Fish Ponds are a powerful yet confusing method to produce rare items inStardew Valley. They give renewable access to some of the most sought-after materials in the game, but they also come with their very own set of rules that can be hard to untangle at first glance.
RELATED:Stardew Valley: How To Get Hardwood
If you haven’t played around with Fish Ponds that much, there’s probably one mechanic that’s more confusing than the others: your Fish Pond capacity. It may seem small at first, but don’t worry. There is a way to grow your pond so that it can hold more fish and produce more rare items. Here’s how you’re able to expand your Fish Pond capacity and how the rules change with different fish.
How To Expand Your Fish Pond
Fish Ponds can’t just hold all the fish you could want; there’s limited room in each, and more importantly, it takes time for the pond to become a suitable environment for the fish. Because of this, while the ultimate capacity of any Fish Pond is 10, your pond will initially have much less capacity depending on the type of fish you throw in. As a general rule, rarer fish,like the Sturgeon,have much lower initial capacities.
At the start, you may simply throw fish in until the pond is at capacity, but expanding the Fish Pond past that point takes time and some rare materials. After your pond has been at its max current capacity for a few days, it will get a yellow exclamation mark over it.
If you interact with the pond now, the fish will issue you a quest to find a certain material that’ll make their pond feel more like home. Once you’ve got it, throw it in, and the pond’s capacity will increase slightly until it reaches 10.
These materials can range from incredibly simple to outrageously expensive, but, again, the rarer the fish, the more troublesome you’re able to expect the quests to be. However, keep in mind that fish like theSuper Cucumbercan serve as arenewable source of Iridium, which makes all the trouble of doing their Fish Pond quests much more worthwhile.
RELATED:Stardew Valley: How To Catch An Eel
Adding Fish To The Pond
Since a Fish Pond needs to be at its max current capacity to generate a new quest, you’ll have to add more fish in as the pond’s capacity expands. If you didn’t already know, the fish in the pond can reproduce and fill it to capacity themselves, but this process will take much more time.
The spawning frequency of new fish in a Fish Pond varies depending on the type, but you may expect it to take anywhere between two and 15 days for fish to reach the new capacity of their pond by themselves. This can easily double the time it takes to expand your Fish Ponds, so it is much more efficient to add the fish yourself when the pond expands.
NEXT:Stardew Valley: How To Catch Mutant Carp
