Salmonberries: Are they valuable or worth foraging?

Is it salmonberry season in Stardew Valley? You may be wondering what else you can do with this common forage. Aside from gifts, you will be surprised to learn that there are many things that you can do with salmonberries. Learn everything you can by reading this guide!

If you visit Pelican town during the salmonberry season, you’ll see salmonberries virtually everywhere. Before you know it, you’ll be picking berries after a nice stroll in the town.

At this point, you may have collected a lot and realized you don’t need most of it. You can either keep or discard the excess salmonberries. Worse of all, ignore foraging them.

With many salmonberry bushes, you might think that you can’t pick them all. But what if I told you they’re worth something to your start-up venture? It’s not much, but it helps when you’re in desperate need of gold. If you’re not sure how else you can put it to use, this guide will come in handy.

Profiting From Salmonberries

If you don’t like salmonberries because they aren’t worth a lot of money or because it’s too much work to forage, then you’re wasting your opportunities. Despite its low selling price, you can collect up to a hundred of them and enhance your earnings by its quantity.

Note for newbies: foraging salmonberries is a great way to earn money in the first to the second year of farming.

Moreover, those with advanced foraging skills can harvest many berries in a single journey.

Plus, you don’t want to miss on gifting it to several villagers who like regular salmonberries: Demetrius, Jodi, Kent, Leah, Shane, Robin, Linus, and Pam.

Professions affect their yield and price.

Having level 4 foraging skills doubles your yield to 2 berries per bush. At level 8, you get three, and with a foraging buff, it increases to four.

Botanists will only forage iridium-quality berries. While having a Bear’s Knowledge results in a 2 to 3 fold boost in pricing which isn’t very profitable but is useful when money gets tight. 

For example, normal berries sell for 5g, but with bear knowledge, the price triples to 15g.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison for better understanding:

On the other hand, tillers earn a 10% profit increase on processed berries.

So if you have these professions and have encountered the secret note #23, it’s definitely worth the forage!

Salmonberry jam/jelly

Apart from selling it raw, you can also make salmonberry jams. Although a few NPCs in Pelican town enjoy Salmonberry jelly, Sebastian doesn’t.

On the other hand, selling jams will earn you 60g.

You can only get salmonberry jam upon crafting a preserves jar, which is accessible through the crafting menu, but only if you reach farming level four.

Afterward, you can store your preserves jar wherever you like, except in locations where NPCs may trample on it.

Salmonberry wine

After reaching level eight in farming, you’ll receive the crafting recipe for a keg (30 pieces of wood, a copper bar, an iron bar, and an oak resin). But it’s also possible to obtain after completing the artisan bundle. 

Usually, it takes 6–7 days to brew salmonberry before you can sell or give it to wine-loving locals like Harvey.

While if you were to compare the price of selling wine made from star-fruits, melons, hops, and many more to the cost of salmonberries, you’d realize that these berries are not worth marketing as these only sell for 15g. Nevertheless, it’s suitable for new starters.

Excellent for restoring health and energy

Salmonberries are an excellent food choice to sustain your first year of mining. Because of its high yield, you can have a large stockpile at your disposal. That’s why it’s called “A Working Man’s Food” for a reason!

Spending a day or two acquiring it (with the advantage of level 4 foraging before or during salmonberry season) allows you to get through mining at levels 50, 60, or even 80!

You can even ride your horse while going around the map collecting these energy-booster fruits.

Furthermore, brewing it into wine can grant you +22 health and +50 energy instead of eating it raw, which only gives you +11 health and +25 energy.

Bundles

Don’t sell or consume all of your salmonberries just yet. The game has a randomized setting to remix the community center bundles. And if you choose this option, some of the bundles will require berries to complete. Hence, you’ll want to save a few because salmonberries are only in season for a brief period, typically 15th-18th in spring.

Tailoring

You can use salmonberry as an alternative to creating a red dye or as an ingredient in a spool to make T-shirts.

Qi’s prismatic grange quest

Although salmonberries don’t have their quests, you can still use them to complete Qi’s prismatic grange challenge. Initially, you must put 100 items of green, yellow, blue, orange, purple, and red.

There are many red items in Stardew Valley, but salmonberries are one of the cheapest and easiest to hoard.

Other places to find salmonberries

Farm Cave

Once the player has accumulated 25,000g in earnings, you’ll unlock the farm cave located at the farm’s northern boundary.

Demetrius will pay a visit and notify you that he wishes to set up study specimens in the cave. Then he’ll present you with two options: produce mushrooms or attract fruit bats. By selecting the latter, you can benefit from the numerous fruits that bats may drop, including salmonberries.

Traveling cart

The stock in the traveling cart changes daily. On the other hand, the prices of salmonberries may occasionally be higher (100g) than the typical retail value of 5g. However, these costs vary with each visit.

If you’re lucky, you can obtain salmonberries inexpensively using this method.