Stardew Valley Ginger Island Music Puzzles: Crystal Cave and Mermaid Song Solved

ByMarcus Vale

Two Different Music Puzzles, One Island

If you’re stuck on crystals in a cave, you’re looking at the Crystal Cave memory game — a Simon Says puzzle hidden in the northeast of Ginger Island. There’s also a completely separate mermaid puzzle at Pirate’s Cove involving music notes that does have a fixed solution. Both pay out in Golden Walnuts, and neither explains itself. This covers both.

The Crystal Cave: Simon Says, Not a Fixed Code

Finding the cave

The cave sits northeast of the Tiger Slime Grove. From the Parrot Express station, head left and cross the rope bridge. On the far side, turn right and walk north toward the cliff edge. There’s a curved palm tree — walk under it and the entrance appears. Easy to miss if you’re not hugging the north wall.

How it works

A stone lion statue sits in the center. Interact with it to start. Colored crystals light up in a sequence and you click them back in the same order. The sequence randomizes every attempt — there’s no code to look up. You have to watch and repeat.

Five rounds total. Each round adds one more step and the pace picks up. Fail any round and you restart from round one. What most guides skip: the game tracks your total failures and gets easier as they pile up.

  • 4 failures: rounds 3, 4, and 5 play slower
  • 6 failures: rounds 4 and 5 slow down further
  • 8 failures: the final round is skipped entirely

That’s intentional. Players who quit after three or four attempts were stopping right before the game started cutting them a break.

Practical tips

Before starting, sketch the five crystal positions on paper and number them by location (top-left = 1, center = 2, and so on). Write down the lit sequence as it plays. Some players record their screen on a phone to replay it slowly between attempts.

On mobile, screen glare and tap precision make the timing noticeably harder than on PC. If you’re on mobile and stuck, deliberately failing eight times to trigger the final slowdown is a completely reasonable strategy. The walnuts are the same either way.

Reward

Win all five rounds and you get 3 Golden Walnuts.

The Mermaid Puzzle at Pirate’s Cove

This one has a fixed, repeatable solution. It’s on the south side of the island at Pirate’s Cove, where five rock piles line the shore. The mermaid only appears on rainy island days — that’s why plenty of players show up and find an empty beach.

What you need

Five Flute Blocks. Craft or buy them, then bring all five to Pirate’s Cove.

The solution

Place one Flute Block at each rock pile. Right-clicking a Flute Block raises its pitch by one step. The rock piles tell you the target pitch: small rocks equal 1, large rocks equal 5. The correct number of clicks for each pile, left to right:

  • Pile 1 — 1 click
  • Pile 2 — 10 clicks
  • Pile 3 — 8 clicks
  • Pile 4 — 4 clicks
  • Pile 5 — 6 clicks

Once all five are tuned, walk past them from left to right starting from the leftmost rock. If the mermaid begins dancing as the melody plays, you’ve got it right. She’ll wave and drop 5 Golden Walnuts into the water.

Other Ginger Island Secrets Worth Knowing

There are 130 Golden Walnuts on Ginger Island and you need 116 to unlock everything. The two music puzzles cover 8 of them. A few other big sources:

  • Gem Bird Shrine — On rainy island days, a bird appears in one of the four island zones and drops a gem when startled. Place all four gems on the matching shrine plinths for 5 walnuts.
  • Banana Shrine — Leave a banana on the altar in the jungle clearing. A gorilla trades you 3 walnuts for it.
  • Gourmand Frog — Grow Melon, then Wheat, then Garlic on the island farm in that order. Show each mature crop to the frog before harvesting. That’s 5 walnuts per crop, 15 total.

If you’re on version 1.6 or later and the crystal cave is a hard blocker, walnuts can be purchased from certain island vendors — so you won’t get permanently locked out of anything.

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