The 'math' behind casks

[Its All Zen]

Alright folks so I sat down and started doing a little figuring and you probably won't believe these numbers but if you want to make money on aging things in your cellar it's looking like you'd better stock up on Goats. Goats make milk roughly 14 times a season, doing some easy math say you have 2 DB worth of goats=24. 24*14=336 cheese. Let's assume high happiness/affection and say you're getting at half large milk. This is currently the ONLY way to get a gold star artisan product for the casks yes? Which means to turn it into iridium cheese you need 7 days. So 168 cheese at 7 days to double the value (I'm taking the base value since all other artisan products require you to start from base value). and 168 cheese at the full 14 days means you get 352,800 in 14 days and half that after only 7. This means in a single season you are making over 700,000 just off casks of cheese. This also means you aren't using your kegs to turn ancient fruit into wine to turn into aged wine (taking a full 56 days for iridium). So you can continue your pale ale factories making that much more-for most people at least doubling their income once you add in goat cheese+pale ale. So let's say for a single season you're only making 700,000 off your kegs as well. That's 1.4m within a season off cheese and pale ale.

Let's break down ancient fruit. Assuming a greenhouse filled to the brim with Ancient Fruit that's 116 fruits assuming you are using the correct setup with sprinklers. So every 7 days you have 116 fruits which take 7 days to turn into wine making a constant cycle. This is standard level wine and it takes 14+14+28 to turn into iridium wine. So now we have 7+7+14+14+28. This is 70 days. 116x4620 for iridium wine = 535,920 after 70 days. Or 2.5 seasons. Meaning you averaged out 214,368 per season and you no longer have a pale ale or ancient fruit wine factory to add to your income. This means if you're making ancient fruit iridium wine you're doing it wrong.

Now ready to get mind blown? Let's assume 3 seasons with 2 DB full of pigs at 20 days of sunny weather... no you know what I'll give you a perfect season with 28 days of sunny weather. With 24 pigs assuming 850 for truffle oil and that you don't miss a single truffle all season and you have perfect weather the whole season you can make 571,200 off truffles. This is already less than the 700,000 you're making off the cheese and you're losing a season with the pigs. BUT WAIT. Remember when I said gold cheese only takes 7 days? This means that half of your 700,000 cheese factory is done in half the time... so that 168 cheese means that within the time it took you to make all of those iridium in 7 days you should have likely gotten even more cheese to put back in your casks. If you have just enough casks to last you the full season this isn't an issue... but this means that you can actually make fewer casks for the same amount of product lowering your material cost that much more!

If there is a flaw in my math I'm all for somebody pointing it out but it's looking like I'm going to be ignoring pigs and keg farms in favor of goats. In layman terms this simply means that the cash-per-day is actually higher still running kegs and selling wine/pale ale and using the casks for goat cheese instead of your booze factory.

[Its All Zen]

Now I don't currently have a cellar so I don't have a single idea how many casks you can actually fit in one, but the math works out the same no matter how you work it. Cash per cask per day is still higher on cheese. I was simply using easy math.

[Velic Vorkhov]

I have 103 casks in my cellar, not 100% if I can do some odd stuff and fit more, but this way is pretty simple to understand haha. I looked at the math, and most likely you are correct in saying goat cheese is the way to go. I will find out once I start getting some animals, barn is currently building.

[Mrrshan68]

hrmm seems like you could do better with cows than goats though? i mean goats make milk every second day while cows do it daily, and goat cheese is worth 375 while cow cheese is worth 200.
Assuming number of casks is not an issue and all you want is maximum money per animal i think cows outperform goats every time?

[Sunwave]

Your numbers are wrong. You can do any of the steps in parrallel to each other. This means you will have cycles of 7 days for the fruit wine, not 70 days. 116 fruit wine or 28 (=3,5 cheese/goat per week * 8 goats) cheese per week, which do you think is more expensive? Even if you don't age the wine (not enough casks), it's still going to do better than cheese.

[Velic Vorkhov]

There are a limited amount of casks Sunwave. And in the instance of just looking at casking things, cheese does better in most instances. I agree that making fruit wines will net you a ton of money each time, especially if it's starfruit or ancient fruit, but when casking it falls short of cheese. Goat cheese can get up to 102g/day if its gold quality to start (7 days in cask), or 53g/day if its standard quality (14 days in cask). Whereas starfruit is 112.5g/day and takes 56 days guaranteed to reach iridium quality. I think going with making base wine and selling it and going with cheese in the casks would be the way to go.
EDIT: Faster money, not the most money. Looked at the math of just getting 103 iridium goat cheese every two weeks (amount of casks I have), assuming standard quality and artisan profession, you will get 108150g. So 432600 in 56 days. Starfruit wine will net 648900 in that time, and ancient fruit will net 475860. So unless you are using the two best wines in the game, cheese is better. And arguably only starfruit is the one that will win, since I assumed with this math every single goat cheese you got was standard and not gold quality cutting the time needed by half.

[Dark]

When considering Cask, the question is how much value is gained from each cask per day.
Note that we could allready sell the base items we are producing without improving them in cask.

Goat Cheese Normal: 375 gain over 14 days = 26.78 gold per day per cask
Goat Cheese Gold : 187 gain over 7 days = 26.71 gold per day per cask
Ancinet Fruit Wine : 2310 gain over 56 days = 41.25 gold per day per cask
Starfruit Wine : 3150 gain over 56 days = 56.25 gold per day per cask

Profit gain from cask over 56 days...
Goat Cheese : 1500 profit per cask. 195,000 per celler full
Ancient Fruit : 2310 profit per cask. 300,300 per celler full
Starfruit wine: 3150 profit per cask. 409,500 per celler full

Cask can only go in your basement, where you can fit about 100-130. So you need to produce 130 Ancient fruit or Starfruit over 56 days, or 1040 goat cheese (18 per day [3 barn full]) over 56 days. Any extra goat cheese or Wine you generate past that can be sold at its normal price without cask.

For Goat cheese this will probably all be used for cask aging. But for Wine you will be Creating at least 116 new Wines every 7 days, or about 928 in the time it takes for the cask to finish. Assuming 130 of that goes into the next batch of cask, thats another 798 wine you sell at base price in addition to the 130 irridium quiality wine.

Or about 3,332,700 million (130 irridium and 798 normal wine over 56 days) vs 780,000 (1040 irridium goat cheese over 56 days)


On the other hand... Keg
Ancinet Fruit: 1100 gain over 7 days = 157.14 gold per day per keg.
Hops: something something 135 gold per day per keg

So if you can generate surplus crops and didn't have room elsewhere, you could just build even more kegs in your celler... But you can probably find other spots on your farm to place more kegs.

Cheese makes sense though if you have your 3rd house upgrade but are only level 6 farming and don't have kegs yet.

[Sunwave]

This:

Originally posted by "Dark":

Goat Cheese Normal: 375 gain over 14 days = 26.78 gold per day per cask
Goat Cheese Gold : 187 gain over 7 days = 26.71 gold per day per cask
Ancinet Fruit Wine : 2310 gain over 56 days = 41.25 gold per day per cask

Your argument that only starfruit and anceint fruit will win is totally true. Since they are both very late-game, and cheese is early game, you are right. Casking cheese is definitely one of the best ways to earn money early game. I think you can start this near the end of summer year 1, if you're fast, whereas you probably can't do the greenhouse/desert stuff until halfway year 2 (due to several difficult community bundle requirements)

[SeemannTheAssamite]

To platinum: you made a few wrong assumptions in you math calculations. ;)


I don't know about the cheese calculations, since I find tending to animals too much time consuming, boring, tedious, and generally not fun. xP

Except my for lovely void chickens and dinos. Please don't eat or curse me?

(to be honest, I cba with pale ale... too much of a hassle, gets done too quickly, hops grows everyday, and I can't do other stuff, like fishing or murdering stuff in the mine, in peace. xP)

But:

Originally posted by platinumwyrm11:

(...)So now we have 7+7+14+14+28. This is 70 days.(...)

Not exactly. After the AF grows it already has the first batch of fruit, so apart from the very beginning when you need to wait a season for it to grow from seed it's 63 days, but that's a minor gripe.

Originally posted by platinumwyrm11:

116x4620 for iridium wine = 535,920 after 70 days. Or 2.5 seasons. Meaning you averaged out 214,368 per season and you no longer have a pale ale or ancient fruit wine factory to add to your income.

Apart from the 63 days thing, you're wrong about not having the factories... If you were using kegs before, you didn't suddenly lose the ability to do so *and* you also have 812 "overflow" AF lying around (need to save the 8th batch for the next casking) every cycle.
You can even put hops into those kegs for the first week of the cycle, when AF is going into casks, not to lose the keg uptime.

Didn't really calculate the Starfruit path, but it also seems viable, probably better, since you can use kegs for pale ale while the starfruit is on "cooldown"...

To Velic Vorkhov: Yep, you're probably right, money wise, but mass animal production is much more of a hassle than just doing the AF greenhouse-kegs routine every week and every ~2 seasons plopping a batch into casks. It just saves so much rl time...

To Sunwave: The most optimal way to use casks, at least rl time vs. money is simple - don't. :P
My oppinion, anyway.
Also, it depends heavily on your playstyle.

If you enjoy/are willing to bear the husbandry part of the game, then cheese will be probably the best way, up until you get enough Starfruit seeds to switch completely to that.

If you prefer other aspects of the game, then the AF all the way, since it's a most hands off method presented here. Or switch to Starfruit after you get enough seeds.
Especially if you're a fanatic fisherman like me. I seriously need to stop placing fish collection chests. >,.,>
EDIT: a few typos and stuff

[Velic Vorkhov]

SeemannTheAssamite, animals are a pain, yes. I'm only going an eight animal barn to test out the math to make sure what I said was correct (I don't normally do anything with animals other than chickens to make blueberry tarts lol). I am at starfruit level and have 500+ about to be harvestable so my kegs will be on overtime haha.
Dark, I'm assuming Platinum meant just for casking. Wine is obviously superior in the long run.

[Chief_Pilos_Lipsknecte]

Iridium Star Life

[I Kinda Fail]

I don't have casks on my playthrough yet. Does it tell you what quality it is, before you take it out? Or do you have to remember the date?

[Sunwave]

Originally posted by SeemannTheAssamite:

To Sunwave: The most optimal way to use casks, at least rl time vs. money is simple - don't. :P
My oppinion, anyway.
Also, it depends heavily on your playstyle.

I seriously need to stop placing fish collection chests. >,.,>
EDIT: a few typos and stuff

If you consider real-life time, yeah, don't use casks. If you consider in-game days, then they are quite handy. Since I tried to do a challenge for myself to get the Joja-corp achievement within the first summer, I optimally used my days for farming, mining and fishing. So in-game days were the qualifier. I think I was still in that mindset.

Also, hooray for fish collection chests. I have two o fthem. One for "everything from the ocean" including stuff found on the beach, and one for "everything else from the water". They're both nearly full, with stacks of 25 gold star fish of each type (except no-quality crabpot stuff, only one of each for the legendaries, and silver quality desert fish).

Originally posted by I Kinda Fail:

I don't have casks on my playthrough yet. Does it tell you what quality it is, before you take it out? Or do you have to remember the date?

It tells you the quality, but I think you'll have to wait till it pops out anyway.

[Chief_Pilos_Lipsknecte]

So glad I have no patiece for min/max.

[Velic Vorkhov]

I Kinda Fail, it tells you the quality, and if you hit it with a pick or an axe, it will pop out.

[Abalister]

Well, I'm going with the ancient fruit route. I want to get that Clock. I've got everything else in the game. That 10Mg will be a long road to reach.

Too bad that gold star ancient fruits don't produce gold star wine. It would be faster to reach iridium star in the casks.