An Ultimate Guide to Caves In Stardew Valley

farming fishing foraging mining caught these are the five skills that live in harmony in the valley farmer master of all five skills can bring economic prosperity to Pelican town laughs in the last video we went over the mechanics of mining the machines and then I did a deep dive on all of the Rocks where I got to show off my fancy rock chart by the way y'all were able to spot the pattern with this chart that I could not each upgrade pretty much adds one power to the pickaxe so the copper pickaxe divides the amount of hits it takes by two the steel pickaxe divided by three gold by 4 and iridium by five with all values rounding up which perfectly explains why the copper pickaxe upgrade is so significant and the others not as much this video will be all about the Dungeons and then the Level Up Rewards to wrap it up so before we go into the mines themselves I want to talk about the Quarry first this is either unlocked from doing the crafts rooms bundle in the community center or by buying the bridge on the joja community form for 25 000 gold it can contain any Rock in the game except for the ones that are exclusive to Ginger Island the only catch is the rare stones like the Iridium ore node or the Mystic Stone are incredibly rare once you start clearing the query more rocks will start to respawn in the spaces that you've left empty so it's recommended that you clear it entirely so that they have the highest chance to respawn you can probably get by on checking it like every two weeks or so the query also has its own little cave this is known as the Quarry mine it is simply one floor filled with haunted skulls copper slimes and iron slimes and it can also contain copper and iron ore nodes the main reason you'll want to come here is for the golden Scythe at the end of it which does have a slight advantage over the regular Scythe it's like 0.1 of a pixel longer and it more reliably cuts grass in the area that it does cover it can be worth coming back here though because the haunted schools are exclusive to this type of floor they have the ability to drop a couple of rare things like some bone related artifacts magic rock candy and artifact troves which you know first of all I don't know why the drop skeletal hands they literally have no hands but whatever with that it's time to move on to the mines the mines is a 120 floor dungeon unlocked on day five that's split into six different biomes each different biome has different enemies forageables gems and Aesthetics as you go deeper into the Mind you'll unlock a checkpoint through the elevator every five floors and from then on you'll be able to head straight to any of the checkpoints that you've unlocked the day with the minds is every time you enter it'll be completely randomized this is only if you leave the mines if you're on floor 20 and take the elevator to floor five and then back down to floor 20 again it'll still be the same floor 20 as before so you enter the mines and you're on your first floor to move on to the next one you need to find a ladder different things that you do on the floor have different chances of dropping a ladder for instance killing a monster has a 15 chance of dropping it destroying a rock has a two percent chance to spawn a ladder unless there's no enemies on the floor where there's then a six percent chance for a rock to drop a ladder that is theoretically like most things in the game randomization is a bit more complicated than there's just a percent chance for it to happen for instance the numbers I gave you are heavily affected by daily luck to the point where a good luck day can give you more than a double chance to drop ladders from any source and a bad luck day can more than half that chance in addition the more rocks you destroy the better of a chance you have to get a ladder from the next Rock there's even ways to predict where a ladder will spawn but that's well beyond what I want to go over here you'll also occasionally find these crates and barrels sitting around certain floors you want to break these open as much as you can they can't contain ladders but they do have a whole two mile long spreadsheet of items that it can possibly drop and now that you know the basics let's go over all of the different biomes for the first 10 floors you'll have the brown Earth mines and before we go on I'll point out in the top left that I have panels that show you what enemies can be found what forgeables can be found this also includes gem nodes and what ores are available here so these first 10 floors are pretty generic pretty much only good for finding copper some notable drops from the monsters that can be found here are cherry bombs from the duggies and a crab from the rock crabs and you'll get leather boots from a chest on floor 10. floors 11 through 29 are weed floors here you'll find lots of bugs for grinding bug meat which can be turned into bait fiber will also spawn in good amounts making this a good place to grind for it you'll find your first weapon upgrade on floor 20 the steel small sword and this is also the first of the three underground lakes that you can fish in floors 31 to 39 are Shadow floors here there will be low light along with bats and stone golems I don't really find myself coming back to these floor much although the stone golems do have a 10 chance to drop coal on 440 you'll find the slingshot which can be loaded with various ammos notably the explosive ammo once you reach level 9 combat which is great for mining floors 41 to 69 are the ice mines here you'll finally start finding iron ore along with a bunch of new mine forgeables like frozen tears the dust Sprites that are found here can be a very good source of coal since they usually spawn in large numbers on floor 50 you'll get the tundra boots and from floor 50 and deeper you can now find the diamond nodes the chance starts at 1 in 500 Stones being a node and that increases every floor you go down and as I said before it's one of the only gem nodes that can be found on checkpoint floors on floor 60 you obtain your first guaranteed dagger the crystal dagger alongside having the second underground Lake and on floor 70 you obtain the master slingshot it's identical to the regular slingshot just with twice the damage don't lose this one it's the best in the game floor 71 to 79 are the Frozen castle floors these are similar to the Frozen Earth floors but now they're skeletons they have a chance of dropping a decent weapon the bone sword as well as Bunches of bone fragments floor 80 has the firewalker boots and all around plus three to both defense and Immunity floors 81 to 109 are the lava floors these are the first floors that you can find gold ore emeralds and rubies the geodes of these floors are now magma geodes and in addition to quartz you can now also find fire courts to top all of it off weeds can also be found on these floors making it another good spot to farm for them as for interesting drops the shadow enemies have a chance to drop full resource bars and the rarer the material the lower the chance lava crabs can drop bombs and Squid kids are one of the only sources of squid ink if you don't want to throw squids in a fish pond on 490 you'll obtain the obsidian Edge which is your last and best guaranteed weapon for any better ones you'll have to buy them from the shop find them through luck or solve certain puzzles on floor 100 you get a star drop which increases your energy permanently you also have the last of the underground lakes and from floor 101 on you can now find mystic stones which just in case you skipped the rock section contain gold and iridium ore and have a high 25 chance to hold a prismatic Shard at floor 110 you'll get the space boots which is a plus four to both defense and Immunity and for the last 10 floors it's the same lava caves as before just without weeds and a better chance for magma geodes on the final floor you'll find the skeleton key this has two uses it opens up the skull Cavern which we'll go over shortly and it also allows you to play Juno cart in the saloon yay also small little side effect of hitting the bottom of the mines all enemies now have a .05 chance to drop a diamond or Prismatic Shard well that's generally all of the biomes covered now there are a couple of special floors that have a random chance of replacing whatever floor you're on first we have infested floors no Rock spawn here just enemies and you'll have to defeat them all if you want to move on if you have the oil of garlic buff which is a drinkable crafted item unlocked at combat level 6. this type of floor won't spawn at all and you can still skip it if you have a staircase next you could have a mushroom floor these can only spawn on floor 81 or later here you'll find a bunch of red and purple mushrooms and once you leave it will never spawn again that day last you have dungeon floors which are very similar to the quarry mines which means haunted skulls these can spawn on any floor which is not good because it can be really punishing if you don't have a strong enough weapon to deal with the haunted skulls or slimes and as a role none of those special floors will ever spawn on a floor that has an elevator and before we move on to the skull Cavern we still have to talk about the remixed rewards in the mines this is a setting that you could check whenever you start your file and all it does is changes what items you'll get in all of the chests found in the mines the reward in three of the chests will not change the slingshot Master slingshot and star drop will all still spawn in the regular spot for all of the other chests however there's a variety of boots weapons or rings that you could get instead of the regular item and some of the items you can randomly get are way better than what you would get normally like floor 20 has a chance to give you either a glow ring or a magnet ring both of which are very useful items some of the weapons you can find are just outright better than the default weapons and if you're worried you don't have to worry about never getting a weapon upgrade because you do still have a guaranteed weapon on floor 60 and floor 90. it's just that the weapon itself is randomized for the skull Cavern you've got two things stopping you first the aforementioned skeleton key from the bottom of the mines second you need to complete the Vault bundle after which the bus will be unlocked to access the desert you'll find the skeleton Cavern in the top left corner structurally it's very similar to the mines break rocks and defeat enemies to get deeper however this time there's no checkpoints and the entire dungeon is one biome plus a couple of special rooms you also now have two different ways of getting deeper through the regular staircase that we all know and love or through a shaft anytime a ladder would spawn there's a 20 chance that it'll be a shaft shafts can send you down anywhere from 3 to 15 floors at once at the expense of a little bit of Health the damage will never outright knock you out but it's something to be careful for the main reason you're going to want to come to the skull Cavern is for iridium ore not only does it act as your last upgrade for your tools but it's needed in a lot of the best crafting recipes such as iridium sprinklers crystallariums and iridium bands as you get deeper in the skull Cavern the frequency of iridium or nodes will increase I'd say you'd want to be around floor 40 before you start getting a good amount of them almost every enemy here has a very useful drive and most of them are kinds that you've seen before in the mines serpents are the standout enemy providing both bombs and spicy eels a food that has a speed and a luck buff purple slimes iridium bats and iridium crabs all have a chance to drop iridium ore themselves carbon ghosts drop a guaranteed Omni geode and mummies can drop the famed red cabbage seed an important drop to pay attention to if you're trying to complete the community center in one year as for your special rooms you have prehistoric floors these can contain fiddlehead ferns which are usually locked to the secret Woods in summer and a ton of dinosaur enemies these are great sources of several bone pieces you'll need for the museum and are one of the only sources of dinosaur eggs which can be incubated in a coop to hatch your own little dinosaur after floor 10 you might find a treasure room these are small freebie floors where you can find some of the best items in the game such as crystallariums iridium bars or if you're really lucky and auto better which will prevent your animals from passively losing friendship the only other way to get this item is from jojamar after paying off the JoJo membership form the last type of room doesn't have any official name but I like to call them pyramid rooms it has a sort of a golden brick theme and you'll find lots of more mummies and carbon ghosts than usual here for a couple of tips for going deeper I'll say that you'll need three things to succeed bombs food and food Buffs having different sizes of bombs including explosive ammo will blow up rocks a lot quicker saving you a lot of time as well as energy over swinging the pickaxe food is a must-have due to the strong enemies here almost everyone has memories of walking onto floor 1 getting swarmed by serpents and dying in three hits personally I'm a fan of salad if you like to buy your food or cheese if you want to make it yourself and food Buffs are even more important here than anywhere else first they actually last longer due to time being slightly slowed down while you're in the skull Cavern second luck and speed Buffs are just incredible for mining if you want a more in-depth guide on strategies you could use for getting deeper in the skull Cavern I made a whole video for a guide it's one of my favorites oh and you may be wondering what can I find in the skull Cavern other than iridium everything if it can be found in the mines it can be found in here the last area we'll be going over is Big spoilers once again I'd skip the rest of the section if you don't want to see it we're talking about the volcano dungeon on Ginger Island this one will be pretty brief because just like with the skull Cavern there's just one biome progression through these floors are a bit different you'll generally spawn near the bottom of the floor and you need to find the doorway normally near the top of the floor to move on sometimes the doorway will be closed in which you'll have to find buttons on the floor to open it up there's only 10 floors and once again unlike the other two dungeons these floors only randomize once per day if you leave and come back you'll find the same floors as before floor 5 will always have the dwarf shop along with a shortcut that you can unlock for five golden walnuts back to the beginning of the dungeon speaking of this shortcut you'll want to pay extra attention to your time here because you can't just go up a ladder and immediately be at the entrance if you want to leave before reaching the end you'll have to walk back through every floor you've already been through and this shortcut could save you from passing out if you do reach the end there's another shortcut there to go back to the beginning in the volcano you can find copper iron gold and iridium ore nodes Cinder Shard nodes which give you Cinder shards used at the forge and Omni geode nodes which give you Omni geodes lastly you can find diamond ruby and Mystic nodes all of which we've gone over before now I do want to say there's one of the weirdest things in the entire game here and that's the copper and iron nodes not any normal copper and iron nodes though these are different from the other ones for some reason they're the exact same as the ones found in the minds of the skull Cavern but they only take one hit to break and also they've been recolored to more match the volcano dungeon they only take one hit no matter what pickaxe you're using this does not carry over to the gold or iridium ores for some reason just the copper and iron there are two forageables in these mines magma caps which are a fairly common spawn that heal a lot when eaten and sell for 400 gold at base their main use is to trade for pineapple seeds with the island Trader the second forageable is a dragon tooth these are much rarer only spawning near giant skeletons which aren't even guaranteed to show up at all these can be traded for banana trees at the island Trader and are needed to craft island warp totems you're better off Hunting the lava lurks for these since they'll drop them 15 percent of of the time also while the layouts of all the floors are randomized floor 9 will always be a weird kind of mechanical maze type floor often through this floor you'll just have to take hits and eat food to get through it enemies will always be in your way speaking of enemies here's some of their notable drops dwarvis sentries can drop every type of gem false magma caps drop magma caps 99 of the time also you can tell it's a false magma cap if your cursor doesn't change when you hover over it potheads have two separate 10 chances to drop pineapple seeds magma Sprites and sparkers have two separate chances to drop Cinder shards magma Dougies can drop Mega bombs and tarottubers and tiger slimes can drop pineapple seeds or mango saplings but much more importantly the tiger hat you'll also occasionally find chests sitting around common chests have a chance to give you various Ginger Island items and the dwarf weapons which are great defensively if you're really lucky you'll find a rare chest which has an orange stripe on top these also drop a couple of Ginger Island items a unique hat and as the only source of ostrich eggs if you lost the freebie egg you get from a journal scrap and these will give you the dragon tooth weapons which are second only to the upgraded Galaxy weapons finally you can find 17 of the 130 gold walnuts here five from rocks five from enemies five from crates and then one from each type of chest so after all of that technically there's two more dungeons however they're extremely end game content they're basically reskinned versions of the mines and the skull caverns and are much harder than their original variants they're unlocked after taking certain endgame challenges from a certain end game character if you want to know more about them I do have a video that goes over them in depth the most important thing to talk about is there's one exclusive item to these Dungeons and that's radioactive or nodes this isn't necessarily the next step past iridium ore although it can be put into a furnace to make a radioactive bar they're just used for crafting recipes though there's not radioactive tools or anything finally we've covered all of our bases there's a lot of mining content in the game arguably more than farming so now we can finally start talking about the mining skill and what rewards you get for leveling it up at level 1 you get the Cherry Bomb crafting recipe which takes four copper ore and one coal at level 2 you get the staircase crafting recipe which some would argue is very important however it takes 99 Stone to craft and honestly trading One Jade for a staircase on Sundays from the desert Trader is a lot more efficient level three you get the cooking recipe for miners treat it takes a cave carrot one sugar and one milk and gives you a plus three mining buff and a plus 32 magnetism buff I want to talk about the mining buff really quickly it's not actually a great buff all it does is lower the amount of energy you use when swinging a pickaxe and it slightly increases your chance of Finding Gem nose when mining seriously you'll probably want luck and speed Buffs more than that it also gives a magnetism buff though which is okay it's not going to be too noticeable as long as you have a magnet ring at level 4 you get the crafting recipe for the glowstone ring which is one of the best rings in the game it combines the effect of the light ring and the magnet ring for five solar Essence and five iron bars which sounds expensive but trust me it's worth it and you get your first transmute crafting recipe this allows you to make an iron bar out of three copper bars funny thing is I feel like this isn't used too much because I find myself lacking copper bars more often than iron bars I don't know that's just me but the options there now at level 5 you have your first profession choice between minor which gives you one extra ore per vein you break or geologist which makes gem nodes have a 50 chance of dropping an extra gem I've gotta be honest this is one of the most lopsided choices in the entire game ores are so important a profession that increases the amount of ore you get is fantastically useful and even though it sounds like geologist gives you an opportunity for more money because you'll be able to sell more gems it's not necessarily the case because for the level 10 professions there's a really good money maker on the miners side I would say geologists might be better if you're looking for more gifts for people in the form of gems moving on to level six you get the bomb recipe which like the Cherry Bomb just takes four iron ore and one coal at level seven you get the second transmute crafting recipe which allows you to turn two iron bars into one gold bar which again has its uses if you need a lot of gold bars for some reason also if you were intending on selling the two iron bars you'll get 10 more gold if you turn it into a gold bar so you know stacks on stacks and all that level 8 you get the mega bomb crafted with four gold ore one solar Essence and one void Essence which while it sounds like a very specific recipe you probably have solar Essence and void Essence anyway because they're not used for much else so it's not that bad of a recipe at level nine you get the beautiful crystallarium recipe one of the best in the game fantastic Money Maker it is a bit expensive with 99 Stone five gold bars two iridium bars and one battery pack but it pays for itself eventually I like to have just a group of these making whatever gems I need Super useful can't recommend it enough and then our level 10 professions so starting with minor first we have blacksmith which makes all metal bars worth 50 percent more which doesn't sound like a lot until you consider that iridium bars sell for a thousand gold normally and 1500 gold with this profession this single-handedly makes deep skull Cavern runs a great money maker and if you're late game enough this also applies to Radioactive bar it didn't used to but now it does increasing the price from three thousand gold to 4 500 gold and radioactive ore isn't that bad to grind for because you can just continuously enter floor one of the Dangerous Minds over and over again until it spawns for you it's that easy absolutely nutty money maker and the other one prospector chance to find Cold doubled I don't know if anyone cares about that especially at the point where you're at level 10 mining you have charcoal machines you have money to buy coal if you really need it you've been around the block I suppose if you're really hurting for coal for some reason it's there for you on the other end with the geologist profession we have excavator which doubles your chance of finding geodes and for clarification this applies to normal Frozen magma and Omni geodes it does not apply to treasure troves or golden coconuts now to be fair if you haven't completed your museum at this point this isn't an awful thing this applies to many parts of the game such as fishing up treasure chests that could have geodes breaking open rocks that could have geodes hanning could have an omni geode hoeing an artifact spot can have geodes all of those chances are doubled and should make completing the museum a lot easier if you're struggling with it and on the other hand we have gemologist which makes gems worth 30 more now I'm not gonna act like this is completely inferior to the blacksmith profession since if you do you have like a ton of crystallariums making yourself a ton of diamonds this is good it changes the 750 gold sale price of diamonds up to 975 which is nothing to sneeze at it's also probably the way to go if you just straight up don't like mining for the most part though if you're a miner it's blacksmith that does it sorry this video took so long but as you can see there's a lot to mining so much that I once again have to point to the top right corner of the screen so you can click the card and go to any of the more specific guides if you need them after this though we just have the one guide for combat left so I'll see you all in the next one and good night [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Salmence

Views: 64,010

Keywords: stardew valley, stardew, valley, stardew valley guide, stardew valley mining guide, stardew guides, stardew valley mines, stardew valley skull cavern guide, Stardew valley volcano guide, stardew volcano, stardew skull cavern, stardew radioactive ore, how to beat the skull cavern, how to beat the mines stardew, stardew valley cave guide, stardew valley quarry, stardew valley prismatic shards, stardew stardrops, stardew valley 100 days, all about the caves, stardew challenge

Id: ZxcVvyW1FaE

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023