How many animals do you have and how many should you have?

[zybourne]

I want every type of animal but don't know how many of each kind is a good balance of resources and profit.

4 cows, 4 goats, 2 sheep, and 2 pigs
4 chickens, 3 ducks, 3 rabbits, 1 dino, and 1 void chicken
5 fish ponds midnight squid, super cucumber, blobfish, lava eel, sturgeon

How many do you guys have and is this a good balance? Thinking about having more fish but don't know what kind I should get next.

[I Kinda Fail]

Off the top of my head...

- Cows and chickens are more money per day than goats and ducks. If you're just doing it for money, you may as well have more of those. If you don't mind losing a little profit for laziness, however, goats and ducks produce half as often for like 20% less profit I think.

- I've personally never seen any point in sheep or rabbits unless you just want them. Cloth is easy enough to get in small companies from other methods. I think I had ~25 by Summer Y2 without ever owning sheep or rabbits. So again, I believe cows and chickens are more profitable. It's just if you want them for looks or whatever.

- Pigs MUST be let outside to be profitable, and are useless during rain or snow. For this reason, some people will consider having a 2nd barn full of pigs with a gated off area to reduce the spread of hidden truffles. I THINK pigs are the most profitable barn animal... or you can use their oil to create rainy day totems, at the cost of them not producing that day.

- Ducks are adorable, but their feathers are unfortunately worth a good chunk less than mayo, to the point that getting their feathers is actually a bad thing if you're focused on money... Duck mayo's worth 525, and their feather prices range from 250-500... so best case scenario, you only lose 25g, worst case you lose 275g because RNG gave a feather instead of an egg. Feathers were made more common in this update too, for some reason, which seems like a nerf to ducks overall... In addition to this, only 3 people like/love their feather. So I really have no idea why they made feathers more common.

- Dinos are horrible money, so definitely just keep 1 if you want it. Worst animal in the game.

- As for the fish ponds... If you add a flounder pond, you can make Seafoam Pudding. I figure you might know this, since you said you have ponds for the other 2 ingredients, midnight squid and midnight carp.

- Finally... There's another animal in the game you didn't mention, but it's new to 1.5. So spoiler tag just in case. You can get ostriches for your barn. They're unlocked fairly late game. They lay 1 egg per week, like dinosaurs, but their mayo is determined by the quality of the egg. So if you get a silver star ostrich egg, you'll get 10 silver star mayonnaise.

So... in short, I'd go for like...
Coop: 1 dinosaur, 3 void chickens, 2 rabbits, 4 chickens, 2 ducks.
Barn: 6 cows, 2 of everything else.

[Stardustfire]

1x each brown/white cow, 2 sheep, 2 goats, 4 pigs (before 1.5 it was six) and 2 oastards.
1x each blue/brown/white/black chicken, 2 rabbits, 1 dino, 2 ducks (before 1.5 the complete rest ducks) and the rest golden chickens.
thats how i balance my animals.

for fishes i do one stugeon, 1 lava eel, 1 blobfish, also in my actual farm midnight squid (normaly instead an octupus) and under construction 2 flunder and 2 shadowfish ponds for multiplying them so i can make the best fishing stew.

fishponds can give some nice harvests, but its only a "can" mosttimes. so its mostly only an add.

[BCD]

I usually wind up with a setup dictated by convenience the order in which I unlock them. As for an optimal collection...
Let's start with the fish pond. I had midnight squid once, all it gave me was cheap ink. Maybe it has the chance to give something amazing (like how the rainbow trout allegedly gives prismatic shards), but you're not gonna get much money out of it. Money is gonna be my criterium for good animals. Doesn't have to be, but we need something and you're mostly looking into selling their produce.
I actually kinda hate the sturgeon for the fish pond, cause caviar takes considerably longer to produce than regular roe. It's better than fish with low financial value, but at some point in the money ladder the time makes it worse than other options, and at a later point (specifically blobfish/icepip) caviar actually sells for less than what'd you be getting, on top of taking longer to produce. The most profitable pond fish is the lava eel, blobfish and icepip tie for second place.
Another animal I don't like so much is the goat. Unless you're ageing goat milk in the cellar, the cow is more profitable. Let's see the numbers.
Goat produces enough milk for one goat cheese worth a base of 400g every two days. Cow produces enough milk for one regular cheese worth 230g every day. Cow produces 460 every two days, goat produces 400. Not a big difference, but still a difference. Goat's also more expensive.
Duck's in the same boat as the goat except you can't age mayo and also it can give a product you'll sell for less (duck feather). Ducks bad. Next.
I think chickens are the best coop animal. Let's compare!
1 chicken produces 1 mayo every day, which sells for 190. Void chicken produces 1 void mayo every day, which sells for 275. HOWEVER, void mayo is only ever regular quality. After you get enough hearts with your chickens, you'll always get large eggs that produce gold quality mayo, multiplying the product's price by 1.5 and resulting in a slightly better 285. Void chicken okay, but chicken better.
Dino lays 1 egg every week. Dino mayo sells for a base of 800. In that time a chicken laying large eggs every day will produce 1995g. Dino very bad, chicken stomp.
Let's see rabbits! Rabbits produce 1 wool every 4 days, which you can turn into cloth and sell for 470. Cloth is always regular quality, and your trusty high friendship chicken would have made 1140g in this time. The rabbit could almost catch up with iridium quality rabbit's foot worth 1130g (more if you chose rancher but no one does), but not quite, and it wouldn't always be rabbit's foot and it wouldn't always be iridium. While noting that rabbit's feet are gifts loved by everyone but Penny and that you might want cloth for the mill or making new clothes, chicken wins the money game.
What about sheep, how do they compare to the cows? Sheep produce wool faster than rabbits (3 days instead of 4), which is further reduced to 2 days after you get high friendship and 1 if you decided to take the sheperd perk for a funny joke. A sheep producing 470g cloth every day is fantastic, every 2 days makes 10g over the cow and and every 3 days is worse. Actually, taking into account that you'll regularly get gold quality cheese and not picking artisan turns your save into a challenge run, it's just worse. Cow wins... But it's not the best barn animal.
It's time for the big guns: the pig.
The pig is (by the greedy JoJa standard set earlier) the best animal. I could stop here, it's the pig and pig is best. I'll briefly show why though, just in case.
Provided the mighty pig leaves its barn (won't happen in rain or winter), it will produce truffles. The number of truffles it finds varies, but your odds for getting more are increased with friendship. The wiki tells me the percentage chance for this to happen is (animal friendship)/1500. Max friendship is 1000, so 2/3 or 66%. This is a check applied every time it finds a truffle until it fails, so you could get a lot of truffles in theory, but it apparently averages out to it passing 2 times after it finds the (guaranteed) first truffle and giving you a total of 3 truffles. With that in mind, let's do the pig a huge disservice and assume it never finds more than one truffle every day, cause the nerf won't make it not the best animal it'll keep things consistent.
One truffle can be turned into truffle oil, which sells for a base of 1065g, more than 4 times what you'd get from regular quality cheese. You can even just sell the truffle and not bother with the oil maker if you take the level 10 gatherer perk from foraging, which will result in exclusively iridium quality truffles selling for 1250 (more than the oil, but the oil gets boosted by artisan up to 1491 and gets better).
Conclusion: the ideal animal setup is 20 barns full of pigs. If you're not a JoJa capitalist, however, you can decide what is best based on whatever criteria you want. Maybe you wanna do a challenge run with sheperd or something.
Note: I never got an ostrich and don't really know how they work. Maybe they've been blessed by God and somehow surpass the greatness of the pig.

[biochimera]

The fish are terrible. I used to keep fish ponds for all the dungeon fish and sturgeon as they had the most expensive roe and thus most expensive aged roe/caviar, but the return is garbage so nowadays I only use sturgeon to get the caviar for the theatre. For animals the pigs are going to win. Truffle oil, especially if you have artisan, sells for an amazing amount. Forager with the chance for 2 each pick up and iridium level perks gives you a lot of iridium truffles, which are also very high value, though not as much as artisan truffle oil.

[Nakos]

The point is, there's lots of ways to run a farm in SDV. Which ... frankly ... is pretty much like real life. Every farm is different. Mind you, I'm speaking of the old fashioned "family farm" as opposed to the more modern corporate farms which dominate the industry these days.

But ... regardless, have as many animals as you like. Or as few.

Personally, I find animals to be labor intensive and low on returns, so I have a few (to complete the community center) but I'd really rather just be farming.

If I was farming in real life ... I'd probably have a chicken coop, but I don't think I'd do pigs, cows, goats or sheep.

[o o o elle o]

I have one barn full of pigs and a cow or two. Pigs = $$$ from truffle oil and cows give milk for recipes :)
As for coop I was lucky enough to find a dinosaur egg as an artifact early on in my most recent playthrough so it's mostly dinosaurs with one void chicken and two blue chickens, again for eggs.
For fish ponds, I started with sturgeon, lava eel, and rainbow trout (Hoping rainbow trout would produce prismatic shard for me but to avail..). So now I have four lava eel ponds. They are really handy for easy money if you have preserves jars AND they level up your fishing skill.

[Pixel Peeper]

In most of my playthroughs, I have zero.

They're usually not worth the trouble.

[Včelí medvídek]

Your numbers are okish for balanced game where you want explore game fully, compelte all bundles etc.

it does not matter if it is 1000% optimal or not, more sooner than later you do not need extra profit anyway so no reaosn to worry about it if some bring few hudnerds gold extra or not.

Just do what bring you joy and have fun with.

[BCD]

Originally posted by Tripoteur Ventripotent:

In most of my playthroughs, I have zero.

They're usually not worth the trouble.

I've been hearing that animals are labor-intensive, I don't get it so I'm just gonna ask: why? What trouble do they give you? My routine re animals is run around the barn/coop with the right mouse button pressed, picking up the produce, putting them all in my machines all at once (I build enough to do that), then leaving and letting them out. All I need to do then is come back at the end of the day to close the door and picking up the goods. Milking and shearing is a little bit of trouble, but otherwise it doesn't even cost energy and it takes very little time.

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by BCD:

I've been hearing that animals are labor-intensive, I don't get it so I'm just gonna ask: why? What trouble do they give you?

It's a lot of things, really. Clearing space for buildings, having buildings made and waiting for them to be complete, collecting hay and restarting grass in Spring, buying and placing machines, buying animals individually and having to pet them every day for a long time before they start producing quality, collecting their products and processing them and re-collecting them every day...

It's a huge upfront investment that requires a long time and everyday work to be grown, and doesn't even pay that much when it does... despite still requiring work forever. Pigs aren't that bad, but still, they don't produce year-round.

For short-term profit there is Fishing and Mining, and for long-term hands-off profit there is Ancient Fruit Wine.

I just don't see the interest in raising animals. It's simply... inferior. You can do it for fun if you genuinely like it, but for those who don't, there's no reason. Too much work for too little payoff.

[BCD]

Can't deny the upfront cost.
I like animals as a parallel source of income. They're not as good as crops, but after you build their stuff they don't require much attention so you can focus on something else while keeping that source of daily income.

[Uncoelacanth]

Originally posted by I Kinda Fail:

Off the top of my head...

- Cows and chickens are more money per day than goats and ducks. If you're just doing it for money, you may as well have more of those. If you don't mind losing a little profit for laziness, however, goats and ducks produce half as often for like 20% less profit I think.

- I've personally never seen any point in sheep or rabbits unless you just want them. Cloth is easy enough to get in small companies from other methods. I think I had ~25 by Summer Y2 without ever owning sheep or rabbits. So again, I believe cows and chickens are more profitable. It's just if you want them for looks or whatever.

So... in short, I'd go for like...
Coop: 1 dinosaur, 3 void chickens, 2 rabbits, 4 chickens, 2 ducks.
Barn: 6 cows, 2 of everything else.

You'll probably need a couple Rabbits' Feet at various points during the game, (Which Stardew rabbits apparently shed regularly,) so that's a reason to have a couple on hand. On the other hand, there are a few other ways to obtain Rabbit's Feet, so perhaps that's not much of an incentive.

Personally, I'm basically endgame at this point, so I'm in the process of replacing most of my chickens with Golden Chickens for 3x the mayo per day I have no idea how Marnie thinks she can sell them for so much, though. Nobody's willing to buy them off me for that kind of money.

[I Kinda Fail]

Originally posted by Uncoelacanth:

Originally posted by I Kinda Fail:

- I've personally never seen any point in sheep or rabbits unless you just want them. Cloth is easy enough to get in small companies from other methods. I think I had ~25 by Summer Y2 without ever owning sheep or rabbits. So again, I believe cows and chickens are more profitable. It's just if you want them for looks or whatever.

You'll probably need a couple Rabbits' Feet at various points during the game, (Which Stardew rabbits apparently shed regularly,) so that's a reason to have a couple on hand. On the other hand, there are a few other ways to obtain Rabbit's Feet, so perhaps that's not much of an incentive.

I can only think of needing 2? But one of the main alternate sources for cloth in the game is the same place you can get rabbit's feet without owning rabbits. Mummies drop cloth pretty commonly, and serpents in the Skull Caverns have a rare chance to drop rabbit's feet. Grinding them, especially with Monster Musk, makes it not too bad if you only need 1 or 2...

[Nakos]

I think technically the Night Market counts as the third source (although it is just 3 extra visits by the traveling cart.

[zybourne]

I don't really need maximum profit, it's silly to have a farm of only pigs and void chickens. I think it's cooler to have a diverse farm with all types of produce. Realistically the demand for truffles and ancient wine and stuff would plummet once everyone in Pelican gets sick of having wine and jam on truffles for every meal. Talking about grinding but with just one type of animal you don't have to grind for cloth or rabbit footsies.

With a good balance I could make regular cheese while waiting for goat milk or I could make normal mayonnaise while waiting for dino eggs and duck eggs. A more interesting system imo than only ever expecting one type of produce.