There are a lot of different items to find, craft, grow and collect in Stardew Valley. Some of them are more useful than others, but all have their benefits. Maple syrup is not an item used for a lot in the game, but it is necessary to complete the community center and it can be used to craft one significant item, so let's go over how to obtain it.
To start with, players will need two things: a tapper and a maple tree. The first needs to be crafted and the second should already be on the farm and in town. Maple trees look relatively similar to oak trees, but they're a little less bushy and have slightly thinner trunks.
If players need to plant another tree in Stardew Valley for whatever reason, maple seeds will drop from other maple trees when shaken or cut down provided the player is at least at foraging level 1. They can also be dug up next to other trees with the pickaxe or axe if the location it's going to grow in needs to be changed. Finally, they can be occasionally found from garbage cans around town. Searching through garbage cans when other villagers are around will make the villagers in question lose friendship points however.
As for the tapper, as previously mentioned, it needs to be crafted. The crafting recipe for the tapper is obtained after reaching Foraging level 3. To make it, it requires 4o pieces of wood and 2 copper bars, which can be smelted in a furnace, the crafting recipe for which is given by Clint after finding copper ore in the mines. Once a tapper has been crafted, just place it on a maple tree and wait for it to produce maple syrup. It can placed on oak or pine trees for oak resin and pine tar respectively. The maple syrup specifically will be ready in about 9 days.
The Stardew Valley 1.5 update, currently only available for PC, introduced a heavy tapper which will cut the production time in half. It's an extremely late game item, but once the player has access to the new Ginger Island and has collected 100 golden walnuts, they can access a room with Mr. Qi who will reward the player with Qi Gems for completing various requests for him. The heavy tapper recipe can be obtained for 20 Qi Gems.
Maple syrup is used for the Chef's Bundle and optionally the Exotic Foraging Bundle in the Community Center. It can also be combined with 1 iron bar, 40 wood and 8 coal to make a bee house which spawns honey every 3 to 4 days. The bee house crafting recipe is obtained at Farming level 3. It can also be combined with sugar and wheat flour to make a maple bar, the recipe for which is obtained by watching The Queen of Sauce on TV on the 14th of Summer Year 2. Sewing with maple syrup creates the floppy beanie.
Stardew Valley is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Stardew Valley Wiki
