How to do well your first year in Staxel

Overview

This guide will get you profiting over 100,000 petals in your first year of farming in Staxel and help you complete quests with little trouble.

Welcome

Thanks for checking out this guide. I hope it helps you make your Staxel dreams come true!

Starting Out – Utilize Your First Day

I’m sure you’re very excited to go around and go through the tutorial but I’m going to stop you there. The tutorial is great up to a certain point as you get free stuff but don’t let that first day go to waste.

• Go through the tutorial up to the point where you are told to use the magical water on the plant to instantly grow it. Stop and don’t grow the plant (or more specifically don’t talk to Farm Fan if you do) until you’ve accomplished a few things.

  You see, time is frozen at noon until you finish that quest. So you’ve got the hammer, you’ve got 100 petals and you’ve got a broken farm.

• Take the hammer and use it on the doghouse and bowl to pick it up. This way you won’t have to feed your pet until you’ve got enough coming in that you don’t care about loosing ~800 – 1600 petals a season on food.
• Next, go to the general store (the blue one) and buy the bug catching net. Go around and catch all the bugs that you can find and sell all of them except the Bee Queens and Workers (as well as 2 rhinoceros beetles which you need for buildng a dock later). You can make a lot of money your first day as you’ve got infnite time to catch all the bugs on the island if you wish. It also gives you a chance to explore your surroundings. Besides catching bugs there are shells that are on the beach that you can collect and sell too.
• After you’re satisfied that you’ve caught all the bugs and sold them (especially the monarch butterflies which go for ~120 a piece) it’s time to go and get supplies for later. Take your hammer and collect all the blocks from the 2-3 abandoned buildings in the woods and store them on your bookshelf on the farm. You’ll want the shingles and wood for rebuilding your barn in a quest later.
• Then return to the town and buy the catalog and shipping station (5000 petals total) from the general store with all the petals you’ve earned from the bug catching. Place them at your farm where you’d like but now you don’t have to worry about getting them later and it’ll be helpful for bulk selling as you grow (I actually recommend that you use the sell boxes in town as it’s instant and you can buy stuff that day then, especially if it needs to be shipped).
• While you’re at the store, be sure to pick up ~50 potato or sweet potato seeds and a pickaxe, shovel, axe and scythe (you will be given an axe for free later but it’s wiser to buy one now so you can remove the trees and logs). Return to your farm and clean up the whold landscape of grass, flowers, rocks, ect. You’ll need to use the pickaxe to remove all of the stone to flatten and create more dirt space on the farm. I would suggest removing the pond and trees as well (shovel removes pond blocks and axe for trees). Go and shovel up some dirt from somewhere else and flatten your farm out.
• Once you’ve done that, use your hoe to till ~50 plots for your seed and water them and plant your potatoes (P.S. if you have a few left over petals, go buy some cucumber because you can get multiple harvest from them up until autumn every 3 days).
• Now rebuild your barn early to take advantage of your paused time. It doesn’t need to be huge, you can just use the wood and shingles you got from the abandoned buildings and fix up the colapsed building in the back of the farm. You will have a quest later on to rebuild it but if you do it now, all you’ll need is the troughs to finish it (which you make in the quest). Also don’t worry about the floor, you can put one in later (heck, you don’t even need to keep it inside the fence around your farm if you want the space, just take the materials and build it just outside the fence). Once you’ve completed that you’re almost done with your first “day.”

Now you have a choice of just messing around and rebuilding your house as best you can but you really can’t earn much more money today as you can only have stuff shipped over night and you can’t buy the fishing rod yet.

When you’re done, talk to Farm Fan and finish her quest to have time start to move and finish the tutorial. The tutorial will bring you to the construction shop which will want you to rebuild your barn (which you’ve done) and will offer you an axe (but since you’ve got one already, you don’t get a second) You’ll make the two troughs and put them in the barn with a sign to finish the quest. The mayor will give you two cows in a box, but don’t place them right now because the food cost.

Your Second Day and Spring

Starting out, you’re primary focus in this time is just building up your money quickly every day.

• To start, you’ve already got crops in the ground so you need to water them. If you don’t, you’ll lose them and this is all for naught.
• When you’re done watering, go collect bugs and sell them. Save yourself 100 worker bees and 10 queen bees (which you’ve probably got a good start on from your first day). You don’t actually need the 100 workers but if you happen to collect them, good on you.
• You’ll want 10 apiaries with the money you earn from the bug selling. If you have some extra cash after you’ve collected the ten apiaries, buy cucumber seed and sunflower seed (cucumber will grow all through the spring and summer with collection every 3 days and sunflower sell for ~120 a piece and have about a 50% chance to give you seed on harvest.
• Put your queens and workers in the apiaries when you get each one. I like to wait to harvest honey until all ten are ready because then you see ~2300 petals every 3 days. If you want to expand on the apiaries in the future, go for it but once you have 10, stop buying more until fall.
• Your potatoes should be ready for harvest around your 5th day. Take the money and reinvest into potato seed. You should be able to get ~100 – 200 potato seed.
• REMINDER, keep catching/selling bugs all through the spring when you’re done watering and planting and buying apiaries.
• Once your crop of 100 – 200 potato seeds are done, havest and go for 200 – 400. These might be done by the end of spring in which case, use the money to buy 400 – 500 seeds.
• You should have extra money after all of this, which if you want, use for apiaries, bushes or trees (apiaries are the best choice, but buy the others if you want to get into cooking).

Summer

Summer is pretty similar to the end of Spring. You probably have cucumbers growing every three days and have 300 – 600 potatoes in the gound.

What you do is pretty simple.

• Harvest your potatoes and reinvest into your seed, you should have thousands extra every time.
• What to do with the extra petals? Once you have enough to buy the same amount of oat seeds as you have your potatoes (400 – 600), buy them and set them aside for Autumn. They cost more than the potato seeds but trust me, it’s worth it.
• If you’ve discovered the strange butterfly, place him on the ground and he’ll turn into an npc magically. He’s interested in you building a museum! Also if you talk to Maximus, the mayor, he’ll likely offer you a quest to build a new resident’s house. Or, if you’re tired of not having much space, you could take some of that extra cash and expand your home, build a better barn and/or build a shop/garage/storage house to just put storage shelves in as well as all your tools for making blocks.

All of these things should keep you busy until Autumn.

House expansion!

Autumn, Winter and Setting Up for Your Second Year

Here’s the big part, everything you’ve been waiting for, Autumn! In this season, you should be able to make 100,000 petals on the low end, possibly up to 300,000 or more (profit) this season.

Here we go:

• Now you should be somewhere in your potato growth cycle. Grow them to maturity and harvest. Once you have, get those dusty oat seeds off the shelf and completely replace all you’re potatoes with oats.
  
• Follow the same steps as with the potatoes (grow, harvest, reinvest) and you should still profit a good few tens of thousands each harvest.
• This will set you up to grow your apiaries which should still be giving you ~2300 every three days. If you wish to expand them, now’s the time. I’ve heard 20 – 30 gives ~7000 petals every 3 days.
• If you do grow your apiaries, be sure to buy some winter seeds so you have some crops during the winter, but the better investment would be to first buy sweet potato seed to fill you’re field in the spring. After the sweet potato, then buy your winter seed, because there isn’t much that’s very profitable in the winter.
• When buying winter seed, get sugar beet seed and expand your field if you choose. You can expand the field on the right like I have in my picture below. I’ve done 15 wide and gone all along the length of the right side fence to allow for 1000 crops at a time. Sugar beets during Winter will allow you to have 4 harvests and at 1000 crops per harvest, you’ll make ~50,000 – 100,000 petals each harvest. Your seed cost is close to half so by the end of Winter you’ll earn about 200,000 petals with 1000 plot field.

Also there’s the only current festivals in the game during Autumn and Winter should you want to relax. But with what you’ve got now, you should be able to do what ever you want and definitely be able to support livestock during your second year should you wish. Also, during winter you can place your pet and begin to build the town while you wait for a profitable spring!

The picture is from the first year, if you look at the petals you can see that before the end of Autumn, I’ve earned 100,000 petals. I’m in winter right now, making mistakes (missing waterings, not being completely efficient, lollygaging), and I’ve got a regular 90,000 petals in my account with it topping out around 150,000 during harvests (and I haven’t been maximizing my honey production either).

Alteratives

Because this is a very basic way to do things (the main thing is that first day to get set up), there are a few alternatives to what is used, which could be used during the second year or the first if you have the petals.

An alternative for the oats:

• Sugar cane (seed is twice as much but sells for a lot more too, but has only 2 harvests instead of 3 per season)

Alternatives for Potatoes:

• Sweet Potatoes (Spring only, but sell for a decent bit more, however only get 2 harvests instead of 3 per season)
• Beetroot (Sells for a bit less than potatoes but you could buy more for the same price)
• Lettuce (Seed is almost twice as much and only get two harvests per season, but sells for about twice as much)

Alternative for Sunflower:

• Onion (seeds sell for a little more but you can get 4 harvests per season instead of 2, both grow year round. Big difference is sunflowers can produce free seeds on harvest)

Final Thoughts

Once you’ve used this guide to get you started in your first year, you can really play around a bit more.

There are crops more profitable than the ones I mention in here, but the idea of this guide is high turnover crops, that you can try to get as much in per season (with exception of the sunflowers, just switch out with onions, comes out a little less but close). I farm in real life and that’s what I do to get the most profit per year I can.

I hope this helps you in your Staxel journey! Good farming.