Crops quality - HM:HSH

[Anutha1]

Can you get star quality crops early game even if you don't use fertilizer on them? Like is there a small chance you can?

[Cherubae]

Yes, if the crop is grown in a healthy field. I've harvested 3-star crops without using fertilizer, but that was in later chapters after the conditioner machine was installed at the end of chapter 5.

[Anutha1]

Yes, if the crop is grown in a healthy field. I've harvested 3-star crops without using fertilizer, but that was in later chapters after the conditioner machine was installed at the end of chapter 5.

Yeah, I'm starting over just for experimentation purposes to see if I can get star crops without ever using fertilizer to begin with from Day 1 because I'd rather save the money I had previously spent on fertilizer in my previous game.

I've noticed that if you do different actions on your field (till a spot, water an existing crop, etc.) instead of harvesting a crop that may return a normal item, you can sometime obtain a star crop instead so I'm going to try this and see if I can't get all star crops this way. It's a little time consuming as I have had to save scum over and over to achieve this but I'm OCD like this anyway so it's no biggie.

Just wanted to make sure it was possible to begin with here was all.

[Anutha1]

So I'm getting one star quality produce so far randomly without using fertilizer this time and I'm on the 10th of the first month so it's working as planned but when I'm going to harvest a couple of my eggplants that have matured for the first time, no matter how much I try harvesting them by reloading my save over and over, neither of the two are returning a single star quality eggplant.

I had five mature wheat that I harvested this same day and I eventually was able to harvest a single star wheat from the five of them but the two eggplant are never returning me any star quality produce.

Is this the case because they produce multiple harvests from a single plant so if you never fertilize it, it will never return star quality crops or are their chance of randomly producing a star quality produce just that much lower than other crops that only produce a single crop item?

[Cherubae]

You have already harvested a mature crop in that field, which reduces the field health. It is expected that you would harvest a reduced-quality crop on a subsequent harvest. Even when applying fertilizer, there's no guarantee that you'll get higher star-ranked crops because of the drop in field health.