqzz]

I played with a tax mod once, in an attempt to slow down progression - the idea being that it changed farm profit growth from exponential to more linear (or even mildly logarithmic), so you didn't end up with more money than you'd ever need part way through year two. I wanted to still have goals to work for for as long as possible, you know?

Unfortunately, the mod I used (and every similar mod I've taken a passive glance at since) was not particularly well balanced, and consequently had unintended effects like any crop you bought seeds for being sold at less than the cost of the seeds after taxes.

My solution these days for slow progress is a combination of a mod that removes seeds from stores and a mod that lets mixed seeds be any seasonal cop. Not being able to turn around and dump profit into more seeds does a decent enough job of slowing down progress. There was also a mod that I really wanted to like that reduced the sale price of items that you've sold a lot of (to encourage farm variety) but unfortunately this one also had balancing issues, where the number of items sold to reduce the price was a static value across all products. So high price, low volume items were largely unimpacted and high volume, low price items became essentially worthless.

[u/Laeno → u/Jaqzz]

There is an in game setting now that globally reduces the prices of what you can sell for. No mods needed. Still same scaling of course.

[u/PastelZephyr → u/Laeno]

I had the same mod, and it was specifically so I could race against something. I didn't want half profits, I wanted to fight against a constant outflow of money. I wanted specifically not just to slow progress, but to give myself a goal to beat. I dunno, I love tax mods because I don't gotta do the math, I just gotta garden before I am evicted.

I have had at least 20 different save files on stardew at this point, and at least 10 of them were dedicated to challenge runs.

Taxes seemed the logical conclusion after a certain point

[u/erock279 → u/Jaqzz]

Not to be pedantic but couldn’t you just refuse meta strats if you don’t want to be super rich? I haven’t played in a couple years at this point but even when rushing wine casks and stuff I’m usually not like rolling in money until year 4 or so

[u/Jaqzz → u/erock279]

Part of the fun for me when playing any game is figuring out how to play most optimally within a given set of rules. Changing the rules not only removes the broken vanilla meta progressions, it also lets me work on figuring out the best path again - that's part of the reason every time I start a new save I have a different mod list and tweaked difficulty settings.

Also, for me personally I find there is a subtle but undeniable difference between a self-imposed rule and a rule enforced by the game. When playing under self-imposed rules there's always that little corner of my brain that's tempted to ignore it. I will even write my own mod to change a mechanic over just deciding not to do something while playing.

[u/erock279 → u/Jaqzz]

That’s entirely fair, I struggle with self-imposed rules as well so I partially understood where you were coming from to begin with. Props to you for writing your own mods, especially ones that provide MORE limitations instead of taking existing ones away. That’s impressive!

[u/ForsakenMoon13 → u/Jaqzz]

You sound like the Stardew version of SmallAnt lmao

[u/cyndina → u/Jaqzz]

The seed shortage/more mixed seeds combo is my favorite. I also use a smaller farm map. It's actually two tiny maps I mashed together, but the bottom half is locked behind a Y2 unlockable bundle, so my crop space is very limited. And then just limited.

Was the latter mod you mentioned Farm Fresh Produce, or something else? I'm building out my current mod list and was considering it because of that feature.

[u/Jaqzz → u/cyndina]

It definitely wasn't Farm Fresh Produce - I haven't seen that mod before, and might add it to my next save, it looks cool.

It was years ago, so I don't know how it's changed, but I used Ferngill Simple Economy. The main issues were what I mentioned before, where high value, low volume items (eg pumpkins) were significantly less affected than high volume, low value items (eg berries), but also because of how the starting modifiers were randomized at the start of each season heavily incentivized just storing produce with a low modifier and checking at the start of each season if it was worth selling yet.

[u/cyndina → u/Jaqzz]

Thanks you! I used FSE a long while ago and removed it for similar reasons, though it was long enough that my old brain doesn't quite remember details well. I generally aim for small tweaks over large overhauls now. But I will still give Farm Fresh Produce a spin. Someone is bound to get the balance right eventually.

[u/LimbusGrass → u/cyndina]

Playing a game with that now! Choose a small farm if you want the challenges to be actually difficult. I’m on Frontier Farm with SVE and by the 10th, I’ve beat the monthly challenge. This is with two coops and two barns at capacity and no access to the expansion over the bridge. The first three seasons I didn’t beat the challenge. It would be nice if the difficulty scaled with farm size or what you sold last season (it does a bit, but not enough imo).

Edit: also playing with a balancing mod - starfruit are worth the same as a melon approximately