How to Milk Cows in Stardew Valley | Full Guide 2022

Owning a barn and a few Cows may sound like an ordinary business, but not until you start milking them. But how can you extract some milk in Stardew Valley? Here’s a complete guide to help you through the process of collecting this product from your barn animals!

Getting farm animals like Cows helps you find other ways to get better income by selling their products reasonably. However, do you know how to milk them in Stardew Valley?

Starters may find owning farm animals overwhelming, but it’s worth the time and effort. To learn more about the step-by-step process of getting Milk from these animals, here’s a guide to help you!

Important Questions

What are Cows?

It’s a farm animal that produces Milk once it matures after five nights of feeding them every day. You may get them from Marnie’s Ranch for 1500g, wherein they come in colors of white and brown. There’s only a 50% chance of getting the brown cattle. But their color doesn’t affect the quality or shade of milk they produce.

Nevertheless, before purchasing these farm animals, you must buy a regular-sized barn from the Carpenter’s Shop. But if you already have one that’s currently filled with other livestock, you can ask Robin to upgrade this building. Here are the specifications of each advancement:

Moreover, you can prepare a Silo to ensure they have enough food before Winter. Building it requires Robin’s help, and you also need to collect Clay (10), Stone (100), and Copper Bars (5) alongside 100g. This structure gives you stores of hay you’ve collected with your scythe.

How to Milk Cows?

Continuously extracting milk from Cows is pretty trivial if you maintain your friendship with them. You only need to get a Milk Pail and click your farm animal, then there you have a fresh bucket of Milk. You can purchase this tool from Marnie’s for 1000g.

Once you reach Farming Level 10, you can finally buy an Auto-Grabber from the same shop. This equipment automatically squeezes out milk from Cows. But using it has the disadvantage of missing 5 to 10 friendship points from this livestock. It lessens the frequency of milk production, which gives lower profits.

Facts and Information

Maintain Friendship with Cows

Clicking your farm animal shows their age and your relationship with them. You can gain five Friendship Hearts, equating to 1000 heart points. Once you earn enough hearts, it’ll help produce a more lucrative animal product like Large Milk. Here are some ways you may want to practice enhancing your relationship with them:

• Pet or Interact with them. It would give +15 pts or +30 if you chose the Shepherd Profession. Failure to do this diminishes your score by five to ten calculated day-end. 
• Let them eat grass outside. It adds +8 pts to your relationship. You can do this by opening the barn door and allowing them to roam around the farm. Don’t leave them overnight because it’ll lessen your friendship with them by 20 pts.

Enhance Your Cows’ Mood

Keeping your Cows in a great vibe gives better quality and type of products. It may range from silver-grade to iridium-grade Milk. Note that their mood starts from zero to 255 points (pts). Here are some ways to enhance it:

• Have them eat grass outside. It quickly elevates their mood to 255.
• Petting them. It adds +32 to +36 pts, and if you have the Shepherd Profession, it may double these benefits.
• Place a Heater in the Barn during Winter. You may get this equipment from Marnie for 2000g. It gives +4 to +8 pts every ten minutes as long as you’re still awake past 6 PM. You only need one heater for every Barn.
• Feed them. You need to place pieces of hay on the platform on their lodging to feed them. It grants you +4 to +16 pts, depending on the animal’s type. You may also give them grass. Everything gets calculated once you sleep.
• Let them out after 6 PM and get them back inside the Barn before 7 PM. You can do this if they have less than 150 mood scores. It’ll significantly increase by 4 to 8 pts every ten in-game minutes.

Despite these positive outputs, you may also negatively affect your Cows’ mood by doing the following:

• Letting them outside on rainy days or Winter. It removes four to eight pts every ten minutes but doesn’t pile with other every ten minutes effects.
• Leaving them outside once it’s past 7 PM. Forgetting to secure them in their Barn scrapes off four to eight pts per ten minutes. While letting them sleep outside reduces half of their current mood. 
• Not petting or interacting with them. Your points would get lessened by 20 to 40 pts, depending on the type of animal.
• Not feeding them. Forgetting to give your Cows something to eat recedes their mood by 100.

Products

After using your milk bucket and collecting these products, you can immediately sell them. But you may also use a Cheese Press to produce some Cheese. Here are the selling prices of each item: