One of the most important buildings for any Stardew Valley farmer looking to raise some animals is a Silo. These small, inexpensive structures will help keep your animals fed, often saving you time and money. They’re especially useful in Winter, when grass does not grow naturally and your animals stay inside.

Luckily, Silos are super easy to build and are very straightforward to use. Here’s all the info you’ll need before and after constructing Silos on your farm.

What Are Silos For?

Simply put, Silos are for storing Hay for your animals. In the warmer seasons, your animals can graze outside to stay fed, so long as there is some long grass they can access. However, you can also feed them by placing Hay in the feed trough inside Barns and Coops.

Hay can be found in a few ways, but it most readily available from the same grass that animals eat. When using your scythe on this grass, you’ll obtain Hay about 50% of the time. If you have a Silo, the Hay will automatically be added to it. Using a weapon like a sword will not yield any Hay. The other main ways to obtain Hay include purchasing it at Marnie’s Ranch or harvest it when you grow Wheat.

Each Silo can hold up to 240 pieces of Hay, and you can check their contents by interacting with them from the front.

You can access the Hay from the feed hopper inside Barns and Coops, then place it on the feeding trough for your animals. However, if you upgrade these buildings to their Deluxe level, they’ll automatically fill the feeding bench from the contents of your Silos, which is very handy.

When To Build a Silo

It’s incredibly counter-intuitive, but you should build a Silo before you build a Coop or Barn. There are a few reasons for this:

  • It’ll save time. If you build a Silo first, you can already have a stockpile of Hay ready to go for when you get your first animals, meaning you won’t have to buy or collect Hay each day. Sure, you can build a chest and store Hay there, but at that point, just build a Silo! Hay is difficult to obtain in Winter, but you can purchase new animals in Winter. Therefore, starting a stockpile before the cold sets in by building a Silo, then purchasing animals, is a much wiser way to do things. It’s much cheaper. A Silo requires fewer resources and only a paltry 100 gold to construct, which is way more affordable than Coops or Barns.

Many veteran players recommend building a Silo before Coops or Barns. It’s especially tempting to do the Coop first because one of the earliest quests you’ll have tells you to build a Coop, but not a Silo.

If you really want to, you can fill up a couple of Silos pretty easily before you even get your first animal!

How To Build a Silo

As with most farm buildings, to build a Silo, just head to Robin’s Carpenter Shop in the Mountains. You’ll only need a few things that are relatively easy to obtain:

  • 100 gold 100 stone 10 clay five copper bars

Stone can be found by smashing rocks with a pickaxe, and digging in the soil or tilling it with a hoe will yield clay.

The only material here that you won’t have a ton of naturally is the copper bars. You can smelt them in a Furnace from five copper ores and a single lump of coal. Find copper ore on floors 1 through 40 in the Mines. Toss it in a Furnace with some coal and in a short time, you’ll have a copper bar. Make five in total for a Silo.

Once you’ve asked Robin to build you a Silo and paid the gold and materials, it’ll take her two days to finish it. Each Silo takes up a square grid of 3x3 tiles.

Other Info

Here are a few other things about Silos that are helpful to make note of:

  • Silos are at their most efficient when you upgrade your Coops and Barns to the Deluxe level. This way, you can basically ignore them or the need to feed your animals until the Silos are empty. Silos do not need to be near your other buildings. You can place them off somewhere in a hidden corner if you don’t like the sight of them. As long as they’re on your farm, they “connect” to your Coops and Barns. A Farm Computer can tell you how much Hay you have in your Silos. This special computer can be made after obtaining the recipe from Demetrius as part of the special orders “Biome Balance” or “Aquatic Overpopulation.” If you manage to find the Golden Scythe, each time you cut grass with it, you have a 75% chance to find Hay, compared to 50% with the normal scythe. It’s wise to cut down all of your grass toward the end of Fall. It’s all going to disappear on Winter 1, so you’d might as well get as much Hay from it as you can.

NEXT: Stardew Valley: Complete Guide And Walkthrough