u/Crashmadal

His shield no longer deals percentage burn damage when destroyed, instead it just basic freezing shield. Why the fuck they nerfed him while he was just above average???

I searched for this a lot to see If anybody did the math but there was a lot of jumbled mess. Especially after 1.6 so I did the math myself and wanted to share so it would be useful for anyone who seeks that answer.

Ostriches:
-Produces an ostrich egg every 7 days.
-Maximum friendship + mood is guaranteed If animal is pet and well fed while also having heater in winter.
-This results in Iridium Quality Ostrich Egg every 7 days.
-Every Iridium Quality Ostrich Egg will result in 10 Iridium Quality Mayonnaise.

380 x 10 = 3800 gold

-We can combine this with Artisan profession you get from level 10 farming which will multiply the value of every artisan good with 1.4 multiplier.

3800 x 1.4 = 5320 gold per week, per Ostrich.

-This results with: 720 gold per day for every Ostrich.
*BUT WITH THE POWER OF GOLDEN ANIMAL CRACKER!*
-This will be multiplied by 2x which will result as 1440 gold per day for each Ostrich.

Pigs:
-Produces a Truffle every single day.
-Maximum friendship + mood is guaranteed If animal is pet and well fed while also having heater in winter.
-This results in Pigs finding more Truffles, the formula to find another Truffle is friendship/1500
-Maximum chance is 1000/1500 which will result with 66% chance to find another Truffle.
-The chance to find another Truffle will be rolled until Pig can't get another Truffle.
-If we do the math, this will result as:

Sum = 1+ 0.66 + 0.66^(2) + 0.66^(3) + ... = 1/(1-0.66) = 2.941 roughly.

-This can be combined with Gatherer skill you get from foraging which have 20% chance to double each harvested forage.

2.941 x 1.2 = 3.529 Truffles per day.

-Because Truffles are seen as foraged items, they can also take advantage of Botanist profession coming from level 10 foraging, this will result in 100% of the truffles being Iridium Quality which sells for 1250 gold per Truffle.

1250 x 3.529 = 4441 gold per Pig, per day.

-If you feel like processing Truffles into Truffle Oil though, each Truffle Oil will sell for 1065 gold which you can increase up to 1491 gold by using Artisan Profession.

This will result with: 1491 x 3.529 = 5261 gold per Pig, per day

Normally, this makes Pigs roughly 365.4% better than Ostriches at an average day and they still beat out Ostriches by 308.4% even If you don't process them.

But this completely, disregards Ostriches biggest advantage to Pigs, which is the consistency of production through the year.

Total amount of days in a single stardew year is 112 days.
Winter: 28 of these days are winter, so they are cut from that 112 days.

112 - 28 = 84 days

Spring: 18.3% chance to rain in year one, year 2 and forward, it is 13.725% chance to rain. The third day of first years spring is always rainy.
This makes first year spring have 4.941 of the days be rainy combined with +1 guaranteed rainy day, it makes 5.941 days rainy. If we round this up as we should, we can say 6 days of year one spring is rainy on average. While on year 2 and onward, we will end up with 3.843 days being rainy, which will round up to 4.

Even though there is a difference like that between year 1 and year 2+ I will take year 2 and onwards data here because even If you had the money to build a barn and buy the animals in first year, the third days effect on the first year wouldn't be there and effect of 6~ percent between first year and second year would lower because of the setup time.

84 - 4 = 80 days

Summer: The chance of rainy weather increases steadily per day from 12.6% on summer 2 to 20.1% on Summer 27. So you have a scale of [12% + (0.3% * day of the month)] to determine your chances of rainfall.
This makes it so the average daily rain chance rounds up to 16.35% chance which will result in 4.578 days being rainy + 1 day of summer having green rain will give us 5.578 days ending up with rain in summer which we will need to round a sad 6 (the difference between it being 5 or 6 is so small that it is inaccurate to do this but we will have to trust the math in here and still round up. I will still consider this probability in the end result though, so don't worry.)

80 - 6(5.5) = 74 days (74.5 most likely)

Fall: Same as spring, except fall in year 1 can be stormy so it's a flat 13.725% chance.
This will result us with 3.843 days being rainy in fall which will net us 4 days of rain.

74 - 4 =70 days

With all of this info, we will have our yearly income from Pigs, which will be:

70 x 4441 = 310.870 gold for straight selling the Truffles.

or

70 x 5261= 368.270 gold for processing them to Truffle Oil.

If we also look into Ostriches yearly income, because of them having all 112 days fully working, it will result as:

112 x 1440 = 161.280 gold coming from Ostriches.

This will lower the difference of total income between Ostriches and Pigs from 308.4% to around 192.8% If the Truffles are not processed and will turn the 365.4% to 228.3%

TL;DR
Pigs are better than Ostriches. They yield more income nearly 2x by just selling Iridium Quality Truffles. If you Turn them to Truffle Oil, it will sell for 2.3x instead.

This calculations used Golden Animal Cracker in the mind so If your Ostriches don't have any, this will rise up to Pigs being 4 and 4.6 times.

Also these calculations are made at 1.6.15 patch of the game.

I hope it will help anyone who heard about Golden Animal Cracker making Ostriches better than Pigs and felt like math being off.