When you’re playing Stardew Valley, there’s a lot of things you’ve got to keep track of throughout the day. Of all of the most time-consuming and exhausting, watering your crops is something that has to be done regardless of how much work it is. Once you’ve made sprinklers, you can spend less and less of that precious time watering and more time managing the rest of your farm, but there are endless ways you can set your sprinklers up. Here’s the top seven best sprinkler layouts in Stardew Valley.
Staggered Basic Sprinkler Layout
Your first sprinklers on the farm are always gonna be your most memorable, even if they aren’t the most effective at their jobs. The Basic Sprinklers only water the four tiles directly above, below and to the sides of them, so you can only water four crops per day using them. This alone isn’t ideal, but you can set up your farm in ways such that your sprinklers will maximize their effect.
Make sure that you’re stratifying your sprinklers so that they’re placed at a diagonal. That way, you can maximize the amount of space you use on your farm without having to worry about too many tiles of land not getting watered or growing crops. I would suggest that if you choose to have a plot as large as the one in this example, throw a couple scarecrows on the blank spots of land so the crows won’t come by and destroy your hard work.
Basic Sprinkler Scarecrow Layout
If you’re still focused on farming with Basic Sprinklers, then you definitely want to make sure you maximize the amount of crops that you’re able to grow, and protect them. That means it’s important to make room in your crops for a scarecrow, and to make sure that your crops are all within its radius so that they don’t get eaten during the night. The example above does a great job of showing how to use the Basic Sprinklers the most efficiently if you aren’t planning on upgrading any time soon.
While using Basic Sprinklers isn’t the most resource-efficient strategy when you can make Quality or Iridium ones, if you’ve got a bunch of them laying around you may as well use them for a plot of their own. Even if you’re saving them for some upgrades, they can always be put to better use in a field than in a chest, or until you can use them to fill out a different plot. If you’re really set on using basic sprinklers, this style of layout is going to be the best you can choose, but the real efficiency comes in with the bigger ones.
Quality Sprinkler Scarecrow Layout
So, you’ve stepped your way up to the Quality Sprinklers, eh? That’s good news for you and your sales, because you just doubled the amount of crops you can automatically water per day. However, just because you’ve got better sprinklers now doesn’t mean you know the best ways to use them. It is still just as important to have a Scarecrow covering your crops, whether you’ve got them around the outside of the field or right in the middle.
Given that Quality Sprinklers water in a 3×3 square pattern, you can place them two spaces apart from each other on the same line to maximize how much coverage you get. The above example shows a great way to make sure that all of your crops are within the radius of the scarecrow in the middle, while not wasting any unnecessary space other than the Scarecrow itself.
Clean Patchwork Quality Sprinkler Layout
Why switch to those expensive Iridium Sprinklers when you’ve already got plenty of the quality ones that are doing a great job? Especially for farmers who settle down on the Hilltop Farm where there isn’t a ton of space for large plots of crops, you don’t need to use sprinklers with a ton of coverage if you aren’t going to be able to fit them all in a plot anyway.
By laying out your Quality Sprinklers in modular, 2×2 squares, it not only allows you to spread out throughout the space on your farm, but also makes it easier to keep track of what crops are being grown where, and to keep those crops separated. The plots are all a great size for planting individual products, you don’t have to worry about harvesting half a plot of Potatoes one day and having to wait a couple more days to be able to harvest the other half a plot of Cauliflower.
Iridium Sprinkler Scarecrow Layout
You thought you were pretty well set with your Quality Sprinklers, eh? Let me welcome you to the world of Iridium farming, where you can water 24 tiles of crops at once, per day, per sprinkler. Iridium Sprinklers water in a 5×5 grid pattern, so they can be laid out side by side like the Quality Sprinklers, but with 4 spaces between them instead of 2. That way, you can have fewer sprinklers sitting and more crops growing.
The example above shows that you can fit six Iridium Sprinklers within the radius of a scarecrow without wasting any tiles, but you’ll have to pad some of the extra space with Quality Sprinklers to fill the entire radius. That way you can make the most profit out of your space with significantly less effort.
Symmetrical Iridium & Quality Sprinkler Layout
Now, say you’re looking to lay out your sprinklers while trying to avoid any unattractive, wasted space between plots. This sprinkler layout is exactly what you’d be looking for, because it utilizes two Iridium Sprinklers and 14 Quality Sprinklers to water 162 tiles altogether. On top of that, it looks great and leaves you with plenty of opportunity to decorate and incorporate your aesthetic into your farm.
This layout is great for those farms that are just starting out using the Iridium Sprinklers, because you can build it out further and further as you get more. As you get more Iridium ones, you can reshape the sprinkler layout and stretch it further to add more crops, or you can keep padding it with Quality Sprinklers if you don’t have the resources just yet. This layout provides a great use for your old Quality Sprinklers as your farm grows, and that way you don’t have to sell them at a loss once you got Iridium ones.
Efficient Iridium & Quality Sprinkler Greenhouse Layout
So you’ve got yourself a Greenhouse. It can be a challenge to make sure you’re maximizing your profits by making the most of your space inside, but this example does a great job at saving space by only taking up four plots of tillable land with Sprinklers. The extra spaces that are on the outside of what the Iridium Sprinklers can reach are watered by some Quality and Basic Sprinklers, giving another perfect opportunity to use up some of the old resources you’ve got instead of just selling them or letting them sit.
If you have more than just those four Iridium Sprinklers, you can use them on the outside of the border instead of the Quality and Basic ones, and that way you only need four more sprinklers to line the outside and water the entire plot of crops. You can also use this layout outside of the Greenhouse for your other crops as well, being that its still an efficient way to water the most of your crops.
When you’ve gotten yourself far enough in the game to reach Ginger Island, you can go to Qi’s Walnut Room to buy upgrades for your sprinklers. The Pressure Nozzle is a valuable one because it allows you to increase the range on your Sprinklers, which you can then apply to any of these farm layouts to significantly scale up your production. You can also tack on an Enricher to fertilize your soil automatically as your plants get watered.
Those are seven of the top Sprinkler layouts in Stardew Valley, although everyone does their farms differently depending on the landscape they choose and the crops they grow. You can switch these up to fit your play style, but no matter which ones you choose, they’ll certainly make life on the farm just a little bit easier. After all, once the Blackberries bloom, you’ll have a lot of foraging to do.
