Stardew Valley’s resources are vital to building your farm and creating a viable farm. Plus resources like stone, vegetables, and hay will help you when you start your farm for the first time. One resource you want to look for is hardwood.

There are several ways you can acquire hardwood. The easiest way to catch them is to cut off large stumps with a copper ax. Alternatively, you can grab some by taking care of any large logs you come across using a steel ax. You can find stumps on your property until you clear them, but those with the Forest Farm map can discover stumps that reappear daily on the west side. There are eight of them, and they respawn daily, providing you with two per item.

The next way to have a drop of hardwood is to harvest them from a Woodskip fish pond. You can catch Woodfish in the Secret Woods, or starting at the Forest Farm. You can find them anytime of the year, in all weather conditions. They are difficult to catch, so even if you have one on your line, you might have a hard time trying to pull it out of the water.

Once you have it, take it to your fish pond and you should be able to spawn a new fish every other day after completing its quest. Once you have six or more Woodskip fish in the pond, they have a chance to produce five hardwood materials. Here are his mandatory quests:

1 Woodskip: 10 hardwood
3 Woodskip: 2 to 3 common mushrooms or 2 to 3 red mushrooms
5 Woodskip: 1 oak resin or 1 pine tar
7 Woodskip: 2 jade leaves or 1 tea leaf
Alternatively, for those in the lumberjack profession, you have a chance that hardwood will fall off when cutting standard trees.

Using many of these methods to pick up hardwood can make some of the more difficult materials to craft much easier.