How to farm Iridium in Stardew Valley

Iridium ore is one of the more difficult resources to find in Stardew Valley. There are a handful of places where it can pop up, but there’s always a low chance of getting it regardless of where you look.

Rather than searching in multiple places in Stardew Valley for Iridium, optimizing your time and focusing on the ones with the best outcome is better. There’s only one location that checks off all those boxes, so get ready for combat, a lot of mining, and prepare plenty of food to heal yourself as you set out in your search for Iridium.

The best place to farm Iridium in Stardew Valley

The Skull Cavern is one of the best places to farm for Iridium. It’s a location you can visit in the Desert. It’s a similar structure to the Mines you can find north of Pelican Town, but it’s far more dangerous, with plenty of enemies and locations to explore. What makes the Skull Cavern a great place to form Iridium is as you progress through the area, it slowly becomes easier for you to find Iridium as you descend, but that also means the challenges increase alongside it.

There’s the chance to find Iridium Nodes and Mystic Stones by defeating Purple Slimes, Iridium Bats, or the Iridium Crabs that spawn in Skull Cavern. These odds stack up and give you the best chance to find Iridium at this location regularly. The trick is to progress quickly to the next level of the Skull Cavern, which means using staircases or bombs to dive deeper. You want to prepare for this as best you can before committing to a Skull Cavern run in Stardew Valley, and it also means having some of the best combat gear and food on you when you head down.

There are alternative methods to tracking down Iridium, though. For example, you can find some whenever you’re opening Magma Geodes, Omni Gedoes, Golden Coconuts, visiting the Traveling Cart, having a fish pond with more than nine Super Cucumbers, or catching a treasure chest while fishing. A meteorite can fall on your farm, and you can begin mining for Iridium Ore. However, these all have a smaller chance compared to the Skull Cavern.

The Skull Cavern location is not for the faint of heart. I recommend visiting this location after you’ve wrapped up your first year in Stardew Valley and completed the Community Board. By this point, you should have an excellent foundation for your farm, which makes dedicating days to delving into the Skull Cavern and gathering up supplies for your journey much easier.