Introduced alongside a hundred other things inStardew Valley’s1.4 update,Fish Ponds sort of get lost in the sauce when it comes to money-making discussions, but they’re a genuinely great source of passive income.
Once you get them filled to the brim, you don’t need to do much of anything to get a ton of roe that can easily supplement whatever your main source of income is, while you just check on it every so often.
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The actual rankings here will be determined solely by the profit per day of a maxxed-out fish pond, but I’ll be sure to mention if the fish is particularly annoying to get, and if its requirements may not be worth getting.
Rather intuitively, the more difficult and expensive a fish is to catch, the higher value its roe will be. This means you might want to stick to some of the easier options, if you’d like to keep your sanity.
A Note On Methodology
The methodology used for calculating the average daily profit of any given fish type is rather complex, and I’d like to explain how I calculate it.
The initial numbers were taken from theStardew Valley Wiki, namely the base price of the fish to calculate how expensive the Roe is, and the chance for additional items that add more value to their produce.
Assuming your pond has 10 fish and you’re always hitting the 95% item chance, we can weigh the percent chance for each item, multiply that percentage by the item’s sale value, and divide by the total number of items in the pool.
Do note that all Legendary Fish are an exception to this, as the game caps out at one fish per pond for them, making the daily chance of an item 23%, which leads to them being far less profitable than you’d believe. As an aside, all Legendary Fish sequels are identical to their counterpart.
This gives an idealized and rounded-up number that will be above what you would realistically be getting, but it is an estimation of how much you’d be getting per day when not factoring in aging, level perks, or crafting steps into the final number.
Numbers Aren’t Lying
Fish Location
The Ocean, South side, or Southwest side of Ginger Island
Base Fish Price
Average Daily Income
Items Produced
I did not expect Lionfish to be up here at all, but it barely scraped its way up into the top eight by having a Tiger Slime Egg, no matter how rare it may be, because it sells for a whopping 8000g.
Even if you only get that jackpot 2% of the time, it still contributes an average of 160g per day, on top of the Roe and Taro Tubers contributing a little bit to that total themselves.
You can age the Roe and plant the Taro Tubers, making this one even more valuable. You can raise some Tiger Slimes from the eggs you get, making for a great investment all around.
This 225g per day average is from doing none of that and just selling the items outright, so you can still get a decent chunk of passive income for zero work, but the option for higher effort production is there.
7Crimsonfish
Better Than Corruption(fish)
East Dock at the Beach during Summer
You’re about to see a pretty notable pattern here, which is that most of the Legendary Fish manage to squirm their way onto the list while having significantly lower daily yield than expected.
This is because you can only ever get one of them, and while fish ponds with 10 fish cap out at a 95% chance of receiving a product every day, single fish ponds cap out at a 23% chance.
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This means on 23% of days, you’ll receive the 780g Crimsonfish Roe, and while that averages out to 269g every day, it’s still very inconsistent, and provides no benefits aside from the money.
You can still do it if you’d rather receive passive income from your single-time catch, but I’d recommend gunning for fish that give you cool items on top of having a 95% chance at an item every day.
Complete 200 Quests
In The River North of JojaMart, During Fall
Another single-time legendary catch, the Angler has the same 23% production rate, but due to the increase from 1–2 Roe to 1–4 Roe, it gives you a bit more money on average, despite selling for less.
It’s arguablyone of the easiest legendaries to get, too, since you almost definitely have Fishing Level 3 by your first Fall, and can easily get it in the northernmost part of Pelican town, then throw it in a pond.
Again, it’s not great, and it will only ever produce Anglerfish Roe, butin the early game, it’s still nice to have 276g of passive income every day, especially since there is no extra work to be done.
The best part about Legendary Fish Ponds is that you simply catch it once, throw it in, and you’re done. The others may have quests to max out, but you only ever need to worry about this one fish.
5Sea Urchin
The Strongest
Foraged on the Beach
It feels incredibly wrong, but if my math is correct, the Sea Urchin is actually lowkey one of the most profitable things to put in a Fish Pond, despite being an incredibly easy-to-find forageable.
This is due to the chance of getting anywhere from one Roe to five, which sells for a damn solid 110g, and has a 53% chance to appear once you’ve gotten ten Sea Urchins in your pond.
This feels incredibly strange, as every other forageable and crab pot option is genuinely abysmal in terms of raw income, mostly providing trash, and this is the only one to be focused on roe.
Given the fact that it’s incredibly easy and practically free to set up,I’d recommend throwing one of these ponds on your farm, just to have a really consistent and easy source of income.
4Mutant Carp/Glacierfish
Pick Your Affliction
The Sewers/Cindersap Forest in the Winter
The only tie on this list, the Mutant Carp and Glacierfish, have near identical numbers, and are effectively the same if we’re talking purely about the average amount of money you’d get from them.
They both have a base price of 1000g, both have the Legendary Fish debuff of a 23% chance of production, and both produce 1–4 roe whenever they’ve procced, making them the same average of 305g per day.
TheMutant Carp is practically guaranteedif you have the key to the sewers, with the only requirement being the location, but getting the sewer key is a bit tricky, so you might get the Glacierfish first.
You get the Glacierfish fromfishing in the forest during wintertimewhile you’re at least fishing level 6, and while that sounds like a lot, it’s not too hard to achieve in your first year, especially with temporary buffs.
Pearly Whites
Night Market Submarine
The Blobfish is quite a nice one, coming in at the third most profitable, while also not being super tough to catch, being one of the very few fish that are exclusive to the Night Market Submarine.
It’s an uncommon one in that pool, sure, but the limited pool means you’re far more likely to get it than if it were among the fish in the general Ocean pool, making it only a matter of time before it’s caught.
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On top of that, since it isn’t legendary,you’re able to fill a pool with ten of them and have a 95% chance of getting the roe worth 280g, or a bunch of Farm Warp Totems, or even a very pricey Pearl.
The Pearl is the main contributor to this very high average income, as it sells for a great 2500g while being a solid 2% chance, which is much higher than the other expensive items other fish boast.
2The Legend
Prince From The Dark
The Mountains, during spring, during the rain
The Legend is rather notoriously the hardest fish to catch in the game, only acquirable during Spring, and only if you’re at level 10 or higher, which is incredibly difficult to achieve in the first year.
Once you’ve fished it up, though, you’ll be able to throw it in a pond and get Legend Roe, which sells for a cool 2530g, though it’s once again only a 23% chance per day,making it only 582g per day on average.
That said, if you’re going to go all out on the fishing ponds for money, then I’d say you should grab The Legend and The Legend 2, since they’re identical, and age their Roe for double the money.
This slows down the process, but it’s already a bit of a slow-burning moneymaker, and frankly, I don’t think you have anything better to do with a legendary fish other than profiting off of it.
Flint And Eel
Floor 100 of the Mines
Of course, the fish with the highest sale price that isn’t legendary takes the top spot. The Lava Eel isa bit more complicated than that, but that’s the main reason why it managed to take first place.
Namely,the Roe selling for 380g alongside the chance to get up to three Roe at once is a big factor, but the Gold Ore, Cave Jelly, Spicy Eel, and Magma Geodes aren’t anything to scoff at either.
They’re all nice to have produced passively, and sell for quite a chunk of change on top of that. The only issue is that catching the Lava Eel sucks, considering it takes forever and can easily slip by.
You need ten of these things to rival the profitability of the Legend, which only requires one fish. This one has a higher profit ceiling, from smelting the gold and processing the geodes, but not by much.
