Artifacts Dilemma

[Coinflipper]

Hello fellow Stardew Valley Junkies,

First off:
This game is amazing. I've had alot of fun exploring every corner of this beautifully crafted gem. I've spend over 100 hours on this game. The start felt slow and the work felt hard, but it always seemed to pay off and progress was always in sight.

Until... I had to complete the museum's artifact collection.

This game is about farming and progressing. You build up your farm and you take care of it, regularly. You invest in your farm and make it bigger, better and more efficient. Obviously, this takes time, but the more time you spend, the more you and your farm progress.

When it comes to the completion of your artifact collection though, this is not the case.
While you might have the option to optimize your grind for the specific arifacts you're still missing, actually filling the gaps still comes down to luck. The time you spend during your quest to find all the artifacts might not translate into progression at all.
This feels horrible.

Let me elaborate.

In my case, I am still missing 2 artifacts: The Bone Flute and the Skeletal Hand.
To optimize my search, I've consulted many different sources.

Bone Flute allegedly has the following drop chance:

Tilling in the mines/ skull cavern 2%
Cindersap Forest Atrifact Spot 1%
The Mountain Artifact Spot 1%
Pelican Town Artifact Spot 0,5%
Fishing Treasure Chest 0,018%

I've been tilling Artifact Spots on all of these locations for 1 ingame year, while using the following strategy:
1) start the day
2) visit all three locations and use hoe on every artifact spot found
3) if no artifact spot dropped what i needed, reload the save and restart the day
4) do whatever and end the day without touching any of the artifact spots.

Each day an artifact spot's drop is predetermined. This means that every time you restart your day, the same item will be dropped. If you don't dig up an artifact spot, however, it has a chance to still be there the following day. That day, its drop will be rerolled and you can look again. If it still does not contain what you want, you reload the day and leave it alone. You then try your luck the next day and rinse and repeat. If it happens to despawn, it doesn't really matter, because it didn't containt anything you would've needed anyway.
This way, you don't despawn artifact spots by digging them up for nothing. Instead you maximize your chance of finding what you need by leaving them up.


I went fishing, too. I used Treasure Bobbers and Magnets as well as Food Buffs with +3 to Fishing Skill, which was already maxed out. I only fished on days with max luck (The spirits are very happy today!).
All of that only to enhance my chances of finding treasure chests while fishing.
I've literally found every artifact that can allegedly be found in Fishing Treasure Chests over 8 times each and most of them have the exact same drop rate as the Bone Flute. I've lost count of how many Iridium Bands etc I've had in Treasure Chests.
But no Bone Flute in Sight.

One of the problems is, that I don't even know if I can attribute this to bad luck. Since some sources in the internet contradict each other, I can't say for sure whether my strategy is actually good or not. Maybe the indications are wrong and the Bone Flute can't even drop from Fishing Treasure Chests? Or they once could, but not anymore due to some patch?
The same applies to the mines/ skull caverns. I've found all the artifacts so many times, but not a single time did i dig up a Bone Flute.
Maybe it can't be found in the mines?

The game itself does not provide ANY hint or help in this regard. Finding artifacts does not only come down to the mercy of our good old friend RNGesus, but actually knowing where to start trying your luck is never guaranteed. You have to consult external sources which in turn will never give you 100% certainty.
When you've completed everything you can possibly do in this game and your progress gets capped by something like this, it just makes you feel bad.
If the developers decide to leave the artifact drop matter to RNG, then adding some kind of "artifact drop location guide" ingame might be an idea worth exploring. Even if it is an item you end up paying 1 million gold for, it will at least provide the information needed for a potentially successful expedition!

Let us know what you think.


tl;dr
Looking for artifacts doesn't feel good. You can spend many hours without making any progress at all due to bad rng or insufficient information.
The game does not provide any help, tips or hints on the drop locations and the player is simply left in the dark for no apparent reason.

[Shakuras]

Originally posted by Coinflipper:

This game is amazing. I've had alot of fun exploring every corner of this beautifully crafted gem. I've spend over 100 hours on this game. The start felt slow and the work felt hard, but it always seemed to pay off and progress was always in sight.

Until... I had to complete the museum's artifact collection.

This game is about farming and progressing. You build up your farm and you take care of it, regularly. You invest in your farm and make it bigger, better and more efficient. Obviously, this takes time, but the more time you spend, the more you and your farm progress.

When it comes to the completion of your artifact collection though, this is not the case.
While you might have the option to optimize your grind for the specific arifacts you're still missing, actually filling the gaps still comes down to luck. The time you spend during your quest to find all the artifacts might not translate into progression at all.
This feels horrible

getting close to the 200 hours mark and that pretty much how I feel about Stardew now.
Why they made the artifact system a crappy 100% random mess the player has no control over is beyond me.

[carl8000]

The result of hoeing a worm is set at the beginning of a day, and it resets each day. So what you can do is go to the places that will produce the artifacts you need, hoe all the worms, and if you don't get what you need reload the day and leave the worms alone, and try again the next day.

I always do this in the winter (since there are more worms), and I always end up with all the artifacts before the end of year 2 (in the 3 times that I've tried at least). It's still a bit of a grind, and since it's a kind of save scumming it might violate your principles, but it's not too bad.

Edit: I didn't actually read your super long post the first time around, looks like this is what you're already doing, nevermind