Kegs vs Jars: The Artisan Goods Multiplier

The multipliers

Kegs: fruit becomes wine at 3× base price (ancient fruit = 550 → 1,650g), vegetables become juice at 2.25×, hops become pale ale, wheat becomes beer. Jars: pickles and jelly at 2× base price + 50g. Kegs multiply harder; jars work roughly 2–3× faster (jars take 2–3 days, wine a week, juice about 4 days).

Match machine to crop

High-base-price fruit (ancient fruit, starfruit, melons, pomegranates) belongs in kegs — the 3× multiplier on a big number beats everything. Low-price bulky crops (corn, blueberries in bulk) often earn more per day in jars because of the speed. Hops are the keg sleeper: pale ale daily harvests keep kegs continuously fed.

Scaling the machine room

Keg and jar recipes are cheap (wood, copper/iron, stone) — the real constraint is space and crops. The shed is the classic keg warehouse: a fully loaded shed holds 137 machines. Put the machines beside the field, fill them the day of harvest, and let the cellar age the best wines to iridium for double price over two in-game months.

Two formulas, and one of them wins on a metric nobody quotes

Every keg-or-jar argument reduces to two lines of arithmetic from the official wiki:

Keg: fruit → wine = base × 3   |   vegetable → juice = base × 2.25

Preserves Jar: jelly / pickles = (base × 2) + 50

Stack them against each other and the crossover falls out immediately. The keg pulls ahead on value per item as soon as 3b exceeds 2b + 50 — that is, whenever the crop's base price is above 50g. Below 50g the jar's flat +50 bonus wins outright, which is why cheap high-yield crops like corn and green beans are jar crops.

The metric that reverses the answer: gold per machine per day

Value per item ignores time, and the two machines are not close on time. A keg takes roughly 6.9 days to finish wine (4 days for juice); a preserves jar finishes in about 2.8 days. The jar cycles two and a half times in the window a keg uses once.

Divide output by processing time and the ranking inverts. This is not a house opinion — the official wiki states it plainly: looking at gold per day based on time required, it is always more profitable to use a preserves jar, on the highest value item possible.

So on strict throughput the jar wins everywhere, including on starfruit. That is genuinely useful to know and it is also not the whole answer, because two things the table cannot show push players back to kegs.

Why kegs still deserve your wood

1. Casks only age wine. The cellar takes wine and lifts it through silver (1.25×), gold (1.5×) and iridium (2×) quality. Nothing in the game multiplies a jelly. A starfruit wine aged to iridium is 4,500g from a 750g fruit — a 6× multiplier the jar can never reach, once you accept the ageing time.
2. Labour, not gold, becomes the limit. A jar that finishes every 2.8 days must be emptied every 2.8 days. Run forty jars and the collection schedule alone starts dictating your mornings. Kegs let you batch the same work into a single weekly pass.
3. Vegetables lose to kegs on rate, not value. Juice is only 2.25× base, so a pumpkin kegs worse than it jars — but a cellar of kegs fed by a harvest that outpaces your jars means the overflow has nowhere to go. Throughput beats theoretical gold per day when you are the bottleneck.

The working rule that falls out of all this: build jars early, build kegs once you have a cellar to age in. Jars unlock at Farming level 4 for 50 wood, 40 stone and 8 coal; kegs need level 8 plus a copper bar, an iron bar and oak resin.

Three worked examples

Starfruit. Base 750g. Jelly = 750 × 2 + 50 = 1,550g. Wine = 750 × 3 = 2,250g. Wine wins per item by 700g. Per machine per day: jar 1,550 ÷ 2.8 = 558g; keg 2,250 ÷ 6.9 = 326g. Jar wins on rate — until the wine goes into a cask and reaches 4,500g, at which point the keg plus cellar is in a different league entirely.

Blueberry. Base 50g — exactly the crossover. Wine = 150g, jelly = 150g, a dead tie on value. Since the jar finishes in 2.8 days against 6.9, the jar is the better machine for blueberries, full stop. It is also the single clearest example of why value-per-item comparisons mislead.

Corn. Base 50g, but a vegetable, so the keg gives juice at 2.25×: 113g. The jar gives pickles at 2×+50: 150g. The jar wins on value and on rate. Corn is the textbook case from the wiki itself, and it is why a corn field and a keg-only build are a poor match.

What to build, in order

• Farming 4: preserves jars. Cheap, quick to build, and they beat a keg on rate for every crop you can afford at that stage.
• Farming 8, no cellar: kegs for high-value fruit you intend to age later, jars for everything cheap and everything vegetable.
• Cellar open: kegs and casks for starfruit and ancient fruit; keep jars running for overflow and for anything under 50g base.
• Never: compare the two on sell price alone. It is the one comparison that gives the wrong answer most often.

Sizing a machine room

Sources and standards

FAQ