1) Stardew lets you grow crops, but it’s time consuming to water them
2) Sprinklers water crops for you, but starter sprinklers water 4 squares only
3) Better sprinklers are your reward for growing lots of crops
4) So having an optimized basic sprinkler layout is time-efficient and useful
Scarecrows are necessary to keep crows from stealing crops, and have their own protection radius - similar to sprinklers, but wider. The python script linked here is a useful programming exercise for trying to start developing these layouts by code, and many improvements could be made to improve the aesthetic - but if you just want to write a quick layout generator and grow some crops, it’s perfectly sufficient as-is for basic sprinklers. Once you progress to advanced sprinklers, you don’t need this algorithm as much as you need a tesselation pattern that fits within the game’s constraints, and that’s what shows up in the player-built maps linked above.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then go to https://stardew.info/ and scroll down to the “Useful” collection maps. The first map shown is a gloriously efficient honey farming operation: you have to plant a flower within the beehive’s radius, and you have to be able to walk up to the beehive, so this layout meets those rules, while doing so in a way that’s pleasing to the eye.
https://storage.googleapis.com/planner-renders/pink-mayfly-3...
SimCity fans may remember “Magnasanti”, where the same rules and principles were applied: Tesselations of constructs designed for maximize people per square, with the bare minimum of infrastructure necessary to deliver that. Magnasanti was designed by a human being using graph paper and is optimized beyond imagining, just like those Stardew “Useful” maps. HN discussed Magnasanti before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933265
And I’d just like to highlight how much this image from Magnasanti map development could be an image from Stardew beehive map development:
https://rumorsontheinternets.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/mag...