Keg, Dehydrator, or Preserves Jar? The Honest Comparison
Every Stardew Valley farmer hits the same wall: you have a shed full of fruit and a shelf of machines, and no clear answer to what actually makes the most money. This Stardew artisan goods calculator settles it for any crop. Enter what you harvested, toggle the Artisan perk to match your character, and it runs the real 1.6 formulas for all four outlets at once — sell raw, jar it, keg it, or dehydrate it — so you stop guessing and start optimising.
The headline question, is the Stardew dehydrator worth it, has a trap baked into it. A dehydrator sells dried fruit for 7.5× the base price, which sounds like it demolishes the keg’s 3× wine. But a dehydrator eats five fruit per dried item. The honest comparison is not 7.5× against 3×; it is 7.5× against 5 × 3× — one dried item versus five bottles of wine from the same five fruit. Put that way, the keg earns roughly double the dehydrator per fruit. So why build dehydrators at all?
Speed and Machine Slots Change Everything
Because gold per fruit is only half the story. A keg takes about seven in-game days to turn one fruit into wine; a dehydrator turns five fruit into dried fruit in a single day. Measured as profit per day per machine — the number that matters once you have more crops than machines to process them — the dehydrator pulls far ahead. The table below is computed straight from the calculator’s own formulas.
The 5:1 Input Trap, in Gold Per Crop
Flip the same crops around and rank them by gold earned per raw crop and the story reverses: the keg wins nearly everywhere, because wine keeps the full 3× of every fruit while the dehydrator’s 7.5× is diluted across the five fruit it swallows. The ratio column shows how much more gold each fruit is worth as wine than as dried fruit.
How to Read the Verdict
The rule of thumb the calculator encodes: keg when crops are your bottleneck, dehydrate when machines are. Early on you have a handful of kegs and endless Ancient Fruit — wine every fruit for the highest ceiling. By mid-game you are drowning in cheaper fruit and mushrooms and short on machine slots — dehydrators clear the backlog and earn more from the same shed. The preserves jar sits in between: fast like the dehydrator, flat like nothing else, and strongest on cheap crops where its +50 bonus is a big fraction of the price.
A few crops are special. Grapes dehydrate into Raisins (a fixed 600g) rather than generic dried fruit. Hops and Wheat ignore the juice formula entirely: their kegs brew Pale Ale (300g) and Beer (200g). Coffee Beans are the other 5:1 keg item — five beans brew one Coffee (150g) in about two hours, the fastest keg cycle in the game. And remember that quality (silver, gold, iridium) raises raw prices but never artisan goods, which always come out normal quality — so the base price is the right number for this decision.
Optimising a whole farm layout too? Compare it with our other game utilities: the Minecraft villager trading chart for the other great farming-sim economy, the Minecraft potion chart for brewing recipes, and the Pokémon weakness calculator for type matchups. All numbers here are Stardew Valley 1.6 values, fan-made, and not affiliated with or endorsed by ConcernedApe.
