liquidcitrus | Stardew Valley's free coffee

I have found what is quite possibly the dumbest, least interesting way to make money in Stardew Valley. (Or, at the very least, it is in the competition for such a title.)

So there's this midwinter festival, introduced in version 1.3, called the Night Market. It starts at 5pm on three consecutive days and lasts until you go home or pass out. There is a merchant there that gives you free coffee. You're throttled to one coffee every ten in-game minutes.

Realistically, you can get to the merchant by about 5:30pm, and - if you use the mysterious guy in front of Willy's shop who has a farm warp totem - you can safely farm coffee until 1:30am and then get home in time to go to bed (i.e. so you don't pass out outside and get billed for someone dragging you home). This means you can farm free coffee for 8 in-game hours, netting you 48 coffees per night (144 coffees if you do this for all three days).

If you chuck (brewed) coffee into the sell bin, each one sells for 150 gold. This makes the entire hustle earn you 21600 gold. This is not great, especially compared to the profit margin of farming in Stardew Valley, but this festival happens in the middle of winter - the part of the year where farming is almost entirely off-limits. (Unless you use Winter Seeds to grow forage items, but those only give you foraging XP, not farming XP, so I don't really count them.) That makes this method almost, sort of, slightly, viable.

Ten in-game minutes takes six real-world seconds; round that up to about 10 real-world seconds to account for the short brewing cutscene and the associated text. So you can get those 48 coffees in something like 5 real-world minutes. Note that you can't accelerate in-game time in any meaningful way, so you have to spend about 12 in-game hours per day messing around before you can do this. I guess you could go chop wood or something to pass the time.

Realistically, coffee is much better as gifts for people in the village (it's Harvey's absolute favorite thing, and most of the other adults and bachelor(ette)s at least somewhat enjoy it). But if you want to completely turn off your brain, I suppose it is theoretically possible to use this to farm money. You just won't enjoy it very much.