Stardew Valley – Beginners & Advanced Gameplay Tips

When you first start a new game of course you’re going to want to get stuck right in! If you want some advice on how to start off your game then see below!

Beginners Gameplay Tips

  • Check the TV daily – You can unlock cooking recipes by watching a cooking show, and find new items in the wild such as berries by watching the foraging show. 
  • Ignore grass on your farm – Don’t cut down patches of grass (the big patches with flowers on them, you are fine to cut down weeds which are the single plants) with your scythe until you have built a silo! Grass, when cut down, is automatically added as hay to your silo which is used to feed your animals. By cutting it down you are wasting a bunch of free feed and you’ll be losing money for a while by paying to feed your animals. 
  • Collect 300 wood to be rich – You need this to repair the bridge on the beach. Doing this will unlock an area that fills with valuable items such as Coral (80g) and Sea Urchin (160g) that you can collect usually on a daily basis to sell. 
  • Collect another 50 wood for storeage – You can build a chest with this that gives you a huge extra storage (36 Slots) for all those items you collect. Trust me, you’ll need it quickly. 
  • One mans trash.. – Check the 7 trash cans in town daily. You can get ores, bars, food and who knows what else! Don’t let people see you do it though, as they can react with a WTF type message. You can find them in the following places. (1) next to 1 Willow Lane, (2) next to 2 Willow Lane, (3) next to Mayors Manor, (4) next to the Saloon, (5) next to 1 River Road, (6) next to the Museum (7) next to the Blacksmith. 
  • Donate items to the museum ASAP – Once you donate 5 items you are rewarded seeds which you can grow this spring! The more different items you donate the more rewards you get, and the sooner you get them the sooner you can use them to improve your gameplay! 
  • Don’t sell everything – Keep a few of every item (told you you’d need chests!) for quests and storyline completion later on in the game, but sell at least one of each crop for your shipping collection. This especially goes for forageables as they can end up being very rare if you are unlucky and boy do people request them for quests at bad times! 
  • Upgrade your bag – Save up 2000 gold to buy a backpack from Pierre’s shop. This will be purchasable once you recieve a letter in your mail (I think once you have filled your inventory) and increases your inventory space to 24. 
  • See brown worms wiggling on the path? – Use your hoe on them! You can anything from materials to books (these books are gameplay tips that you must go to the museum library to view). 
  • Give your crops enough time – All months last 28 days and any seasonal crops still alive on the 28th will die the next day on the 1st. You will have to remove their wilted remains with a scythe. Plan ahead and make sure all crops are harvestable by the 28th at the latest. 
  • Scarecrow – Build a scarecrow to stop crows eating your crops! 
  • Keep energy food on you! – you will need it if you are doing a lot of activities. If you hit 0 energy you become “exhausted” and have slow movement speed until you regain energy or sleep. I recommend spring onions and salmonberries. 
  • Finish your day! – Currently you can only save at the end of the day when you sleep. Bear this in mind if you need to suddenly close the game that you’ll lose progress. 
  • Don’t stay up too late – Make sure you are in bed by 1:50am otherwise you will faint! If you sleep after midnight you will only wake up with half energy. 
  • Be careful in the mine – If you die in the mine you will respawn at the top but also forget a few levels (the lowest ones) and lose some gold. 

Advanced Tips

For those that have gotten hold of the basics but would like to know more (you can never know enough!).

Gameplay

  • You can use the keybind F to open your Journal/Quests and M to open your map. 
  • Is your inventory full and you don’t want to throw anything away? Open it up and click it and then drop it outside of your inventory screen to drop it on the floor. 
  • Equip the scythe or sword when wondering around town. If you accidently use it you will not spend any energy. 
  • Coffee (300 gold from the Saloon) gives a movement speed boost for a few minutes. 
  • You can increase your maximum energy via an item called a Stardrop. 
  • Once unlocked in summer, use the spa once per day to regain energy. 
  • Salmonberries / spring onions – save them to use as food for energy when you are mining etc! 
  • You can shift + right click an item to move half the current stack. 
  • Left click to move all of an item or right click to take 1. 
  • Find that you keep missing when mining/hoeing etc? You can turn on “Always show tool hit location” under options to display a red box where your tool will hit.

Crops / Animals

  • Build a silo before a chicken coop, otherwise you will have nowhere to store all the feed! 
  • Don’t sell eggs, save them until you have a mayonnaise maker to create more valuable goods. 
  • On days where it rains you do not need to water your crops. 
  • The time provided in the tooltip for a crop to grow does not include the day you plant it. So if it says 4 days, you can count is as 5. 
  • Plants crop seeds in sets of 9 (3×3) for a chance in getting a giant crop that produces more than 9 items when harvested! (need to check what crops this applies to). 
  • You can harvest all crops faster by holding down your right mouse button and mouse over them all.
  • You can use a greenhouse to grow crops out of their season. 
  • Use water retaining soil and/or sprinklers to save valuable time from watering crops! 
  • Grass dies in winter, make sure to harvest it all by the 28th of Fall! 
  • Crops such as Green Beans and Hops are grown on a trellis (long wooden stick in the ground), these are automatically planted when you plant the seed, but you cannot walk through them. Bear that in mind when you decide where to plant them.

Mining

  • You can build stairs for 99 stone to skip a level in the mine.
  • Kill grubs/larvae as soon as you see them, otherwise they will morph into undamageable cocoons and then into annoying flying insects that do a lot of damage! 

Social

  • If you want to make friends fast, grow a few flowers with every batch of crops. I made the mistake of ignoring everyone, and nobody wanted to dance with me at the Flower Dance 🙁 
  • You can give up to 2 gifts per person per week, this resets on a SUNDAY. 

Miscellaneous

  • Keep all trash items you find to use in the recycle machine later in the game. 
  • Trees take 10 hits to cut down and provide 12 logs each, if you need wood fast this is a more efficient way to gather it. The same goes for rocks, the large 2×2 rocks in mines provide 10 stone for 8 hits (does not apply to 2×2 rocks on your farm).
  • There’s a wagon that sells unsual items just east of the Wizards tower. It visits twice a week (Friday/Sunday). 
  • Check the beach after rainy weather or a storm. There will be more forageable goods. 
  • Tree cut down outside of your farm will grow back after some time has passed. 
  • Trees usually fall away from you as you cut them, make sure you don’t let them fall into water/unwalkable areas otherwise you’ll lose the drops.
Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 15023 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices.

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