What's the real difference between the different farms at the beginning?

[MediocrePigeon]

^

[Inny【🐭】Nazrin]

https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Farm_Maps

[Spartan_Warrior]

one has a lake/river you can fish in one spawns monsters and looks like a standard farm theres the standard farm one has more forestry and less places to plant crops and the other has more rocks and less trees and less places to plant crops

[Thor]

One is 90% better than the rest, the other is the basic starter farm.

[MediocrePigeon]

Originally posted by Thor:

One is 90% better than the rest, the other is the basic starter farm.

And that means...?

[npcsnake]

i think he means the basic farm is the best?

[Seraphita]

Clearly not... They all have their advantage except basic, which is a big boring platform...

[Ranzuko]

I played two years on the forest farm and two years on the haunted.

Forest farm makes hardwood so easy.
Haunted scales with the player, so you do end up with battery and iridium ore drops from mobs on your farm etc.

I imagine the normal plain farm works out the best in endgame. Ton of space to get the crops planted, sprinklered and collected.

[Jigain]

I mean, it says right on the character creation screen what each farm is for. Each cater to a skill.

Standard = farming.
Forest = foraging.
Riverland = fishing.
Hilltop = mining.
Wilderness = combat.

You will find it easier to level up the skill of your choice by choosing the appropriate farm.

Beyond that, Inny linked to a wiki page that has literally all the differences between the maps including pictures of the layouts. Can't really answer the question more than that.

[Soren]

The basic farm is definitely the most safe bet out there. The other layouts just take away too much tile space for benefits that quickly grow obsolete. Only other layout worth talking about is the combat one. And that comes with it's own annoyances.

[Seraphita]

People would easily argue that combat map is the most useless. I used forest which supposedly have the less farming space and I still became rich and was comfortable without even using all the tiles of the map. When I was using the basic map, I was barely using half of it. So yeah. :D

[Soren]

The combat layout has a unique enemy that spawns there that drops diamond, prism shards, and other goodies very rarely. The map also makes iridium a little more common. I beleieve it also compromises the least amount of tiles for it. I could be wrong on that last bit though.

Combat is also the hardest skill to lvl. It isn't nearly as spammable as any of the others.

[Seraphita]

Mhm, this much I do agree. Most feedback I heard about combat was that it was useless, though. Especially since you can turn off combat later then it turns the map into a broken basic map...

I personally never had troubles training combat even faster than anything else but I understand how combat map could be faster for it. Still, I ain't touching a basic map ever again with the new maps. It just doesn't feel right to go flat mode when all of these cool maps exist for the scenery.

[Ɲøƈ]

I like the river map for aesthetics. You don't really NEED that much space to get rich, and the rivers work as nice barriers to separate your animals form everything else without so much fence.

[Inny【🐭】Nazrin]

Originally posted by Inoc:

I like the river map for aesthetics. You don't really NEED that much space to get rich, and the rivers work as nice barriers to separate your animals form everything else without so much fence.

I like the Hill Top map for similar reasons. Also having Iridium nodes potentially spawn on your farm (at mining level 10) is pretty neat.

The river running through it provides the same bonus as the fishing map too.

[Seraphita]

Hmm. Interesting. Maps also get better with skill level from what I keep hearing. This is great...