Stardew Valley Desert Festival Guide

Patch 1.6 of Stardew Valley introduces several new features, including the Desert Festival, a three-day event in spring. During this festival, the villagers of Pelican Town host a fair in a location that is, curiously, not in their own town. Here's a preview of what you can anticipate at your inaugural Desert Festival.

Beach Party Without Water: The Desert Festival in Stardew Valley

First things first: the Desert Festival can’t happen if nobody in Pelican Town can reach the Desert. This location is only unlocked once the town bus is repaired, whether you do it by repairing the Community Center or throwing money at JojoMart.

If you're a new player, don't worry about this. It's nearly impossible to fix the bus by mid-Spring in a fresh run, and I'm only saying "nearly" because there might be some deviant speedrun strat that I don't know about. For most if not all players, you'll need to wait until at least Year 2 before you can access the Desert Festival.

Once the bus is running again, the Desert Festival is held every Spring 15, 16, and 17. While you can reach the festival as early as 6 AM if you burn a Warp Totem: Desert, most of its features aren’t available until it officially opens at 10 AM. The “official” way to get to the festival is to wait until Pam shows up to work at 9:30 AM and take the bus, which costs 500g.

The festival replaces many of the desert’s typical map features with new events for the show. Sandy’s shop is closed for the duration of the event, but the usual roadside vendor is not.

Many of the villagers in Pelican Town take a break from their typical schedules to visit the Desert Festival. This always includes Emily, who runs a booth on all three days; Harvey, who runs the festival’s medical tent; and Willy, who spends the festival running its fishing hole.

To get much out of the Desert Festival, you’ll need its unique currency, Calico Eggs. These are rewarded by most of the quests and events that involve the festival. They take up an inventory slot and disappear on Spring 18. You can exchange Calico Eggs for useful goods from traders throughout the festival, some of which are rare enough that even advanced players will want to stop by.

How to Earn Calico Eggs

Trash Diving

Check the trash can by the trivia contest every day for up to 20 Calico Eggs. This is a decent early stake on the first day of the Festival.

The Scholar’s Trivia Contest

In the northeast corner, a guy in a robe offers you a series of 4 multiple-choice questions about various features of the game. To get an idea of just how fiddly these questions are, they can include Pierre’s weekly day off (Wednesday), how much a Duck costs if you buy one from Marnie (1200g), how many garbage cans are in Pelican Town (8), or what George’s last name is (Mullner).

If you get any question wrong, you’re done with the trivia challenge for the day. If you can get all 4 right, you receive 50 Calico Eggs. You can make one attempt a day to complete the quiz but can only get its reward once a year.

In my experience so far, the trivia questions for each year’s Desert Festival are set at the start of the event and don’t change from day to day. You could, if you really wanted to, brute-force the quiz by reloading your save from that in-game morning every time you got a question wrong.

Bet on Critter Races

Every few minutes during the festival, 3 of a possible 4 critters race around the event grounds. Between the races, you can bet on a winner with the guy on the carpet near the race’s finish line. If you guess correctly, you win 20 Eggs. This can be repeated as often as you like between 10 AM and 11 PM.

You can cheat in the critter races by talking to the shady guy on the bench left of the Oasis (below). For 1 Egg, he arranges for one of the 3 competitors to be visibly hamstrung going into the race, which guarantees they’ll get last place. That gives you a 50/50 shot at your prediction being correct, which lets you farm Eggs over the course of a day in relative safety. It's dull, though.

Willy’s Fishing Quests

Each day of the festival, you can accept a quest from the board next to Willy’s fishing hole. This does not require Willy himself to be there, so you can grab it before the festival opens.

These quests require you to fish something up from the nearby water, which is an almost entirely random process. If you complete one of Willy’s quests, you receive 30-40 Calico Eggs.

Explore Skull Cavern

Gil and Marlon from the Adventurers’ Guild have set up a booth next to the Skull Cavern’s entrance, and every day, they offer a choice between two quests. These can involve getting to a particular floor, collecting a set number of Omni Geodes, or defeating several monsters like Mummies. They all have a 1-day timer, however, so you’re usually better off with collection or combat quests.

During the Desert Festival, the Skull Cavern contains special stone blocks that yield 1-3 Calico Eggs if destroyed (below). It also has a couple of new mechanics that only apply during this event.

There’s a random chance on any floor of the Cavern that you may find special Calico Statues. When activated, these statues offer a random buff or debuff, such as a full Health/Energy restore, a damage multiplier for all monsters, or cutting the benefits from food in half.

The Statues play into an additional stat called your Egg Level. This goes up by 1 every time you activate a Calico Statue and with every 5th floor you reach. You can report to Gil after leaving the Cavern during the Festival to get a bonus based upon the highest Egg Level you’ve reached, which can include more Calico Eggs, Triple Shot Espresso, or Miner’s Treats.

If you get killed on a Skull Cavern run during the Desert Festival – and you might; the place is no joke, especially if you’ve been ignoring the Mines up until now – you awaken in Harvey’s medical tent at 10 HP and lose 2 Calico Eggs.

How to Spend Calico Eggs

The Villagers’ Pop-Up Shops

Every day during the festival, 2 random villagers from Pelican Town are selected to run the two booths on the south side of the map. They’ll offer an assortment of rare or unique items in exchange for Calico Eggs. This supersedes anything else the villager might be doing at the festival. For example, if Willy is chosen to run a booth, he won’t be at the fishing hole.

The villagers arrive around noon and are chosen at the start of each festival day; reloading your save does not result in a new set of villager traders.

At time of writing, there doesn’t appear to be a way to predict or affect which villagers are chosen to run the festival’s shops. Many of them have something interesting to offer, such as unique furniture or hard-to-find food, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to buy from them.

That being said, here are some Desert Festival deals to keep an eye out for:

• Demetrius sells up to 100 Deluxe Speed-Gro for 2 Eggs each.
• If you’ve unlocked Trinkets, you can buy Magic Hair Gel from Alex for 100 Eggs.
• You can buy a Tea Sapling from Caroline for 30 Eggs, if you haven't gotten the blueprint from her yet.
• Elliott sells up to 5 Squid Ink for 30 Eggs each. This is otherwise a little difficult to get.
• In the event you’ve somehow accumulated 500 Eggs, Emily will sell you one of the rarest items in the game: a Prismatic Shard.
• You can buy up to 5 Artifact Troves from George for 10 Eggs each.
• Gus offers the skull decoration from the Stardrop Saloon’s wall for 50 Eggs.
• In addition, Gus sells some useful stat-boosting food like Lobster Bisque and Squid Ink Ravioli.
• In the event Jas shows up, you can grab an Ancient Doll artifact from her for 1 Egg or a Magic Rock Candy for 300 Eggs.
• Leah sells up to 100 Hardwood for 3 Eggs each. This isn’t hard to get on your own, but it’s a slow grind, so this can help with a few other new things in Patch 1.6.
• Penny offers some unique interior design options like a Pirate Flag.
• Pierre will sell you Calico Eggs for 150g each, which goes a long way towards making some of these other options affordable. If he shows up on day 1 of the festival, buy all 200 of his Eggs on the spot for 30,000g. It's at least Year 2 by now. You've got the money.

The Egg Merchant

Starting at noon on every day of the Desert Festival, a new shadowy vendor is available to sell you stuff in exchange for Eggs. Particularly good deals from the festival include:

• Magic Rock Candy: 250 Eggs
• Mega Bomb: 15 Eggs
• Mystery Boxes (up to 10): 10 Eggs
• Lucky Lunch: 10 Eggs
• Woodcutter’s Weekly: 100 Eggs

The Traveling Cart, which you may recognize from the Night Market or weekends in the forest near your farm, also makes an appearance at the Desert Festival. The trader on the Cart sells his usual assortment of random stuff in exchange for gold.

What to Do Without Calico Eggs

Get An Extremely Untrustworthy Meal

One of the first things you see when you arrive at the festival is a food kiosk run by a weird dude. He’ll offer you a free meal that consists of 2 questionable ingredients.

This meal, as unappetizing as it may sound, always gives you a full Health/Energy restoration. You also receive 2 temporary buffs depending on the ingredients you chose.

Main Dish:

• Hearty Beans – Defense
• Cave Loaf – Mining
• Rare Fruit – Luck
• Extremely Sharp Cheddar – Attack
• Shrimp – Fishing

Sauce:

• Rich Marinara – Defense
• Mushroom Creme – Mining
• Cherry Syrup – Luck
• Pungent Garlic – Attack
• Uncomfortably Hot Sauce – Speed

This lets you specialize depending on what you plan to do at the festival that day. A Fishing/Luck buff is useful for Willy’s weirder daily quests, for example.

You can’t double-stack the same kind of buff with the Desert Festival meal. You simply aren’t given the option. For example, the chef won’t put Rich Marinara on your Hearty Beans. You do seem to be able to stack at least some buffs from other food with this, however, which might be a bug.

Emily’s Fashion Booth

Assuming Emily isn’t running a pop-up shop, as above, she and Sandy have set up a fashion consultancy on the north side of the road. Enter their tent and you’ll receive a new, random set of hats, shirt, and pants. These are permanent and can be removed, discarded, or stored as usual.

As with other random options at the festival, this appears to be determined at the start of each day, so you can’t reload your save to get a different outfit. I tried, and Emily gave me a Santa hat 3 attempts in a row. Apparently, the real fashion option this season is heatstroke.

Upon entering the fashion tent, your existing outfit is unequipped and placed in your inventory. If you have fewer than 3 free slots in your backpack, Emily won’t let you into the fashion booth.

Get a Free Cactus

Once a year, you can visit the booth on the south end of the festival map to receive a random Cactus decorative item for your home. If there’s more to it than that, we haven’t seen it yet, but hey, free Cactus.

The Teleport Guy

As with the Night Market, you can buy a teleport back to the Farm for 250g from the robed figure on the north end of the festival lot.

There’s a lot to do and see at the Desert Festival, and much of it is so random that we’re still combing through it. This is what we know for now, however, and we’ll update this and our other Stardew Valley guides as we continue to explore Patch 1.6.