If you’ve tried to grow crops in Stardew Valley before, you’ve probably noticed that crows will visit your farm every once in a while. Rather than acting as set decoration, crows will actively eat and destroy a few squares of crops until you chase them away by running past them. It’s a huge pain, especially near the beginning of the game where crops are one of the only ways to make money.
There is a way to make sure crows stay away. You’ll want to construct a scarecrow, a human-shaped bundle of straw that prevents crows from landing in a large radius around it. If you’re tired of crows eating your crops and want to chase them off for good, keep reading to learn how to craft and place scarecrows.
How to make a scarecrow in Stardew Valley
Pre-construction
In order to receive the recipe for scarecrows, your farming skill will need to be at least level one. After going to bed on the night you achieve level one, the recipe will be automatically granted and added to your crafting menu. In order to find it, press E to open your inventory and look for the straw man on a stick with a hat on his head.
Before you can make a scarecrow, you’ll need to collect the necessary materials to craft it. Each scarecrow requires 50 pieces of wood, one piece of coal, and 20 fibers. All of these ingredients are, thankfully, easy to find. Fiber can be found all across your farm and in other areas outside of Pelican Town—just use your scythe to clear weeds, and some will drop fiber when destroyed. Wood can be found by breaking branches with your ax. Coal is found inside rocks after breaking them with your hammer, in the river or ponds while panning for minerals, or in treasure chests obtained while fishing. Once you’ve found all the materials you need, it’s time to get crafting.
Making and placing scarecrows
Crafting scarecrows is extremely easy. Make sure all the needed materials are in your inventory, then navigate to the crafting tab. If you have everything you need, the scarecrow should be highlighted. Click on it to instantly turn the materials into a scarecrow, then click on any open spot in your inventory to deposit it.
Once you’ve made the scarecrow, add it to an easily accessible spot on your toolbar and walk outside. Pick a suitable location on your farm—you can only place it on cleared ground, so no crops, branches, rocks, or weeds can be in the way—and right-click once to place it in the ground. If you need to move it after you’ve placed it, equip your pickaxe and hit the scarecrow once. It will instantly pop up as an obtainable item.
Scarecrows will keep crows away in an eight-by-eight-tile radius around themselves. The radius is roughly circular and covers 248 tiles total. Even if you have an unusually large farm, you’ll only need a few scarecrows to cover all of your crops. Once you’ve erected one, you should no longer see crows within its radius.
Other scarecrows
Beyond the basic craftable scarecrow, there are a few other kinds of scarecrows that can be obtained. Known as rarecrows, these unusual scarecrows serve the same function as regular scarecrows but can’t be crafted. There are eight in total, and each can be found in a different location: purchased at the Spirit’s Eve festival or received from the museum after donating 40 items to the museum, for example.
After finding and obtaining all eight rarecrows, you’ll receive a letter from the Z.C. Rarecrow Society, which is so impressed by your dedication to rarecrows that they’re providing you with a blueprint for one last scarecrow: the Deluxe Scarecrow. This scarecrow has a unique look and prevents crows from appearing in a 16 by 16 radius, double the size of a regular scarecrow’s area of effect.
You can craft as many scarecrows as you need to fill your farm, and some of the rarecrows can be obtained multiple times, enabling you to fill the valley with straw figures. Besides keeping crows away, scarecrows add fun personality to your farm and act as separators between fields and buildings. They’re an essential item for any burgeoning farmer to have.
