The Stardew Valley Fair is a wondrous event that takes place on the 16th of Fall every year in Pelican Town. It's a time for the townspeople to come together for fun events and for local craftspeople and shopkeepers to display their excellent craftsmanship. Of most interest to players is that farmers can show off the very best of their annual harvest.

In the fall, you can compete in a contest called the Grange Display, Stardew Valley's best opportunity to show off your progress on the farm. The one to beat is Pierre, who famously wins the competition every year (if you don't, that is!). This guide will give you all the info you need to win and put him in his place, year after year.

Updated February 11, 2024, by Sean Murray: The Stardew Valley Fair has some exclusive items that you can't get anywhere else, so you'll want to grab as many Star Tokens as you can from the Grange Display. To help, we've tweaked this guide's formatting to be a little easier to read and given it more links to other helpful Stardew Valley topics.

How Many Points Do You Need?

There are five different rankings you can achieve in the Grange Display contest at the fair. If you're interested in grabbing some items from the Star Token shop, including one of the only Stardrops in the entire game, you'll want to earn as many Tokens as possible by getting first place.

How Do You Score Points?

You'll earn points four different ways once you've entered the display contest. There are some points you'll earn just for entering, but the ones you'll want to focus on are the ones you get for submitting items.

Base

Just by entering the competition, you've earned 14 points.

Number Of Items Entered

Your display will earn points just for being full, too! Always include nine items, even if some of the items are not good or even trash, because it'll increase your point total and ensure you don't lose any points.

Categories

The fair recognizes eight item categories for the display. Including an item from each category will earn your display five extra points. However, this will only work a maximum of six times, so you only need items in six of the categories, not all eight.

Your last three items can be repeated if you so choose!

The item categories are...

• Animal Products (anything gathered from your animals, such as eggs, milk, or wool)
• Artisan Goods (anything created using a keg, preserves jar, oil maker, etc., such as pickles, jellies, honey, wine, or mayonnaise
• Cooking (any food item, often made in a kitchen, such as Maki rolls, Ginger ale, Pancakes, Spicy Eel, or Sashimi)
• Fish (anything caught with a rod or in a crab pot, such as sea cucumbers, snails, stingrays, pike, lobster, halibut, or lingcod)
• Foraging, Flowers, and Tree Saps (items found in the wild or flowers grown on the farm, like holly, mushrooms, poppies, winter roots, or cave carrots, as well as tree saps like pine tar or maple syrup)
• Fruits (any fruit grown on a tree or in the ground on the farm, such as melon, starfruit, strawberries, cactus fruit, apples, blackberries, or coconuts)
• Minerals (any special gem or stone found while mining rocks, including amethyst, aquamarine, obsidian, jade, star shards, or thunder eggs)
• Vegetables (any vegetable you can grow on the farm, such as beets, amaranth, pumpkins, taro roots, tea leaves, garlic, corn, or hops)

Sell Price and Quality Of Items Entered

The final way you'll earn points is based on the sell value and quality level of your items. Ideally, you want to place iridium quality items that would sell for 200g or more because they'll earn eight points (the maximum for one item).

The Grange Display considers the actual sell price of an item, not its base sell price. For example, an albacore is worth 75g at the normal quality and 112g at gold quality. According to this chart, a gold albacore will be in the 90g-199g level. Then, because it's gold quality, it gets more of a bonus. So, a gold albacore would be worth five points.

How Do You Do The Math?

Taking all the information from the previous section, you can now refer to the items you have in your inventory to check whether you can win the contest. You have a week's notice for the festival, so there's plenty of time to make last-minute adjustments.

Step one is to assess your items' individual point values. ​​​​​​

For this calculation, we've assumed you haven't taken the Rancher Profession or anything else that increases an item's value. If you have, you should take that price into account to calculate point totals.

1. First, maybe you've spent time cultivating a barn with plenty of goats and cows you love! If so, you'll be able to get iridium quality Large Milk. That has a base sell price of 380g, which makes it worth eight points. If you put some of the lesser quality Large Milk into a Cheese Maker, you can earn a gold-quality Cheese. It has a base sell price of 345g, making it worth six points. You can also get Goat Milk — an iridium quality Goat Milk will fetch you 450g, so it's worth eight points in the display.
2. Perhaps you've also cultivated a small coop and a few ducks. Toss any duck egg into a Mayonaise Maker, and you'll be rewarded with a normal quality Duck Mayonaise worth 375g. It'll earn five points.
3. If you knew the fair was coming, you could have saved the best few crops from the past three seasons. One normal quality Parsnip (from the spring) is worth 35g, or two points in your display. A normal quality Melon (from the spring) sells for 250g, getting you four points. And a gold quality Pumpkin (from the fall) is worth 480g and a cool six points.
4. Your other adventures throughout Stardew Valley can earn you the last few points you'll need. Fishing up a gold quality Albacore would earn you 112g or five points. Hanging on to a Diamond from the mines would have sold for 750g, but it gets six points in your Grange Display.

Your current point total is 50. Now, we'll consider everything else.

1. You've included nine items, so you get a bonus of nine points.
2. Plus, you entered the contest period, so that's another 14 points.
3. Finally, you've fulfilled the Vegetables, Minerals, Fruits, Fish, Artisan Goods, and Animal Products categories. That's five points each for a total of 30 points.

Your final first-place score is a total of 103 points!

Stardew Valley Fair Best Items To Display

These are some surefire ways to win the display contest, assuming you have these items (or similarly valued ones).

124 points:

• 4 Iridium Quality Goat's Cheese
• 1 Iridium Quality Fiddlehead Fern
• 1 Iridium Quality Coconut
• 1 Iridium Quality Duck Feather
• 1 Iridium Quality Purple Mushroom
• 1 Iridium Quality Pike

118 points:

• 1 Iridium Quality Large Milk
• 1 Iridium Quality Woodskip
• 1 Iridium Quality Sashimi
• 1 Normal Quality Diamond
• 1 Normal Quality Starfruit
• 1 Normal Quality Goat Cheese
• 1 Iridium Quality Super Cucumber
• 1 Iridium Quality Sturgeon
• 1 Iridium Quality Tiger Trout

Whether or not you have certain Professions that increase the base value of certain items will affect the exact total you come out with. These examples are just guidelines.

103 points:

• 1 Iridium Quality Large Milk
• 1 Normal Quality Hops
• 1 Gold Quality Albacore
• 1 Iridium Quality Goat Milk
• 1 Normal Quality Duck Mayonaise
• 1 Gold Quality Cheese
• 1 Normal Quality Melon
• 1 Normal Quality Diamond
• 1 Gold Quality Pumpkin

96 points:

• 1 Gold Quality Mayonnaise
• 1 Gold Quality Purple Mushroom
• 1 Gold Quality Midnight Carp
• 1 Gold Quality Strawberry
• 1 Gold Quality Pumpkin
• 1 Gold Quality Artichoke
• 1 Gold Quality Sardine
• 1 Gold Quality Crystal Fruit
• 1 Gold Quality Coral

100 points:

• 9 Iridium Quality Truffles

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Can You Win In Your First Year?

While tough, it's absolutely possible to win the contest during your first year in Stardew Valley. Prioritize variety and get at least six of the applicable categories, then high-quality silver or gold items, in that order (don't sacrifice having all six categories just for a slightly higher quality item).

Some items that earn great points and that you can include in the first year are:

• Gold cheese is absolutely obtainable in your first year so long as you've been giving your cows the love and attention they need. They're part of the "Artisan Goods" category and, at the gold level, are worth six points.
• The recipe for Cheese Cauliflower is easy to obtain; Pam will mail it to you once you've achieved three hearts of friendship with her. Not only that, but its ingredients aren't unreasonable either — cauliflower, which you can grow in spring, and regular ol' cheese. This dish — which counts as part of the "Cooking" category — is worth five points.
• If you have managed to invest in goats already, goat cheese of normal quality is worth six points. It only goes up to eight points if it's Iridium, so you don't need to worry about having to invest in a relationship with your goats to score high here. Like regular cheese, goat cheese is an Artisan Good.
• Melons, which you can grow in the summer, fall into the "Fruits" category. They are worth four points at their normal quality. However, bumping the melon up to silver (which can be reliably done with a little fertilizer) means it's worth six points! Just be careful to plant them early in the summer because they'll take 12 days to grow.
• It's tempting to experiment with the things you find while foraging, but if you come across a purple mushroom, put it away for your grange display! It counts as part of the "Foraging, Flowers, and Tree Saps" category and is worth four points at normal quality. If you're lucky enough in your first year to stumble upon a silver or gold-quality purple mushroom, it'll be worth six points.
• Grow some cauliflower in your first spring and save at least one — once preserved, they become pickles. Pickled cauliflower is worth six points at normal quality! It also counts as an Artisan Good.