Stardew Valley: How to Auto Harvest Your Crops

Growing and harvesting your crops is a core part of establishing and maintaining a successful farm in Stardew Valley. However, there’s a way you can auto-harvest your crops rather than putting in hours of manual labor.

Harvesting Crops in Stardew Valley

Once you’re a bit further into your Stardew Valley adventures, you’ll find that maintaining your crops manually can become difficult. For instance, if you’ve managed to cultivate large fields of crops, keeping on top of them can be time-consuming.

In addition, harvesting large yields of crops manually can become tedious after a while. Especially when there are so many other things to be doing in Stardew Valley.

Fortunately, there is a method of auto-harvesting your crops. However, this isn’t something that’ll be available straightaway. You’ll need to work through a fair amount of Stardew Valley’s quest content before you can get your hands on some auto-harvesting equipment.

How to Auto-Harvest Your Crops

You’ll eventually be able to delegate your crop harvesting work to creatures called Junimos. These cute little critters are actually forest spirits that can be found hiding in the run-down Community Center in Pelican Town.

After completing a number of prerequisite quests, you can purchase Junimo Huts from the Wizard at his Wizard’s Tower home. These small buildings house a number of Junimos, who will automatically go out and harvest all of the crops in the surrounding area. You can place these Junimo Huts on your farm to automate your crop harvesting pretty much entirely.

The Junimos will harvest all the nearby fully grown crops, including those grown on trellises. They’ll also pick up other plants and flowers as they’re out harvesting. Your crops will be stored in the Junimo Hut ready for collection whenever you want to pick them up.

While the Junimo Hut is a very useful building to invest in, there are a number of steps you’ll need to carry out before you can actually buy it.

Junimo Hut Prerequisites

You can only purchase the Junimo Hut after completing the following quests.

• Restoring the Community Center (optional but recommended)
• Goblin Problem

Restoring the Community Center takes a fair amount of time. After accessing the Community Center in Pelican Town for the first time, you’ll follow a short set of introductory quests which will introduce you to both the Junimos and the Wizard. From here, you’ll be tasked with collecting Bundles of items for each of the Junimos’ Golden Scrolls. Each scroll requires donations of different items, and completing them all will restore the Community Center to its former glory.

Goblin Problem comes after completing the Dark Talisman quest for the Wizard. This is unlocked after completing the Community Center quest. You can also unlock these Wizard quests after purchasing a JojaMart membership to turn the Community Center into a Joja Warehouse if you prefer to spend gold rather than collecting items for Bundles.

Once you’ve completed Dark Talisman, you’ll need to solve the Goblin Problem quest by gifting the Henchman outside the Witch’s Hut with some Void Mayonnaise. Grab the Magic Ink from the Witch’s Hut and bring it to the Wizard to complete Goblin Problem. You’ll now be able to purchase buildings from the Wizard, one of which is the all-important Junimo Hut.

Junimo Hut Tips

If you choose to buy a JojaMart membership, the Community Center will be permanently transformed into a Joja Warehouse. This means that the Junimos won’t live there anymore and you won’t be able to complete Bundles for them. However, you can still buy the Junimo Hut from the Wizard once you’ve completed the Goblin Problem quest for him.

Using the Junimos to auto-harvest your crops means you won’t gain any Farming XP for them. However, they will speed up the process if you’re willing to forgo the experience gained.

Junimos are sensitive creatures and won’t go out harvesting crops when it’s raining. They also prefer warmth and so won’t auto-harvest any crops during the winter.

You can only use the Junimo Hut to collect normal-sized crops. Larger crops such as melon, pumpkin, and cauliflower will still need to be harvested manually, as they’re too heavy for the Junimos.

Junimos can’t harvest items from trees. You’ll still have to forage produce like fruits and mushrooms manually. The same goes for any crops grown from wild seeds or grown in a garden pot.

You can toggle Junimo auto-harvesting on or off at the Junimo Hut at any time.

Although it does take longer, completing the Bundles to restore the Community Center is arguably a more rewarding route to enlisting the services of the Junimos. You’ll also pick up the Local Legend achievement and Stardew Hero Trophy for fully restoring the Community Center.

Junimo Huts are incredibly useful but they’re not cheap. One hut will cost 20,000 gold and you’ll need 200 Stone, 100 Fiber, and nine Starfruit to build it.