Stardew Valley New Farm Type Guide - Welcome to Meadowlands

Patch 1.6 of Stardew Valley came with a brand-new map, the Meadowland. This starts you off with a free Coop and two chickens, but gives you significantly less open farmland. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind for your new life at a Meadowlands Farm.

Welcome to Meadowlands Farm in Stardew Valley

Meadowlands Farm isn’t any more difficult than other maps, but like a lot of the post-launch farm options in Stardew Valley, it’s set up to enable a specific style of gameplay. If the Riverland Farm is for fishing fans and the Hill-top Farm is to make mining easier, Meadowlands is for players who want to skip straight to the part of the game where you make friends with a chicken.

This new farm has a big belt of greenery that cuts across the north side of the map from west to east. This encompasses the area between the farmhouse and Greenhouse. On this land, you can’t plant anything besides Grass Starter or oak, maple, and pine trees. (Fruit trees can’t grow on the green belt. Don’t do what I did and waste an Apple Sapling on it.)

While there’s enough tillable land directly south of the farmhouse for you to make a small garden, it’s a bit of a hike between the farmhouse and any of the available water sources on the Meadowlands map. This can really cut into your workday, since you have to take regular trips to refill your Watering Can. When you’re establishing your initial farmland, either build a Well near your farmhouse or clear the tillable land around the big pond in the central-south part of the map.

There’s also a river alongside the west to northwest side of the Meadowlands, which forks and runs behind the Greenhouse. If you fish here, you usually get trash like Broken CDs, but there’s a chance you’ll catch river fish like Pikes. Usually, bodies of water on your farm only have trash unless you chose the Riverland map, so this is a helpful additional bonus on Meadowlands.

Other notes about the Meadowland Farms map:

• You begin the game with a Dresser in your farmhouse. Since there are a lot more random sources of clothing items in Patch 1.6, this is helpful for sorting through it all.
• The Warp Totem arrival point on the Meadowlands Farm is on the north side of the map behind your farmhouse. If you can’t spot it, there’s a good chance it’s hidden by random trees.
• You still have a cave on Meadowlands, but it’s on the southeast corner of the map. When Demetrius helps you turn it into a mushroom or fruit spawning point, it'll be there.
• Grandpa's Shrine is on the north side of the map, across the river and northwest from the Greenhouse. The area it's in starts off heavily overgrown and only gets more so as the seasons progress.

Just Chicken Things

As noted above, you start a new game on the Meadowlands Farm with a Coop, a fenced-off area in front of it, and 2 chickens with randomized names.

Your chickens are babies at the start of a new game. If you check in with them every day to build their friendship, they’ll grow up and be capable of laying eggs by week 2.

This is part of what’s changed Stardew players’ relationship with Mayonnaise since patch 1.6 dropped. The Mayonnaise Machine blueprints are unlocked when you reach Farming level 2, which is easy, and it only requires Wood, Stone, an Earth Crystal, and 1 Copper Bar. With a little luck, one trip into the Mines can get you everything you need to build a Mayonnaise Machine, so you can be mass-producing the stuff within the first couple of weeks of a new game on Meadowlands.

Mayonnaise is worth a base price of 190g, which scales with its quality level. Since you’ll always have at least 2 fresh Eggs every day, this is a nice boost to your income at the start of a new game.

More importantly, Patch 1.6 made Mayonnaise an edible item, so you can slug a jar back to restore a base of 50 Energy/22 Health. This is a big bonus when you’re exploring the Mines on your first Spring, as long as you can handle the corresponding hit to your self-esteem.

The Meadowlands also features unique blue grass that grows randomly around the map. If animals eat this grass, it doubles the rate at which they gain Friendship for the day. That, in turn, leads to speedier unlocks for other animals like ducks.

As you expand your farm and get more animals, be sure to open the fencing so your new cows/goats/pigs can get at more patches of blue grass. You can simply break out chunks of the fence with your Axe to adjust its layout.

Having access to animals this early does force you to keep an eye on your Hay supply, especially in Winter or on rainy days, but this is easy to automate. You start with 15 Hay instead of Parsnip Seeds, and it’s a good idea to build a Silo as soon as you can. Once you do that, you can clear grass with your Scythe to automatically deposit more Hay in the Silo.

That’s some of what you’ll want to know about the Meadowlands map before you start one. It’s a challenge, but primarily because it messes with long-time players’ muscle memory in a few specific ways. If you’re coming back for a new Stardew Valley run after Patch 1.6, check it out.