Focus on having fun and doing what you’re interested in. Money will happen and trying to min max really ruins the experience
Additionally: there is no time limit for anything, you can always come back to things at your own pace and not miss anything
Also also: Caroline is a sweetheart. Be good to my boy Linus.
Don’t turn in the dinosaur egg to the museum. Use an incubator to hatch the egg into a dinosaur. Once the dinosaur begins laying eggs, turn one of those eggs to the museum.
Just have fun and go in blind. Failure isn’t punished and learning is more fun than being told.
Give Linus all the love he deserves
Don’t check the wiki for your first play though.
Fishing initially feels like it sucks ass but buy the training rod from Willie and practice, it will eventually just click.
Upgrade your hoe and watering can, it makes the early farming way less tedious.
Counterpoint: Maybe I’m just a filthy casual, but I would have never finished my first playthrough if I didn’t read the wiki as I went along. There’s a ton of stuff going on in this game, including things that aren’t possible to discover without some very arduous trial and error (gift preferences, when and where to buy things, fish species hours and locations, etc). It’s also not a story-heavy game so you can’t really spoil much.
I guess I should have included to only play your first run until you complete the community center. By then you’ll have a much better feeling for the game and all of the systems and starting over will go a lot smoother because you can actually plan ahead.
Or, fuck the watering can, just go mining a bunch, get that copper and silver, and use automatic sprinklers all day erry day.
Fully automated gay luxury farm communism
Even if you have sprinklers as soon as you can, you’re almost certainly going to fuck up planning on your first playthough and upgrading the watering can will make it way less annoying. I never upgrade mine but I’ve played enough that I can sow planning everything ahead for when I have sprinklers.
Build everything with the goal of harvesting truffle oil. You will be rich beyond belief.
At first; then go for the perk that gives you purple foraging items and no longer do you need to do the oil 🙂
Probably. To be honest after I had a fully optimized truffle farm I sort of trailed off playing.
I remember amaranth being really good because you can harvest it with a scythe and it’s worth a lot
Don’t pick the seaside farm if you want to automate your crop watering
You can’t put sprinklers in sand
There is no ‘game-over’ state in Stardew Valley. You can do anything you want, and it is always going to be fine. You can take thirty in-game years to finish everything and that’s totally cool.
Just go dig some dirt, meet some people, and grow some plants. And maybe, in the end, discover that you’re gay as hell for Abigail. She rocks.
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There are tons of mods for this game. Make sure to check them out on your second playthrough (automation mod highly recommended).
There’s no true time limit on this game. Enjoy it at your own pace, you won’t be punished for it. Because of the seasons, there are certain things that might be delayed for a little while, but you can literally just sleep away as many days as you need to if you reach a point that you’re waiting for a specific date. There’s no loss condition.
Chests are your best friend. Always save a copy of most crops/gems, as these are often loved gifts for the villagers. Dinosaur Egg should be saved until you know what to do with it, while Ancient Seed should be donated immediately to the museum.
The sooner you invest in tappers for Oak resin, the happier you’ll be.
Fishing is actually really good. It seems hard, but as you level it and get better equipment, it’ll be easier. Once you have the right lures, fishing becomes fairly simple (aside from the really rare or Legendary fish). Don’t be discouraged!
Use the TV to know which days will have rain. Very important to plan out your days you head to the mines or wherever else you desire.
Invest in the Community Center/Joja Repairs (two different routes in the game). They come with very useful rewards.
For skills, you can go down any branch you want. But I highly suggest for Farmer: Tiller, then Artisan. Definitely the most friendly to a newbie.
Try not to get overwhelmed by the first quest to go introduce yourself to e eryone in the town. It’s a common conplaint from first-timers, given thst the game gives you on guidance at all on where to find everyone, and people move around town in a very natural (and thus not easily predictable) fashion. Just let that be something in the background that isn’t a priority, and you’ll get through it naturally, eventually.
One thing I would note is that Stardew Valley is either a management game or a cozy game depending on how you want to play it. There’s no wrong answer, but it can change your perception of the gameplay.
When I first played it, I saw it as a management game where I needed to optimize things to a certain degree. Needed to save enough cash to buy the right seeds at the start of each season, to make sure I got the right number of crop turnovers in a season, to collect all the seasonal stuff for the community center asap so I didn’t have to wait a year for that season to come back around, etc. If you like that sort of thing, it’s pretty well-balanced for it.
However, only much later did I realize, or have pointed out to me, that Stardew Valley doesn’t force you to do anything in any specific order or pace. It can be played at whatever speed you want, with no real failure state except in context of your own goals. If you aren’t concerned about optimizing progression, you can play it like a cozy game. You can let the seasons come and go, plant whatever crops you feel like, raise animals or don’t, hand out gifts to the townsfolk and see what happens, and so on. Some things are rare, and some events only trigger on certain days or under specific conditions, but nothing is permanently missable on any given playthrough. If you miss something, you’ll get another chance the same time next game year, if not sooner.
Point being, it’s fun to play for min/maxing or finding interesting ways to put points on the board, but you can also just screw around. I think it’s good to keep that in mind even if you like the pressure of optimization. A “mistake” isn’t going to ruin your run, it’ll just be a setback that you can come back from. If the game gets frustrating, it’s likely because you’re putting pressure on yourself to achieve a specific goal.
The wiki is great, and very useful for when you’re stuck on something, but I’d just jump in and start playing before you go to deep into the wiki.
Stardew is great, you’ll enjoy it.
What others have said, play the game the way you want. There’s no “wrong answers” and any online guides for the game will mostly be about optimising all the fun out of the game, so I wouldn’t recommend looking things up and just experimenting instead, only look things up if you’re really stuck.
I will say though that the fishing minigame is actually fun.
It’s just presented initially in a poor way. Go to the fishing shop and buy the training rod, it removes all the frustration from having a low fishing skill, and swap away from it once you’re ready. Of course, if you still don’t enjoy the fishing minigame, you don’t have to play it, it’s just that I find a lot of people hate it because it leaves a bad first impression, but is actually quite fun later in the game.Don’t do it. Stardew valley sucks you in. Two hours past midnight you remember telling yourself “one more night” but it’s only 4pm in game with lots of gameplay can be accomplished.
It’s fun playing a clean game the first playthrough so playwithout mods first, it’s sti a great game
