Of the many crops able to be grown by players of Stardew Valley, ancient fruit is perhaps one of the most, if not the most lucrative. However, obtaining ancient seeds won't be as easy as going down to Pierre's shop and buying some. It's going to take work to get a steady supply of ancient seeds in Stardew Valley.

Likely the easiest way to obtain an ancient seed is to find the ancient seed artifact. While both the seeds and the artifact share essentially the same name, they are rather different. The artifact can be found in a number of ways. It can be found from digging up artifact spots (the tiles around the map with worms peeking out of them), treasure chests from fishing, artifact troves (obtained from the desert trader, island quarry, or dropped from haunted skulls in the mine), as drops from bug enemies, and from cutting down shrubs on the prehistoric levels of Stardew Valley's mine.

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Once the ancient seed has been obtained, players will want to take it to the museum and give it to Gunther. While this is helpful in completing the museum collection, Gunther will also give the player the plantable version of the ancient seed (technically called "ancient seeds," plural) and with it, the crafting recipe for how to make more. The crafting recipe's only component is the ancient seed artifact though, so learning how to craft it won't really make getting the ancient seeds any easier than it was the first time.

The ancient seeds can also be found rarely from the Traveling Cart that appears in Stardew Valley's Cindersap Forest on Fridays and Sundays. When putting other produce in the seed maker, there is also a small chance to get ancient seeds back instead of the seeds of the produce used.

Once players have obtained ancient seeds viable for planting, they can go ahead and plant it during any season but Winter. It will take 28 days to mature and will produce fruit every 7 days from that point on. If planted in Spring, players can get several fruits from it before the plant dies in Winter. However, unless players want to go through the above steps to get more ancient seeds after Winter, they'll want to wait until they have access to the greenhouse to prevent their ancient fruit from dying every Winter. The greenhouse is obtained by completing the pantry bundles in the community center or purchased from Joja for 35,000 (provided players turned the community center into a Joja warehouse).

The best way to increase the amount of ancient fruit plants on one's farm after having one plant fully mature is to use the seed maker. The seed maker is a craftable item whose recipe is obtained at level 9 of the farmer skill. It takes 25 wood, 1 gold bar, and 10 coal to make. It can also be obtained from completing the dye bundle in the community center or occasionally from treasure rooms in the mine. Once players have one, though, simply place an ancient fruit in it and the seed maker will produce one to three new seeds. There's a small chance it will create mixed seeds instead, but there's only a 1.99% chance of that happening.

Ancient fruit can be sold from anywhere from 550 gold to 1,210 gold depending on its quality and the player's profession. Wine made from ancient fruit will sell between 1,650 gold and 4,620 gold, again depending on its quality and the player's profession. Ancient fruit jelly will sell for either 1,150 gold or 1,610 gold dependent on whether or not the player has the artisan profession. These numbers make the ancient fruit one of the most profitable crops in the game. The sweet gem berry beats it, but the sweet gem berry can only be harvested once and is more difficult to produce en masse.

Ancient fruit can also be used as one component to complete the missing bundle introduced in the abandoned Joja Mart's "Missing Bundle" introduced in update 1.4. It may also show up in the remixed bundle for the Rare Crops Bundle if players have selected that option when starting a new game with the Stardew Valley 1.5 update.

Stardew Valley is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.

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Source: Stardew Valley Wiki