How To Get And Use The Workbench In Stardew Valley

Just like there is a lot of farming in Stardew Valley, there's also a lot of crafting. From the Sprinklers you need to automate watering your crops, to the Kegs that make the profitable wines you sell. Even decorative items like fences and pathways. To get these items (reliably), you need to make them all by hand.

Which means constantly stuffing your pockets full of wood, stone, coal, and a bunch of other resources. But there's an easier way. One that keeps your inventory slots free to hold all the useful things you're making. And that's by using a Workbench.

What Is The Workbench?

In Stardew Valley, a Workbench is an item that allows you to craft by pulling resources from adjacent chests. In order to use it, you will fill the chests with the resources you wish to use for crafting, such as wood, stone, and all the other items you get from mining, foraging, and combat.

The Workbench reaches for crafting materials in any of the 8 neighboring tiles, including those diagonally positioned.

Once you've filled your chests with all the crafting materials you want to use or have collected from your journeys around the Valley, you'll click on the Workbench. It will bring your crafting menu up and any items that you can create will be brightly colored.

This replaces the need to open up your menu and navigate to the Crafting tab. However, the two look identical to each other, no matter if you open your Crafting window through the player menu or the Workbench. And they function exactly the same.

How To Get A Workbench

The Workbench is sold at Robin's Carpenter Shop in the Mountains. It can be purchased at any time Robin is manning the register. It costs 2,000g to buy, and you can buy more than one. There's no pre-requisite that you need to hit before you can get your hands on a Workbench.

When To Buy A Workbench

Having a Workbench makes crafting such an easy process. Rummaging through your chests for all of the right materials, building something, and then sorting your resources back into the appropriate chests can take time, cause you to overlook some of your resources, or simply misplace them.

But it's not just about convenience. Depending on your playstyle, you may either have your chests nicely organized, or you might throw everything in the nearest chest and hope you can find what you need later. Either way, your chests will start to fill up, making it harder to move everything to a work area later.

To help with organization, you can change the color of chests to signify what's inside. You can also craft a sign and place or write a kind of material you have in that chest.

Get the Workbench early, during your first year, at least, if not in the Spring or Summer of Year One. Not only will this aid in your crafting, but it will help with your organization and establishing a workspace as, no matter which way you play the game, you'll know that your materials will have to be in the chests near your Workbench.

It also serves as an easy way to check which resources you need to gather for next. If you want to craft Bee Houses, you can quickly see you have enough wood, coal, and maple syrup, but not enough iron bars. So then you know you should be spending your day in The Mines gathering iron ore, or smelting the ore you have into iron bars.

How To Best Use Workbenches

Like it was stated above, you first want to start by figuring out where you want your Workbench and then you want to surround it with chests. The chests that you can use to do this are:

Junimo Chests do not work with Workbenches.

In the early part of the game, there's no need to use big chests and big stone chests. Not only will it burn through your wood and stone quickly, but it will take time to gather enough resources to completely fill the standard-size chest and stone chest.

No matter which of the above chests you decide to use, you will place seven of them surrounding your Workbench. Then it is up to your personal organizational preferences how to place items inside the chests. If you're unsure how you want to place or categorize some of your items, here are a few ideas to get you started:

If you decide to throw things into chests or have multiple stacks of the same item in different chests, there is an order the Workbench will pull from when considering which of the materials to use:

• South West
• Due South
• South East
• Due West
• Due East
• North West
• Due North
• North East

Why Have More Than One Workbench?

When you are first starting out, you only need one Workbench. But as the game progresses, and you begin to explore other areas, having more than one Workbench can be beneficial.

One option is to have a Workbench in The Desert with chests filled with the resources needed for staircases and bombs, as well as what you need to make Field Snacks and Bug Steak.

You don't have to, after all, you can craft or cook those things at your farm and bring them with you to The Skull Cavern. But, if you forget to bring them, then you can craft them without needing to run back home.

If you don't want to set up a space dedicated to a Workbench in The Desert, you can instead keep a chest near the entrance to Skull Cavern filled with bombs, staircases, food, and any items you want for the Desert Trader.

Another helpful option is to have one on Ginger Island. Once you can sleep on Ginger Island, you may find yourself staying on this secondary farm more than on your original one. So, setting up another workspace will allow you to craft everything you need without sailing or teleporting back and forth.

The basics of deciding if you want more than one Workbench comes down to where and when you find yourself needing to craft items. But, keep in mind, until you have a surplus of resources, then you should have only one Workbench in an area that is convenient for all, or the bulk, of your crafting needs.