One of the early limitations in Stardew Valley is the quality of your tools. Your axe and pickaxe aren’t powerful enough to break certain obstacles, your watering can doesn’t hold much water, and doing anything uses a hefty chunk of energy. Upgrading your tools at the Blacksmith not only improves them, but in some cases, will use less energy as well. Upgrading tools requires resources and money. Here’s what you need to know about how to upgrade tools in Stardew Valley.
Tool upgrades
Tool Upgrades are performed at the Blacksmith, which is open every day from 9am to 4pm, except during festivals. Upgrading a tool requires you to bring five bars of the corresponding metal, along with a fee. Upgrading a tool takes two days, but you are really only without your tool for one. You can drop off a tool at any time while the Blacksmith is open and in two days you can collect it, meaning that there is one full day where you don’t have access to your tool. Only one tool can be upgraded at a time, and you have to go through each upgrade sequentially; Copper to Steel to Gold to Iridium.
For most tools, you can just go without for the single day, but the watering can is more of a problem. The best way to upgrade your watering can is to wait until the weather is listed as raining the following day. When that happens, water your crops and go drop off the watering can. The rain will water your plants the following day and the day after you can collect the watering can when the Blacksmith opens, and water your plants. You can also drop it off on the 27th of the month after watering your crops, since watering on the final day of the month is pointless, since your crops will die in the new month, unless you have multi-season crops, like Corn. Winter is also a great time, since there is only one crop you can grow in winter and its seeds have to be foraged, so you probably won’t need to water anything.
The only exception is the Trash Can. It still takes two days to upgrade the Trash Can, but you don’t lose the ability to trash items in your inventory while it’s being upgraded.
There are six tools you can upgrade:
- Hoe
- Pickaxe
- Axe
- Watering Can
- Pan (starts at Copper quality)
- Trash Can
Upgrading each tool costs:
- Copper – 5 Copper Bars, 2,000G (1,000G for Trash Can)
- Steel – 5 Iron Bars, 5,000G (2,500G for Trash Can)
- Gold – 5 Gold Bars, 10,000G (5,000G for Trash Can)
- Iridium – 5 Iridium Bars, 25,000G (12,500G for Trash Can)
More Stardew Valley guides:
What each tool upgrade does
The upgrades for each tool has a different impact. The axe and pickaxe take less swings to destroy trees and rocks. They can also destroy certain objects only after reaching a certain upgrade, like a Copper Axe can break wood stumps and a Steel Axe can destroy wood logs.
The watering can and hoe can cover more area when you hold down the action button. A Copper Watering Can can do up to three spots at once, with the Steel Watering Can able to do five. These actions also count as single use, so it uses the same amount of stamina as watering only a single square.
The pan upgrades net you more ore per panning spot and increases the chances of getting special items alongside the ore. The trash can upgrades make it so you get a percentage of the sale price of the item you are trashing in your inventory, all the way up to 60% of the sell price. This is useful when doing long mining runs, where you may run out of inventory space and want to at least get some money from the items you can’t take with you.
