Stardew Valley friendship guide: gift points, birthdays and weekly limits

Build a repeatable route, not a bag of random gifts

Friendship improves most reliably when you know who you will meet and what they actually like. Keep a small stock of affordable gifts for villagers already on your daily route, then make special plans for birthdays. Giving away an expensive item without checking its taste category can waste both money and the day’s gift opportunity.

One heart represents 250 friendship points. Ordinary villagers have a ten-heart friendship track. Marriage candidates normally stop at eight hearts until you give a Bouquet, while a spouse has a fourteen-heart track. A visible cap can therefore be a relationship-stage limit rather than a failure of your gift.

This guide’s point examples use ordinary villager gifts. Spouse interactions, special events and individual character exceptions should not be treated as identical to a basic weekly gifting routine.

Ordinary gift values

Taste	Base friendship change	Practical use
Loved	+80	Strong choice when affordable and confirmed
Liked	+45	Useful repeatable fallback
Neutral	+20	Small gain, but spends the gift opportunity
Disliked	−20	Avoid when building the relationship
Hated	−40	Check the recipient before giving unfamiliar items

For liked and loved gifts, silver, gold and iridium quality multiply the ordinary gift value by 1.1, 1.25 and 1.5 respectively. Quality does not turn a disliked item into a good gift. Confirm taste first; improve quality second.

Talking to a villager normally gives 20 friendship points for the day. It also makes a social route useful when you do not have a suitable gift available. Do not assume handing over any random object is automatically better than a conversation.

Daily and weekly limits

Ordinary gifts are limited to one per recipient per day and two per week. The week resets on Sunday. Use the Social tab’s indicators to check what you already gave instead of trying to remember which errand included a gift.

Giving two gifts during the week also provides a 10-point weekly bonus on the following Sunday. That is a small addition, not the main reason to choose a poor gift just to fill a box. Two inexpensive liked gifts are often a more sustainable habit than spending your whole farm budget on a perfect item for one person.

Birthday gifts are allowed even after the ordinary two-gift weekly limit has been reached. Keep the birthday date separate from your routine weekly plan so that an earlier visit does not make you mistakenly skip the important one.

Birthday math that explains the priority

An ordinary birthday gift receives an eight-times friendship multiplier. A normal-quality loved gift starts at 80 points, so its birthday value is 640 points: 80 × 8. At 250 points per heart, that is 2.56 hearts’ worth of points before other interactions or modifiers.

A gold-quality loved gift gives 800 birthday points under the same basic assumptions: 80 × 1.25 × 8. Use these examples to understand why checking a birthday can be more valuable than making a long detour for one ordinary conversation.

The numbers do not mean every player will visibly gain that many hearts. A character may already be near a cap, and the Social tab displays hearts rather than every fractional point. Relationship status and current progress still matter.

Stardrop Tea is a separate rule

Stardrop Tea gives 250 friendship points normally and 750 on a birthday or at the Feast of the Winter Star. It does not count toward the ordinary daily or weekly gift limits. Its birthday value is not the ordinary loved-gift calculation of 80 × 8, nor is it 250 × 8.

Treat special items separately from the basic gift table. Keeping this exception straight prevents spending a scarce Tea on the assumption that the usual birthday formula will produce a much larger result than it actually does.

Make a practical weekly checklist

Choose a few villagers whose routes overlap with your farming, shopping or fishing. Keep their known liked or loved items together and label that storage mentally as social supplies, not sale stock. Check Sunday’s reset, then note any birthdays before planning the rest of the week.

When you meet someone, talk first and verify the selected inventory item before giving it. If the gift is unfamiliar, consult that character’s Wiki page from the Friendship reference rather than guessing from the item’s appearance. An edible-looking item is not universally liked.

If hearts stop rising, check the cap and Bouquet requirement before replacing all your gifts. If hearts decrease, check missed contact and recent disliked gifts. Friendship decay and special events mean a long gap can affect progress even when your last deliberate gift was good.

For a first-year farm, combine social visits with your regular town route. The goal is a routine you can keep while farming, rather than a schedule so demanding that every other project stops.