Better balance - customizable prices for fairer choices

Welcome to my first release mod: a simple, fully customizable yet extensive price rebalancing of various agricultural products. Better Balance aims to expand the variety of viable options for crops and animals, nerfing 'overly powerful' options while boosting many weak options so that most crops or animals have specific scenarios where they can be used to advantage.

better balance

🎮 **This mod is suitable for:**

• **Casual Gamer** - Wants more viable paths, or feels like you won't be severely "punished" for not choosing the best "meta" option
• **Experience Player** - Looking to extend the mid-game experience before being able to easily purchase all endgame items
• **Extreme Optimization Player** - Wants more variety in optimal choices depending on the situation
• **Long-time Gamer** - Wants to re-experience the process of trying out unknown options and find out for yourself what best suits your play style

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🎯Mod Target

Simulating various scenarios via spreadsheets, carefully adjusting prices for most crops, seeds, and animal products while making as few changes as possible to maximize compatibility, this mod is designed to:

✨ **Core Improvements**

• Slightly slow down first year exponential growth/revenue snowball effect
• Significantly lowered maximum income, making expensive end-game gold-consuming items more difficult to obtain immediately
• Universal increase in minimum income, by enhancing all low performance options
• Make animals viable alternatives to crops at all stages of development
• Gradually increase crop profitability in different seasons from spring to summer to autumn
• Reduce the huge gap between high-profit and low-profit crops
• Allow most crops and animals to be considered "best" choices in at least some reasonable scenarios

🐄 **Animal system optimization**

• Made the Shepherd and Coop Master give more maximum possible output than the Craftsman with the appropriate animal and play style
• Make the benefits of Best Barn/Chicken Coop with Shepherd/Coop Master equal or better than Best Outdoor Crops with Craftsman
• Make selling chicken coop animals valuable
• Made a distinction between barns and chicken coops: chicken coops generally provide better gold/day/plot, while barns provide better total gold and gold/day/interaction

🌱 **Crop system improvements**

• Made "higher level" animals generally more profitable than "starter" animals
• Make honey a viable alternative to crops/animals
• Make green tea more valuable

-Create more situations where it's possible to choose a pickle jar instead of a keg later in the game

-Bridging the gap between craftsmen and agriculturists

⚙️ **Other adjustments**

• By default, the Crystal Duplicator takes about 3.3 times longer to copy most gems
• Make similar changes to some other machines available on the farm to balance their profits
• Allows users to easily adjust all price changes made by this mod

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📖 Further reading

• **PRICE CHANGES** - See specific changes from the original version
• **Individual Overview** - Diagram showing crop pros and cons in typical scenarios
• **Explanation and Background** - A deeper understanding of the assumptions and thinking behind the balancing process

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⚡ Installation and use

**Required components:**

• Install the latest version of SMAPI
• Install the latest version of Content Patcher

**OPTIONAL COMPONENTS:**

• Install the latest version of the Universal Mod Configuration Menu

**Installation steps:**

• Download the compressed file
• Extract its complete contents into your **Stardew Valley\Mods\** folder

💡 **TIP:** While this mod will work in existing save files, the full effect of the balance changes will be most visible in new save files.

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🛠️ Custom settings

The values ​​in this mod are the result of many hours simulating the performance of different options, but these are all done based on my personal preference for balance.

**Users can easily make any price adjustments via:**

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