There are lots of items, machines, and buildings that you can find as you play Stardew Valley. Notably, all these things you will get in touch with are essential in improving and growing your farm.
Expediting your farm’s expansion and overall growth will significantly help you progress the game. This means that you will get more and easier access to items and resources that will be beneficial when you do quests and participate in the villagers’ requests.
You probably already know that aside from planting crops on your farm, caring for and increasing the number of your farm animals is also one way to grow your farm. When we talk about increasing the number of farm animals, this includes reproducing the animals.
One of the most efficient ways to do this is using the Incubator. It is a tool that helps hatch the eggs of your farm animals. These animals include ordinary chickens, void chickens, golden chickens, ducks, and dinosaurs.
We made this ultimate incubator guide to show you and help you understand everything you need to know about having an incubator.
How to Get an Incubator in Stardew Valley
Using an incubator is actually pretty easy. However, before you get your hands on it, you must first have your own incubator that you can use.
You will get your own incubator by building a coop that can shelter your animals. But do not get excited yet. Simply having a coop will not give you an incubator yet. You must first upgrade your coop at least once to turn it into a Big Coop or upgrade it to the max to turn it into a Deluxe Coop.
Once you upgrade your coop to a Big Coop or a Deluxe Coop, you will automatically get a free incubator for the eggs of your poultry. You can see it placed beside the hay hopper.
How to Upgrade Coop
To answer the question on how to upgrade your coop, go to the first person you went to when you were about to build the coop. Yep, that is right, go to Robin.
You can find Robin in her Carpenter’s Shop every day except Tuesdays from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, except on Fridays when she closes the shop earlier. You can find the shop’s location at 24 Mountain Road in the Mountain.
Simply approach her on her desk and choose to upgrade the coop. Just like any other building, upgrading this for the first or second time will still need two Satrdew Valley days to fully develop. After two Stardew Valley days, you can now enjoy using the incubator for your animal eggs.
Different Types of Incubators
Other than knowing how to obtain and where you can find the incubator on your farm, you must also know the different types of incubators available in the game. The game has four types of incubators: the standard incubator, slime incubator, ostrich incubator, and alien incubator.
Standard Incubator
The standard incubator is the regular incubator that we are just talking about. This is clearly uncraftable since you can automatically get it for free once you upgrade your coop.
Slime Incubator
Slimes also produce eggs. However, they are just some of the rare drops after an encounter in the Mines. But if you already have your own Slime Hutch, Marlon will eventually visit you and will give you slime eggs so that you can put them in the incubators.
Once these hatches, you can restart the reproductions and use the incubator again.
Ostrich Incubator
Ostrich is known to have the largest egg, which is also true in Stardew Valley. Due to its large size, it will not fit inside the standard incubator. This is where the ostrich incubator will be a specialized incubator for these big dudes.
Alien Incubator
Lastly would be the alien incubator. This is another that you cannot craft. You can only see this after a random event in the game called the Strange Capsule event.
How to Use the Incubator
Using an incubator is pretty easy to understand. You must pick up the egg you want to incubate, move next to the incubator, and click on the incubator using the right mouse button.
When an egg is placed in an incubator, it will be removed from your storage. Also, you cannot pick the egg from the incubator once you have placed it inside. So better double-check the type of egg you are holding to not regret the wasted time due to its incubation duration.
Animal Eggs and their Incubation Durations
As mentioned, there are different types of eggs that you can place inside the standard incubator. With that, they also differ in their incubation durations. Here is a list of the eggs and their waiting time.
- Chicken Eggs, Golden, Eggs, Void Eggs, Duck Eggs – 5 days and 17 hours in-game time
- Dinosaur Eggs – 11 days and 7 hours in-game time
The Coopmaster Perk
Given that all eggs take days to be fully hatched using the incubator, you might think it is still a long time. And if waiting is not your cup of tea, in the context of waiting for the eggs to hatch, you might want to get the coopmaster perk when upgrading your rancher profession.
When you do this, all hatching durations will be cut in half.
Conclusion
And that’s it for our incubator guide for Stardew Valley! Hope this helped.
