Is your Stardew Valley inventory always full? Are you trashing items you wish you could keep? Same. Inventory management isn’t the most glamorous aspect of the game, but we’re here to help you do it anyway.
If you’ve been playing Stardew Valley for more than a few days, I bet your inventory has already been full at an inopportune moment. It’s almost inevitable when you first start out if you’re not planning carefully. Your backpack only has 12 slots for storing things on the go, and if you haven’t crafted any chests yet, you’re working with minimal resources.
If you want to drop an item on the ground, select it and drag it outside the inventory menu. Just don’t drop it near water and lose it to the fishies. It’s also a bit complex for no good reason, so for the sake of brevity here, check out this guide: How to Drop Items in Stardew Valley!
Craft A Chest
That’s the first step, really. Collect 50 pieces of wood and make yourself a chest or two. Or go crazy and make fifteen. You can even color-code them, so you know what’s inside without opening a bunch of chests in search of that one fish you need to complete a bundle. Or better yet, craft a sign for 25g and place an image of an item on it so you know what’s there. Do this simply by dragging the item over the sign and clicking. It doesn’t even use up the item!
Chests store up to 36 different types of items and can hold up to 999 of one item in a single slot. They aren’t permanent, either. If you don’t like where you put it just pickaxe it and place it somewhere else. It does need to be empty for this, so have fun dumping those 36 items around the town.
Make Upgrading Your Backpack A Priority
Backpack space is a valuable commodity in Stardew. Upgrading it should be done as soon as possible. First, you’ll get a ‘Large Park’ for 2,000g and a nice 24 slots of space. Then you’ll be able to buy the “Deluxe Pack’ which expands your inventory to 36 slots. It costs 10,000g, which seems high, but is more than worth it! More inventory space means more room for resources and less wasted traveling time. If you want to know everything there is about the backpack, you can check out our detailed guide here.
Place Chests Outside The Farm
You’ll be surprised how quickly the 36 slots of the Deluxe Pack fill up. Making trips back and forth between the farm and Pierre’s or the mine back to the farm is a total hassle. One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is placing chests all over the map!
Be sure not to place a chest on any villager’s walking path. If you do, it and everything inside it will be destroyed. Play it safe and place them where no one is walking; right outside the mine, the far east or west of the beach, in the grassy area to the left of the Hospital. (But not under the tree).
Folks have even gone as far as placing chests inside villagers’ homes! They place them strategically where the villagers never go and voilà, an easy place to store their favorite items!
Upgrade Your Trash Can
No matter how prepared you think you are, there comes a time that your Stardew Valley inventory is still going to be full, and you’ll need to throw items out to make room for others. It’s frustrating to see gold go out the window, but it happens. One way to avoid losing all the money you’ve collected is to upgrade the trash can. There are four levels of upgrades you can do, each of which increases the percentage of value you recoup on an item. If you upgrade all the way to the Iridium Trash Can (fancy!), you’ll reclaim 60% of the item’s monetary value. You can do these upgrades with Clint at the Blacksmith’s.
The Trash Can upgrades are overlooked way too often. You’re basically throwing away gold without them!
Pro Tip: The amount of money you regain IS affected by your chosen professions, so you can toss strategically.
And there you have it! Quick tips to managing a full inventory.
