Stardew Valley Backpack Upgrades Explained: Sizes, Costs, and What Changes

Upgrades to your backpack in Stardew Valley can improve your overall gaming experience. They change how long you can feasibly work during a day, how efficiently you can explore, and how often you have to go home. Knowing the upgrades to your backpack and how to change your style of play after making each upgrade can improve your overall gaming experience.
You begin the game with the Small Backpack. It has space for twelve items. At this point in the game, you have a lot of space problems, so you’ll want to be organized. Group your tools so you can hot key cycle through them. When you are farming or foraging you can leave tools at home to free up space for items you might collect during the day.

The first upgrade for a player’s inventory is the create backpack, which is available for \2000 gold and creates 24 open inventory slots. Players typically purchase this first upgrade for the game-changing experience, as it allows players to scale how long they can farm or mine before needing to return home. Rather than farming for a certain amount of time and having to return to sell items, players can create inventory sections like a row for tools, a row for harvested resources, and a row for a consumable resource, like food or bombs. Having an organized backpack improves efficiency during game days by making inventory clearing days much easier.

The last backpack upgrade, the delux backpack, increases the players inventory by another 12 slots, for a total of 36, and is available for \10, 000 gold. This allows the player to increase their efficiency during more resource intensive tasks like combat and large scale harvesting. Unlike the previous upgrades, which only increase the player’s inventory space, this upgrade increases the players convenience. Players can hold a greater variety of items including combat supplies, food supplies, tools, and looted resources. To improve efficiency, players should move the more frequently used tools to the low or high slots of their hotbar for easier access.

Upgrading a players backpack is not a game-changing experience, because the must micromanage their activities as a result of their back space. Upgrading your backpack early increases your efficiency greatly, giving the player access to a more relaxed play style.