Beginner's Guide to Stardew Valley Farming

Stardew Valley is a very freeform game. You're given all of the tools early to do whatever you want, very few things are actually required of you, and you'll never have a significant penalty for doing anything, air quotes, wrong. Along with that though, comes very few tutorials, and perhaps the feeling that there's just so much to do, and you don't have enough time for everything. Maybe you don't even know how to do everything. That's where this video comes in. This'll be a spoiler-free guide to set you up to be an informed, self-sufficient farmer. I'll be explaining practically everything here, so if you'd like to skip around using the chapters in the description, please feel free. Starting off, I'm going to go over everything in our opening menu here. We're gonna start a new farm. When creating a new farm, the most important choice you'll be making is which farm to choose. Each farm has its own unique attributes, and some are designed to be harder than the others. For a first playthrough, I would recommend either the standard farm or the forest farm. The standard farm is the default option. There's a ton of clear space to farm in and you can pretty much do whatever you want with the space. It's very customizable and easy for a first-time player. The forest farm on the other hand doesn't have as much area to farm, but items that can be hard to find elsewhere spawn regularly on the farm. Not only that, but it's easier to get hardwood, which is a very common resource you'll be using. Two farms that I absolutely would not recommend for your first playthrough are the Wilderness Farm, which spawns enemies at night. Other than that, it's kind of similar to the Standard Farm. The enemies are just really a nuisance. And the Beach Farm. This was added in the most recent update. It's almost intended as a sort of hard mode. There's a lot of farmable land, but you cannot place sprinklers, which makes farming a lot more tedious. The trade-off though is that you can go fishing for ocean fish on your farm, you can find forageables on the ground, and sometimes supply crates will show up on your shores containing pretty rare items. For the other options you can choose them if you like, they all have their little individual quirks. I find them a little annoying to traverse around because you're either going around rivers or cliffs and it's not really worth the trade-off of all the farming space. You'll find a set of advanced settings for your save file on the left. I'd leave this pretty much untouched except for the multiplayer options if you do plan on playing with multiplayer. And you can choose them to be nearby the main house or separated. Everything else I wouldn't touch for a good vanilla impression of the game. I've seen way too many times where people have accidentally set the profit margin lower, which makes the game a lot harder and they didn't know it until months into their playthrough. Other than that, customize the character however you like. One note, don't put the word farm in your farm name because it will say tutorial farm farm whenever it's mentioned. Just put the main name of it. And unfortunately, I did lie. The most important choice you'll actually be making is saying your favorite thing is something like Wieners. Getting us started, explaining controls can get very complicated very fast, especially when controllers for different consoles tend to have different layouts for some reason. So if you ever need to figure out what button does what, if you press the pause button and then go over to options, you can scroll down and see what all of your buttons are bound to. near the bottom of the options menu. Your two most important buttons, left click or the left face button if you're playing on controller, uses your tools. And then the check button is right mouse button or the bottom button if you're playing on controller or if you're on Switch specifically it's the right face button. Now if something's not happening when you press the check button sometimes it's not fully consistent. If I want to pick up this rug and move it somewhere else It is in fact the use tool button, so if something's not working the right way, try both buttons. The check button lights this fire, but the use tool button allows me to move it around. Your first few days should be time for you to get acquainted with the world. You're given a few parsnips to start out, and we need some space to plant them. So we can use our pickaxe to get rid of rocks. We can use the scythe to get rid of grass and fiber. These little sprite-looking things are fiber, and the clumps are grass. And the axe can be used to get rid of pretty much anything made of wood like these tiny sticks, or with a bunch of swings, you can eventually knock down a tree. Knocking down trees gives you wood, one of the most important resources in the game. Sometimes you'll come across things that you won't be able to break yet. That's because later you can upgrade these tools, and sometimes they'll be able to break new things. With this area emptied out, I'm going to use the hoe to hoe the ground so we can put seeds in. Ah, I missed a spot. Fun fact, you can actually use the pickaxe to unhoe a spot. It's not important. It's just really for aesthetics. Then we'll scroll over to our seed. and either left click or right click the use tool button or check button will both plant crops. Then we can use the watering can to water each of them. The watering can does have a finite amount of water it can hold if you ever need to refill it just walk next to water and use the tool and it'll refill. Now after all of that you might have noticed that our little bar on the bottom right here has gone down quite a bit. This is the main thing that limits you in the game, your energy level. Most actions you do use up a little bit of energy. The only thing that we've done so far that hasn't is actually swinging the scythe. If this meter gets all the way to zero, you'll notice that you get a little notification telling you not to push it too hard, but if it goes all the way to zero, you'll be exhausted, and this will put you in an extremely sluggish state where you can barely move at all. There's a couple of ways to replenish energy. One is by eating a food. That'll bring your energy up a little bit, or if you want to bring it back up to full, you can go to sleep for the night. And you can do this whenever you want. It's 2 20 p.m. If you have no energy because you've just done so much and you feel like you can't do anything else for the day, just go to sleep. Nothing wrong with moving on to the next day. However, since I hit zero energy, I'm actually taking a half energy penalty. So you do not want to hit zero energy no matter what. If you become exhausted and continue to use your tools, because you can just a little bit, you'll eventually just pass out right on the spot, ending your day. Now, of course, hitting low energy doesn't mean that you have to go to bed, because there's a couple of things you could do. Like I said, you can still scythe fiber and grass, clean up your farm a little bit. You can go around and pick foraged items. This does not take any energy. You can go around and talk to townspeople. and give them gifts? Well, he didn't like that. And you can go to stores to prep for the next day. One of my favorite activities to do when I'm running out of energy is go fishing, because although fishing does take energy, I just eat any fish that I've caught to regain it right back. You'll gain energy faster than you're using it up, and you'll get some fishing experience to boot. So, speaking of going to sleep to replenish your energy, this game- is on moving time. Every day you'll wake up at 6am and you'll pass out at 2am no matter what you're doing. You can see 10 minutes have already passed. An hour in this game is 43 seconds, which makes a day just about 13 minutes long. At midnight, you'll get this notification that it's getting late. That's mostly because first of all, you don't want to pass out in whatever you're doing. And every 10 minutes after midnight, you will get a penalty. towards your energy when you wake up. On top of that, as you can see, we have a weather system. Some days are guaranteed to be sunny and guaranteed to be rainy, but this day we just happened to get rain. You can see what weather is currently active by looking up in the top right corner. Weather affects very few things, although the most impactful is that your crops will automatically get watered in the rain, so you don't have to do that. Normally you'd have to do that every single day until they're fully grown. The other thing you can see in the top right corner is this little flower. This is the season indicator. The flower meaning that it's spring. Every season has 28 days exactly, which is four weeks. With the change of the season comes characters walking in different schedules, new crops to plant, and new forageables to be found. And a general aesthetic change. Very very important note with the crops. If you still have spring crops growing and it carries into summer, they will die immediately. It's become a little bit of a rite of passage for new Stardew players to have their very expensive crops, there's tons of them, almost ready, and then summer first comes around and they walk out and they're all dead. Feels bad, but it's happened to the best of us. When you have seeds in your inventory, you can see how many days it'll take to mature, Always take that into account. I didn't mean to use my pickaxe. Now I'd like to give you a quick tour of the world you'll be playing in. Of course, this is our farm. Your house will always be situated at the very top right corner, right next to the shipping bin. The shipping bin is where you can sell pretty much any item that you want to, and you'll get paid the money overnight. If you don't want to get paid overnight, you can go to a store that's relevant to that item and sell it there and get the money immediately. This exit over here goes right out to the bus stop. For now it's just an in-between area. Pelican Town is over to the right and there's a bus that doesn't work. There's a mine cart that doesn't work. Pay no heed to it for now. Heading over to the left of our farmhouse, we're gonna have to clear things out a bit here. There's another exit that goes north into an area that we call the Backwoods. This is another in-between area and it goes into an area called the Mountains over on the right which we'll explore in a second. This is what the fellas call the farm cave. Nothing in there for now. We'll go over that later. Here's a broken down building. Unlocked later. A lot of unlocked later. And if we come over here to the far left, there's a tree perfectly blocking it. This is a special shrine. Wait for my return on the dawn of your third year. From Grandpa, who left us the farm if you watched the intro of the game. If we come all the way down to the southern end of the farm here, we can enter Cinder Sap Forest. Close by, we have Marnie's Ranch. Marnie, Jas, and Shane all live here, and this is where you'll buy animals once you unlock them. And you can also buy supplies for those animals here. Heading over to the left, if this were Friday or Sunday, there'd be a little traveling cart that appears here. That kind of sells just bits and bobs at a very expensive price for the most part. It's mostly for if you can't find any specific item that you need for something. There's a chance it'll show up there. It's always worth checking because there's always a lot of weird stuff. This is the wizard's tower which currently is locked. And then the rest of Cindersap Forest is just heavily forested area. You can come here whenever you want and clear all the fiber to try and get some fiber or mixed seeds for yourself. If you cut down the trees here completely... After a few days, a brand new tree will just appear here. You don't have to replant them and it's a great source of wood as you can see from the clear abundance of trees. This is also a great place to come looking for forageable items that are sitting on the ground, like so. And if you like, you can fish here as well. I like to wrap up a lot of my days just walking through the forest picking up any items I find because because you never know what's going to be there it doesn't use any energy so why not oh and here's a worm patch you can use your hoe to get a special item out of it sometimes it's rare sometimes it's clay and in that case it's a lost book which puts a book in the library that usually gives you a hint towards something here's a character just willy one of the beautiful things about this game is Characters have their own schedule that can be very specific depending on the day. Every single character has a doctor's visit on a specific day of the year. Depending on the season and the weather and, I don't know, their birthday, they'll have different paths. It's super fun. This is Leah's house. Nothing really special there right at the moment. And there's an exit over here on the right side of Cinderstab Forest that heads into the main hub of the game, Pelican Town. You can also find Forgeables here. You'll notice trees here you cannot cut down. They are decorative. You can check the trash cans. Sometimes you'll get a special little item. Just make sure that nobody sees you going through them. So the main buildings of the town are this conjoined hospital and general store. This is where you'll end up if you ever lose all of your health. Health is separate from energy, but a very similar bar that will appear only if you get hurt. And they will charge you as well, so be careful about that. Very rarely, sometimes... there is a shop open here. It has very expensive items that can refill your health. Heading into the general store, this is where you'll be buying all of your seeds. As you can see all of these seeds ready for spring are here. You can get grass starter if you ever need to plant some more grass, a couple of cooking items, some decorations, and fruit trees. And you'll notice that these fruit trees have their given season that they're supposed to bear fruit. This is also where you can sell a bunch of items, most importantly crops and foraged items. And very important upgrade here, you can interact with this backpack to get an inventory upgrade and that'll allow you to have open up these bars on your inventory. This is the saloon. If you go in here You can buy a bunch of foods. These will restore your health. The salad is usually my go-to. Beer, just to show this off, if you do drink anything alcoholic, it will give you a tipsy debuff, which slows you down. This is the blacksmith. If I can catch him here really quick. He closes at four. I was cutting it really close there. Here you can shop for ores. They're very expensive. You can find these on your own in other places that we'll go over and coal. These are important items to upgrading your tools, which takes five of whatever material you're making them into if this first tier is all copper and quite a hefty stack of cash. You can also process geodes here. These can give you any number of items including those materials you need to upgrade your tools or Something from your gem set of collections. Which is a perfect time to introduce this next area, the library. Going in the first time, you'll talk to the library and you'll say, Oh, it would be really nice if we could fill this place up again. So if you ever get anything that says, Gunther can tell you more about this, then you can donate it to the museum and it's there. You get a bunch of different rewards for donating to the museum. Sometimes it's items that buff your stats, sometimes it's decorations, it can be all kinds of things. On the southern end of town, there is an exit towards the beach. Here you can regularly find things washed up on the beach. These do give you foraging experience, just like regular foraged items. And it's also a great place to fish. There's a lot of fish that can only be found here because this is the only ocean saltwater environment to fish in. Which kind of goes into the next thing, yes, there are saltwater and freshwater fish. Coming down onto the docks, this is Willy's Fish Shop. You can buy many fishing-related items here, like bait, other fishing poles, and the fish themselves. Up north from Pelican Town, this is still on the same map, we have the Community Center. It's a bit run down, this is kind of what your main story will be revolving around, and it unlocks on day 5, so if you can't get in for now, don't worry about it. Going even further north from here we can find an entrance into the mountains and this was an area I was talking about before. Immediately you'll see the carpenter's shop. Here you can do many many expensive things. You can shop for some resources like wood and stone and a bunch of furniture that you can use to decorate your house. Some of it is functional like the calendar or the workbench which have their own uses and other are just decorations. You can find a ton of crafting recipes here as well. Two very important options that you don't want to miss, you can upgrade your house here which costs a ton of money and a lot of wood. This will give you more room in your house, you can unlock different things like cooking, and you'll be allowed to marry someone since they don't want to marry you when you have a small house apparently. And you can also construct smaller farm buildings. These you can build up wherever you want on your farm. Coop can have coop animals. A barn can have barn animals and then you could go down to Marnie's and buy the animals for them. There's other things like this well can just give you a source of water if you don't want to walk so far to fill your pail. Silos for feed for your animals. The mill has a couple of very niche uses, most people don't even end up making one. And the shed just kind of gives you a lot of room to do whatever you want. Walking around the mountains this is just another good area to go fishing or forage for items if you want to do that. There's Linus, everyone loves him. And normally there would be a rock blocking this for your first five days. As you can see, I've gone on to day seven just doing this tutorial. We'll go over all that in a second. Here we have another blocked off area. This doesn't open up until a few days into summer. And this entrance over here goes back into the backwoods. Another great area for finding forgibles because some of the rarer forgibles that have a hard time spawning in Cindersap Forest or the town can spawn back here. So it's important to kind of check it every few days just to make sure nothing you're missing is back here. And that comes right back to your farm. And also, if you're wondering where exactly the bus stop lets out into in Pelican Town, it's right over here to the left of the general store. That's about all I'd like to explore for now. You'll unlock many other areas as you progress through the game, but by then you'll be able to... take it into your own hands. I would now like to talk about a feature of the game that I feel like is often overlooked and contains a lot of information, so I feel like I need to explain it. The pause menu. There are a ton of tabs here, and I'd like to go over each of them. This is your inventory. As for now, we only have one row of it, but eventually you will get more rows. If you want to swap between those rows on this toolbar down here, you can do that by On here, you can either press tab on the keyboard. Of course, it's not doing anything because we only have one thing unlocked. Or if you're playing on controller, it is the bumper buttons. This button right here will automatically organize your stuff, putting all of your tools on the left. And I don't know exactly how it orders your inventory items, but it generally puts like items together. So we have this oyster. It's not in the middle of all of the like forge items. We also have our gear here. This is how you'll customize your character later on in the game if you ever want to. You can take your pants off if you're really crazy. And if you ever find any rings that increase your stats, they go in there. And boots and shoes and hats and stuff can also be put into their respective places. Next screen we have skills. These are all of the skills in the game. We have farming, which is farming, which is harvesting crops and caring for animals. Mining, which is breaking rocks and spelunking. Foraging, cutting down trees and picking stuff off of the ground. Fishing, which is well fishing. And combat, which we haven't unlocked weapons from the get-go here, but you can kill monsters. Pretty much any action that you do in the game gives experience towards one of these skills and as they go up. You'll start unlocking many things like crafting recipes, new skills, sometimes you'll just straight up be able to sell items for more money. It's really neat. This is something to focus on as you go through the game. Next we have your social tab. This is where you can see every character that you've met and how many hearts you have with them. Hearts are gained by talking to the characters and giving them gifts. As you can see over here you can only give two gifts per day. And you just need to talk to them once to get the friendship from that. As for what gifts everyone likes, you'll have to play around with what you think fits their personality. For instance, most of the girls like some type of flower, the older ladies love diamonds, and kids don't like vegetables. Although, not all gifts make sense as much as those do. So you'll have a bit of trial and error. Now there is a little bit of friendship decay if you don't talk to someone for a day, but trust me when I say it is a tiny decrease. Talking to someone just once covers you for 10 days of decay, and giving them a liked gift covers you for 20. Getting high hearts with characters can earn you recipes, occasional gifts in the mail, and cutscenes to learn more about that character. Next you have the map, it shows where you are at any given time. I'm down here in Cindersap Forest. And if you hover over any of the shops, it'll tell you when they're usually open, and it'll also tell you where people generally live. Also, for some reason, if you go over this rock in the middle of the ocean, it calls it the Lonely Stone. And if you click on it, it just closes the map. The next tab is Crafting. This is quite possibly one of the most important tabs you'll have here. All of these items that are here can be crafted if you have the correct items in your inventory. For instance, I can craft this wood fence because I have the wood in my inventory right now. And you can tell if it's craftable because it'll be lit up or not lit up. If you want to craft it, all you have to do is click it or press on it and it'll automatically use up the craftable material. And you can put it wherever you want in your inventory. And just a bit of an option for this one. You'll notice that it says number crafted 1. If you ever want to know how much you've crafted of a specific item, there's this check marks that says show advanced crafting information. I don't know why it's that vague, but literally all it does is show you how much you've crafted if you've crafted any of it. As I've said before, you'll be filling this up by buying from various shops or leveling up. You'll unlock some crafting recipes. Keep an eye on what you unlock. These are some of the best items in the entire game. Then we have our collections tab. This one isn't too important. It basically just shows you what you've gotten. I fished up that one fish earlier so it shows that I've caught that herring. I haven't done it-oh yeah we donated that one malachite. So there's the malachite. Items here will only show up on this first tab if you have put it into the shipping bin. Doesn't matter if you've grabbed it before, if you've sold it to Pierre or someone, you need to put it in a shipping bin. Don't ask me why it's like that. You have all of your cooking items here. If it's dark like this, that means that you have the recipe for it. If it is completely grayed out, then you don't have the recipe for it. And it'll be brighter if you've cooked it before. Then we have achievements. These are just various things that you can meet within the game. It's not that important. They're just there. And then letters. If you ever get a letter in the mail that you want to read again, you can read it whenever you want just so you never forget it. And then last is the options. I have gone over this briefly. There's not too many important things here. One thing that can be useful is showing your tool hit location. If you're If you're having trouble like aiming, it'll show you where you're going to hit. Why does it hit like, wait, hold on. Why does it hit so far away from me if I go behind me? Anyway, yeah, it shows you where you're going to hit if you swing anything so you won't miss. But I keep it off because I'm used to the hit locations. You can change all of your audio levels. I pretty much always have music turned off so I can add my own songs into the videos. But, you know, they're always usually like straight down the middle. One important thing that I always like to play within the graphics setting, the zoom level. And you can also click the zoom buttons here. Like, notice there's nothing here. I click it, they're here. I like to play at around 90% zoom level. If things are too small, you can zoom in a bit if you like, and you'll be able to find stuff easier. If you want to see more of the screen... You can zoom out pretty dang far and you'll be able to be like, oh there's a forged item way down in the corner. For my own personal playing, I like to keep it around 90. When I'm making a video, I keep it 100 because it just looks nicer in video format, I feel. Especially if you're like watching on mobile. And then the last tab is just if you want to exit the game, exit to title, or exit to desktop. Which I guess the exit to desktop button would probably be different if you're on console. I don't know what it would say otherwise. You know what it says. Uh... Word of warning, this game only saves when you end your day. Unless you're on mobile, mobile for some reason has the opportunity to save wherever they want. We don't, as console nubs. So keep that in mind, don't just end your day and assume that you're good. So now that we've gone through all of that, I feel like I've introduced the game pretty properly. Now we're going to play a little segment called, How Do I Unlock It and What Is It Good For? Where I'm going to give information on some of the things you might have seen. but aren't sure how to unlock. In general, I'm showing you the very important early game things, so there's still not going to be any spoilers here. Fishing! On your second day, you're going to get a note from Willy. It'll say, I just got back from a fishing trip, you should come down to the beach sometime. Then, if you head down to the beach, Willy will give you your fishing rod. The way you use this fishing rod is just like any other tool. Hold it in your hand. Instead of just pressing the button, you're going to want to hold it, and you'll get this increasing meter. The more full that meter is, the farther you will cast. And generally, casting farther away from land will give you better fish. You're going to wait until an exclamation point shows up. There we go. So you're going to press the button quickly, and then you're going to enter this mini game. What you need to do is keep this little bar on the little fish icon. If you press the button, your bar will go up, and it'll move down on its own. I like to employ a little, like, tapping strategy. to keep it in place it can be very very hard and if you're having trouble i mean look at me look at me i fished for years and that took me a while if you're having trouble with that mini game you are not alone it's notoriously difficult and it gets easier as you go along since every time you level up that bar will get bigger now if you find yourself having a lot of trouble go into a shop there's a training rod that's super super cheap that you can buy for 25 gold whenever you want Now whenever you go to catch a fish you'll notice that your bar is just about twice the size as it was before. This is because it sets your bar level to level five fishing. So once you hit level five fishing you can go back to regular rods and you'll notice no difference. The downside is you're only able to catch fish that are kind of common. Once you hit certain levels you can go into Willy's shop and he will sell new fishing rods for you to buy and that's how you upgrade your fishing pole. It's not at the blacksmith like everything else. Unlocking Mining. On day 5, you might have noticed that there was a boulder here before, it will be removed. And with that, you can go over here and walk into the mines. Upon your first visit, you'll be given a sword by this handsome man right here. And for now, there's not really too much we can do, this elevator doesn't work. We just head straight on down. The way that the mines work is every floor is randomly generated. There's going to be a new set of rocks every time we go in, and you'll notice a floor number in the top left. Every time we break any rock, there is a chance for a staircase to appear, like so. That'll send us down to the next floor. Every now and again, you might find enemies on floors. It takes quite a few hits, but you can knock them out. I took a hit there. You'll notice that I now have an HP meter showing up. If that gets to zero, you will spawn in the hospital. Your day won't end, but... It'll put a damper on things. Defeating enemies also has a chance to spawn staircases. In fact, it's a higher chance than you have breaking rocks. So I usually prioritize the enemies if they're easy enough to beat. In the mines you can find these forgeables just like you would in the overworld. If you ever find these crates, you can break them open and sometimes get very rare items. Wow, I got an amethyst and a hardwood there. Hardwood's pretty rare. If you find it, you probably want to keep it. Now the main reason you're going to want to come into the mines are these. This is an ore node. This specific one gives us copper, which you might remember is what we use to upgrade our tools. Once you hit floor five, you've now unlocked a checkpoint. You get a checkpoint every five floors, so... You never have to worry too much if you're having trouble getting any farther. Next unlock, this is a big one, the community center. Starting on day five, if you walk into Pelican Town after 8am, but before 2pm, you'll get a cutscene that unlocks the community center. But it's not completely usable yet. You're gonna have to go in, go to your left, it's a lot of stuff here, and interact with this little thing here. Once you do, you've set plans in motion. You'll get a letter the next day inviting you to the wizard's tower. During the tour we found that the wizard's tower is to the left side of Cinder Sap Forest. Head on in and you'll get a cutscene that allows you to read that weird language. And now if we come back to this plaque, we can see that there's bundles that we need to fill. And it shows you the spring forging bundles shaking because it wants you to see it first. And it's these items. Now what we can do now is donate these items and that will complete the bundle, give us a little reward which is usually pretty nice, and it'll unlock a new room of bundles to look at. This is what many people consider to be the main quest of the game. This is going to take you a very long time but the rewards will be more than worth it. Oh, also you don't have to come to the community center to check what's in the bundles. You now have this new little icon on your inventory screen. And the fun part about it is if you put your cursor over an item that can be donated, it'll start pulsing. But you can click on it and scroll and look through the bundles as you see fit. Now there is an alternative to the community center, although most will say it's not as fulfilling. Starting on day 5, same time you can unlock the Community Center, if you go into Joja Mart on the right side of Pelican Town, this is a store very similar to the general store by the way, just more expensive. You can go over to Morris here, and you'll have the option of buying a Joja membership which costs a lot of money. If you do this, you will be permanently locked out of donating items to the Community Center, and instead, you'll get the option to donate money to Joja Mart to unlock them instead. Despite what you may hear, there are no major downsides to this method other than maybe your personal fulfillment. So I've talked about cooking a lot up to this point, how do you actually unlock it? Well, it's gonna be a while because what you need to do is upgrade your house, which as we previously went over is 10,000 gold and 450 pieces of wood. You'll suddenly notice that your house is a lot bigger and if you go over to your kitchen over here, you can cook! Before I let you out, here's just a few extra tips that, while they're not super important, could make your first experience a bit more smooth. Number one, don't be afraid to make chests. They have a ton of room in them and you can place your tools in there if you don't plan on using it for the day, giving you a ton of extra space to work with. And on that same note, try to keep just about one of everything you find in storage. You never know when it's going to show up in a bundle later on, or in a cooked recipe that you want to make. Next, when you open up a chest, you'll see this button on the side. What that does is automatically organize any stacks that you have both in your chest and in your inventory, so you'll see that we have wood, and automatically organize it into the chest. This is great for just doing a quick organization, open all my chests, press that auto-organize button, and then boom, my inventory's ready for me to go out again. Some items can come in four different qualities. For the most part, this only affects how much energy they give if it's an edible item, and how much they sell for. Higher quality items become more and more common as you level up that respective stat. Once you've filled up a chest, you might notice that it's kind of hard to move. Well, if you have an empty item slot, I've selected two, you can mash the use button to move it over one spot. Note that this will actually use a little bit of energy for some reason, but it's an easy way to move things around if you just didn't like where it is and you have 30 items in here and you don't want to move them around. You may have noticed that you have a TV in your house. You should check this pretty frequently. You can see what kind of weather it is, ...will be on the next day. You can see what luck you have for that day, which affects so many things that I can't really get into it right now. If anything feels like it would be affected by luck, it probably is. On Sundays, there will be a special channel called The Queen of Sauce, where you can unlock a new cooking recipe. And if you miss any recipes on Sundays, you can watch it on Wednesday, and it'll give you any recipes that you've missed. A very important channel if it's your first time playing the game, on Monday and Thursdays you can watch Living Off the Land. And this will generally give you a little tip like, oh it's salmon berry season, you can find berries in the bushes. And sure enough, oh here's a bush, interact with it, oh wow a berry, that I can eat, for energy. That channel kinda just keeps you up to date on any weird events that are happening that you wouldn't know about elsewise. My final and most important tip. Everything repeats. Nothing is missed forever. There will always be another spring, another holiday, another chance to do whatever you think you missed out on doing. There's no need to feel rushed. That's something that really gets a lot of new players to the game. They start it up and, Oh, the day is only 13 minutes long. How can I possibly do everything? You don't. And you don't need to. I generally choose one task that I want to do today. Oh, today will be a Minds Day. And I spend... All day in the mines. Then once my energy's out, I'll go around and do something else that I make up on the spot. It doesn't really matter. You can do whatever you'd like. Thank you for watching. I really and truly hope that this video has made getting into the game easier. That's always the biggest compliment that I see in any comments of any videos. Oh, this really made the game more fun. I love that. Speaking of other videos, if you ever find yourself stuck on something, I have videos on just about everything in the game. So I've probably gone over it. In the end, I just absolutely hate seeing people try the game out and get discouraged, so hopefully this video alleviated that. I'll see you in the next one, and good night.

Maybe you don't even know how to do everything. That's where this video comes in. This'll be a spoiler-free guide to set you up to be an informed, self-sufficient farmer. I'll be explaining practically everything here, so if you'd like to skip around using the chapters in the description, please feel free.

Starting off, I'm going to go over everything in our opening menu here. We're gonna start a new farm. When creating a new farm, the most important choice you'll be making is which farm to choose.

Each farm has its own unique attributes, and some are designed to be harder than the others. For a first playthrough, I would recommend either the standard farm or the forest farm. The standard farm is the default option. There's a ton of clear space to farm in and you can pretty much do whatever you want with the space. It's very customizable and easy for a first-time player.

The forest farm on the other hand doesn't have as much area to farm, but items that can be hard to find elsewhere spawn regularly on the farm. Not only that, but it's easier to get hardwood, which is a very common resource you'll be using. Two farms that I absolutely would not recommend for your first playthrough are the Wilderness Farm, which spawns enemies at night.

Other than that, it's kind of similar to the Standard Farm. The enemies are just really a nuisance. And the Beach Farm. This was added in the most recent update. It's almost intended as a sort of hard mode.

There's a lot of farmable land, but you cannot place sprinklers, which makes farming a lot more tedious. The trade-off though is that you can go fishing for ocean fish on your farm, you can find forageables on the ground, and sometimes supply crates will show up on your shores containing pretty rare items. For the other options you can choose them if you like, they all have their little individual quirks. I find them a little annoying to traverse around because you're either going around rivers or cliffs and it's not really worth the trade-off of all the farming space. You'll find a set of advanced settings for your save file on the left.

I'd leave this pretty much untouched except for the multiplayer options if you do plan on playing with multiplayer. And you can choose them to be nearby the main house or separated. Everything else I wouldn't touch for a good vanilla impression of the game. I've seen way too many times where people have accidentally set the profit margin lower, which makes the game a lot harder and they didn't know it until months into their playthrough. Other than that, customize the character however you like.

One note, don't put the word farm in your farm name because it will say tutorial farm farm whenever it's mentioned. Just put the main name of it. And unfortunately, I did lie. The most important choice you'll actually be making is saying your favorite thing is something like Wieners.

Getting us started, explaining controls can get very complicated very fast, especially when controllers for different consoles tend to have different layouts for some reason. So if you ever need to figure out what button does what, if you press the pause button and then go over to options, you can scroll down and see what all of your buttons are bound to. near the bottom of the options menu. Your two most important buttons, left click or the left face button if you're playing on controller, uses your tools. And then the check button is right mouse button or the bottom button if you're playing on controller or if you're on Switch specifically it's the right face button.

Now if something's not happening when you press the check button sometimes it's not fully consistent. If I want to pick up this rug and move it somewhere else It is in fact the use tool button, so if something's not working the right way, try both buttons. The check button lights this fire, but the use tool button allows me to move it around.

Your first few days should be time for you to get acquainted with the world. You're given a few parsnips to start out, and we need some space to plant them. So we can use our pickaxe to get rid of rocks.

We can use the scythe to get rid of grass and fiber. These little sprite-looking things are fiber, and the clumps are grass. And the axe can be used to get rid of pretty much anything made of wood like these tiny sticks, or with a bunch of swings, you can eventually knock down a tree.

Knocking down trees gives you wood, one of the most important resources in the game. Sometimes you'll come across things that you won't be able to break yet. That's because later you can upgrade these tools, and sometimes they'll be able to break new things. With this area emptied out, I'm going to use the hoe to hoe the ground so we can put seeds in.

Ah, I missed a spot. Fun fact, you can actually use the pickaxe to unhoe a spot. It's not important.

It's just really for aesthetics. Then we'll scroll over to our seed. and either left click or right click the use tool button or check button will both plant crops. Then we can use the watering can to water each of them.

The watering can does have a finite amount of water it can hold if you ever need to refill it just walk next to water and use the tool and it'll refill. Now after all of that you might have noticed that our little bar on the bottom right here has gone down quite a bit. This is the main thing that limits you in the game, your energy level. Most actions you do use up a little bit of energy. The only thing that we've done so far that hasn't is actually swinging the scythe.

If this meter gets all the way to zero, you'll notice that you get a little notification telling you not to push it too hard, but if it goes all the way to zero, you'll be exhausted, and this will put you in an extremely sluggish state where you can barely move at all. There's a couple of ways to replenish energy. One is by eating a food.

That'll bring your energy up a little bit, or if you want to bring it back up to full, you can go to sleep for the night. And you can do this whenever you want. It's 2 20 p.m. If you have no energy because you've just done so much and you feel like you can't do anything else for the day, just go to sleep. Nothing wrong with moving on to the next day.

However, since I hit zero energy, I'm actually taking a half energy penalty. So you do not want to hit zero energy no matter what. If you become exhausted and continue to use your tools, because you can just a little bit, you'll eventually just pass out right on the spot, ending your day. Now, of course, hitting low energy doesn't mean that you have to go to bed, because there's a couple of things you could do. Like I said, you can still scythe fiber and grass, clean up your farm a little bit.

You can go around and pick foraged items. This does not take any energy. You can go around and talk to townspeople. and give them gifts?

Well, he didn't like that. And you can go to stores to prep for the next day. One of my favorite activities to do when I'm running out of energy is go fishing, because although fishing does take energy, I just eat any fish that I've caught to regain it right back. You'll gain energy faster than you're using it up, and you'll get some fishing experience to boot. So, speaking of going to sleep to replenish your energy, this game- is on moving time.

Every day you'll wake up at 6am and you'll pass out at 2am no matter what you're doing. You can see 10 minutes have already passed. An hour in this game is 43 seconds, which makes a day just about 13 minutes long.

At midnight, you'll get this notification that it's getting late. That's mostly because first of all, you don't want to pass out in whatever you're doing. And every 10 minutes after midnight, you will get a penalty. towards your energy when you wake up.

On top of that, as you can see, we have a weather system. Some days are guaranteed to be sunny and guaranteed to be rainy, but this day we just happened to get rain. You can see what weather is currently active by looking up in the top right corner.

Weather affects very few things, although the most impactful is that your crops will automatically get watered in the rain, so you don't have to do that. Normally you'd have to do that every single day until they're fully grown. The other thing you can see in the top right corner is this little flower.

This is the season indicator. The flower meaning that it's spring. Every season has 28 days exactly, which is four weeks.

With the change of the season comes characters walking in different schedules, new crops to plant, and new forageables to be found. And a general aesthetic change. Very very important note with the crops. If you still have spring crops growing and it carries into summer, they will die immediately. It's become a little bit of a rite of passage for new Stardew players to have their very expensive crops, there's tons of them, almost ready, and then summer first comes around and they walk out and they're all dead.

Feels bad, but it's happened to the best of us. When you have seeds in your inventory, you can see how many days it'll take to mature, Always take that into account. I didn't mean to use my pickaxe. Now I'd like to give you a quick tour of the world you'll be playing in. Of course, this is our farm.

Your house will always be situated at the very top right corner, right next to the shipping bin. The shipping bin is where you can sell pretty much any item that you want to, and you'll get paid the money overnight. If you don't want to get paid overnight, you can go to a store that's relevant to that item and sell it there and get the money immediately.

This exit over here goes right out to the bus stop. For now it's just an in-between area. Pelican Town is over to the right and there's a bus that doesn't work.

There's a mine cart that doesn't work. Pay no heed to it for now. Heading over to the left of our farmhouse, we're gonna have to clear things out a bit here.

There's another exit that goes north into an area that we call the Backwoods. This is another in-between area and it goes into an area called the Mountains over on the right which we'll explore in a second. This is what the fellas call the farm cave. Nothing in there for now.

We'll go over that later. Here's a broken down building. Unlocked later.

A lot of unlocked later. And if we come over here to the far left, there's a tree perfectly blocking it. This is a special shrine.

Wait for my return on the dawn of your third year. From Grandpa, who left us the farm if you watched the intro of the game. If we come all the way down to the southern end of the farm here, we can enter Cinder Sap Forest. Close by, we have Marnie's Ranch. Marnie, Jas, and Shane all live here, and this is where you'll buy animals once you unlock them.

And you can also buy supplies for those animals here. Heading over to the left, if this were Friday or Sunday, there'd be a little traveling cart that appears here. That kind of sells just bits and bobs at a very expensive price for the most part.

It's mostly for if you can't find any specific item that you need for something. There's a chance it'll show up there. It's always worth checking because there's always a lot of weird stuff.

This is the wizard's tower which currently is locked. And then the rest of Cindersap Forest is just heavily forested area. You can come here whenever you want and clear all the fiber to try and get some fiber or mixed seeds for yourself. If you cut down the trees here completely...

After a few days, a brand new tree will just appear here. You don't have to replant them and it's a great source of wood as you can see from the clear abundance of trees. This is also a great place to come looking for forageable items that are sitting on the ground, like so. And if you like, you can fish here as well. I like to wrap up a lot of my days just walking through the forest picking up any items I find because because you never know what's going to be there it doesn't use any energy so why not oh and here's a worm patch you can use your hoe to get a special item out of it sometimes it's rare sometimes it's clay and in that case it's a lost book which puts a book in the library that usually gives you a hint towards something here's a character just willy one of the beautiful things about this game is Characters have their own schedule that can be very specific depending on the day.

Every single character has a doctor's visit on a specific day of the year. Depending on the season and the weather and, I don't know, their birthday, they'll have different paths. It's super fun.

This is Leah's house. Nothing really special there right at the moment. And there's an exit over here on the right side of Cinderstab Forest that heads into the main hub of the game, Pelican Town.

You can also find Forgeables here. You'll notice trees here you cannot cut down. They are decorative. You can check the trash cans.

Sometimes you'll get a special little item. Just make sure that nobody sees you going through them. So the main buildings of the town are this conjoined hospital and general store. This is where you'll end up if you ever lose all of your health.

Health is separate from energy, but a very similar bar that will appear only if you get hurt. And they will charge you as well, so be careful about that. Very rarely, sometimes...

there is a shop open here. It has very expensive items that can refill your health. Heading into the general store, this is where you'll be buying all of your seeds.

As you can see all of these seeds ready for spring are here. You can get grass starter if you ever need to plant some more grass, a couple of cooking items, some decorations, and fruit trees. And you'll notice that these fruit trees have their given season that they're supposed to bear fruit.

This is also where you can sell a bunch of items, most importantly crops and foraged items. And very important upgrade here, you can interact with this backpack to get an inventory upgrade and that'll allow you to have open up these bars on your inventory. This is the saloon.

If you go in here You can buy a bunch of foods. These will restore your health. The salad is usually my go-to. Beer, just to show this off, if you do drink anything alcoholic, it will give you a tipsy debuff, which slows you down.

This is the blacksmith. If I can catch him here really quick. He closes at four. I was cutting it really close there. Here you can shop for ores.

They're very expensive. You can find these on your own in other places that we'll go over and coal. These are important items to upgrading your tools, which takes five of whatever material you're making them into if this first tier is all copper and quite a hefty stack of cash. You can also process geodes here.

These can give you any number of items including those materials you need to upgrade your tools or Something from your gem set of collections. Which is a perfect time to introduce this next area, the library. Going in the first time, you'll talk to the library and you'll say, Oh, it would be really nice if we could fill this place up again.

So if you ever get anything that says, Gunther can tell you more about this, then you can donate it to the museum and it's there. You get a bunch of different rewards for donating to the museum. Sometimes it's items that buff your stats, sometimes it's decorations, it can be all kinds of things.

On the southern end of town, there is an exit towards the beach. Here you can regularly find things washed up on the beach. These do give you foraging experience, just like regular foraged items. And it's also a great place to fish.

There's a lot of fish that can only be found here because this is the only ocean saltwater environment to fish in. Which kind of goes into the next thing, yes, there are saltwater and freshwater fish. Coming down onto the docks, this is Willy's Fish Shop.

You can buy many fishing-related items here, like bait, other fishing poles, and the fish themselves. Up north from Pelican Town, this is still on the same map, we have the Community Center. It's a bit run down, this is kind of what your main story will be revolving around, and it unlocks on day 5, so if you can't get in for now, don't worry about it.

Going even further north from here we can find an entrance into the mountains and this was an area I was talking about before. Immediately you'll see the carpenter's shop. Here you can do many many expensive things. You can shop for some resources like wood and stone and a bunch of furniture that you can use to decorate your house.

Some of it is functional like the calendar or the workbench which have their own uses and other are just decorations. You can find a ton of crafting recipes here as well. Two very important options that you don't want to miss, you can upgrade your house here which costs a ton of money and a lot of wood.

This will give you more room in your house, you can unlock different things like cooking, and you'll be allowed to marry someone since they don't want to marry you when you have a small house apparently. And you can also construct smaller farm buildings. These you can build up wherever you want on your farm.

Coop can have coop animals. A barn can have barn animals and then you could go down to Marnie's and buy the animals for them. There's other things like this well can just give you a source of water if you don't want to walk so far to fill your pail. Silos for feed for your animals.

The mill has a couple of very niche uses, most people don't even end up making one. And the shed just kind of gives you a lot of room to do whatever you want. Walking around the mountains this is just another good area to go fishing or forage for items if you want to do that. There's Linus, everyone loves him.

And normally there would be a rock blocking this for your first five days. As you can see, I've gone on to day seven just doing this tutorial. We'll go over all that in a second. Here we have another blocked off area. This doesn't open up until a few days into summer.

And this entrance over here goes back into the backwoods. Another great area for finding forgibles because some of the rarer forgibles that have a hard time spawning in Cindersap Forest or the town can spawn back here. So it's important to kind of check it every few days just to make sure nothing you're missing is back here. And that comes right back to your farm. And also, if you're wondering where exactly the bus stop lets out into in Pelican Town, it's right over here to the left of the general store.

That's about all I'd like to explore for now. You'll unlock many other areas as you progress through the game, but by then you'll be able to... take it into your own hands. I would now like to talk about a feature of the game that I feel like is often overlooked and contains a lot of information, so I feel like I need to explain it. The pause menu.

There are a ton of tabs here, and I'd like to go over each of them. This is your inventory. As for now, we only have one row of it, but eventually you will get more rows. If you want to swap between those rows on this toolbar down here, you can do that by On here, you can either press tab on the keyboard.

Of course, it's not doing anything because we only have one thing unlocked. Or if you're playing on controller, it is the bumper buttons. This button right here will automatically organize your stuff, putting all of your tools on the left. And I don't know exactly how it orders your inventory items, but it generally puts like items together. So we have this oyster.

It's not in the middle of all of the like forge items. We also have our gear here. This is how you'll customize your character later on in the game if you ever want to.

You can take your pants off if you're really crazy. And if you ever find any rings that increase your stats, they go in there. And boots and shoes and hats and stuff can also be put into their respective places. Next screen we have skills. These are all of the skills in the game.

We have farming, which is farming, which is harvesting crops and caring for animals. Mining, which is breaking rocks and spelunking. Foraging, cutting down trees and picking stuff off of the ground.

Fishing, which is well fishing. And combat, which we haven't unlocked weapons from the get-go here, but you can kill monsters. Pretty much any action that you do in the game gives experience towards one of these skills and as they go up.

You'll start unlocking many things like crafting recipes, new skills, sometimes you'll just straight up be able to sell items for more money. It's really neat. This is something to focus on as you go through the game. Next we have your social tab. This is where you can see every character that you've met and how many hearts you have with them.

Hearts are gained by talking to the characters and giving them gifts. As you can see over here you can only give two gifts per day. And you just need to talk to them once to get the friendship from that.

As for what gifts everyone likes, you'll have to play around with what you think fits their personality. For instance, most of the girls like some type of flower, the older ladies love diamonds, and kids don't like vegetables. Although, not all gifts make sense as much as those do.

So you'll have a bit of trial and error. Now there is a little bit of friendship decay if you don't talk to someone for a day, but trust me when I say it is a tiny decrease. Talking to someone just once covers you for 10 days of decay, and giving them a liked gift covers you for 20. Getting high hearts with characters can earn you recipes, occasional gifts in the mail, and cutscenes to learn more about that character.

Next you have the map, it shows where you are at any given time. I'm down here in Cindersap Forest. And if you hover over any of the shops, it'll tell you when they're usually open, and it'll also tell you where people generally live.

Also, for some reason, if you go over this rock in the middle of the ocean, it calls it the Lonely Stone. And if you click on it, it just closes the map. The next tab is Crafting. This is quite possibly one of the most important tabs you'll have here.

All of these items that are here can be crafted if you have the correct items in your inventory. For instance, I can craft this wood fence because I have the wood in my inventory right now. And you can tell if it's craftable because it'll be lit up or not lit up.

If you want to craft it, all you have to do is click it or press on it and it'll automatically use up the craftable material. And you can put it wherever you want in your inventory. And just a bit of an option for this one. You'll notice that it says number crafted 1. If you ever want to know how much you've crafted of a specific item, there's this check marks that says show advanced crafting information. I don't know why it's that vague, but literally all it does is show you how much you've crafted if you've crafted any of it.

As I've said before, you'll be filling this up by buying from various shops or leveling up. You'll unlock some crafting recipes. Keep an eye on what you unlock.

These are some of the best items in the entire game. Then we have our collections tab. This one isn't too important. It basically just shows you what you've gotten.

I fished up that one fish earlier so it shows that I've caught that herring. I haven't done it-oh yeah we donated that one malachite. So there's the malachite.

Items here will only show up on this first tab if you have put it into the shipping bin. Doesn't matter if you've grabbed it before, if you've sold it to Pierre or someone, you need to put it in a shipping bin. Don't ask me why it's like that. You have all of your cooking items here. If it's dark like this, that means that you have the recipe for it.

If it is completely grayed out, then you don't have the recipe for it. And it'll be brighter if you've cooked it before. Then we have achievements. These are just various things that you can meet within the game.

It's not that important. They're just there. And then letters.

If you ever get a letter in the mail that you want to read again, you can read it whenever you want just so you never forget it. And then last is the options. I have gone over this briefly. There's not too many important things here.

One thing that can be useful is showing your tool hit location. If you're If you're having trouble like aiming, it'll show you where you're going to hit. Why does it hit like, wait, hold on.

Why does it hit so far away from me if I go behind me? Anyway, yeah, it shows you where you're going to hit if you swing anything so you won't miss. But I keep it off because I'm used to the hit locations. You can change all of your audio levels. I pretty much always have music turned off so I can add my own songs into the videos.

But, you know, they're always usually like straight down the middle. One important thing that I always like to play within the graphics setting, the zoom level. And you can also click the zoom buttons here.

Like, notice there's nothing here. I click it, they're here. I like to play at around 90% zoom level. If things are too small, you can zoom in a bit if you like, and you'll be able to find stuff easier.

If you want to see more of the screen... You can zoom out pretty dang far and you'll be able to be like, oh there's a forged item way down in the corner. For my own personal playing, I like to keep it around 90. When I'm making a video, I keep it 100 because it just looks nicer in video format, I feel. Especially if you're like watching on mobile. And then the last tab is just if you want to exit the game, exit to title, or exit to desktop.

Which I guess the exit to desktop button would probably be different if you're on console. I don't know what it would say otherwise. You know what it says. Uh...

Word of warning, this game only saves when you end your day. Unless you're on mobile, mobile for some reason has the opportunity to save wherever they want. We don't, as console nubs.

So keep that in mind, don't just end your day and assume that you're good. So now that we've gone through all of that, I feel like I've introduced the game pretty properly. Now we're going to play a little segment called, How Do I Unlock It and What Is It Good For?

Where I'm going to give information on some of the things you might have seen. but aren't sure how to unlock. In general, I'm showing you the very important early game things, so there's still not going to be any spoilers here. Fishing!

On your second day, you're going to get a note from Willy. It'll say, I just got back from a fishing trip, you should come down to the beach sometime. Then, if you head down to the beach, Willy will give you your fishing rod.

The way you use this fishing rod is just like any other tool. Hold it in your hand. Instead of just pressing the button, you're going to want to hold it, and you'll get this increasing meter.

The more full that meter is, the farther you will cast. And generally, casting farther away from land will give you better fish. You're going to wait until an exclamation point shows up. There we go.

So you're going to press the button quickly, and then you're going to enter this mini game. What you need to do is keep this little bar on the little fish icon. If you press the button, your bar will go up, and it'll move down on its own. I like to employ a little, like, tapping strategy.

to keep it in place it can be very very hard and if you're having trouble i mean look at me look at me i fished for years and that took me a while if you're having trouble with that mini game you are not alone it's notoriously difficult and it gets easier as you go along since every time you level up that bar will get bigger now if you find yourself having a lot of trouble go into a shop there's a training rod that's super super cheap that you can buy for 25 gold whenever you want Now whenever you go to catch a fish you'll notice that your bar is just about twice the size as it was before. This is because it sets your bar level to level five fishing. So once you hit level five fishing you can go back to regular rods and you'll notice no difference.

The downside is you're only able to catch fish that are kind of common. Once you hit certain levels you can go into Willy's shop and he will sell new fishing rods for you to buy and that's how you upgrade your fishing pole. It's not at the blacksmith like everything else. Unlocking Mining.

On day 5, you might have noticed that there was a boulder here before, it will be removed. And with that, you can go over here and walk into the mines. Upon your first visit, you'll be given a sword by this handsome man right here.

And for now, there's not really too much we can do, this elevator doesn't work. We just head straight on down. The way that the mines work is every floor is randomly generated. There's going to be a new set of rocks every time we go in, and you'll notice a floor number in the top left.

Every time we break any rock, there is a chance for a staircase to appear, like so. That'll send us down to the next floor. Every now and again, you might find enemies on floors.

It takes quite a few hits, but you can knock them out. I took a hit there. You'll notice that I now have an HP meter showing up.

If that gets to zero, you will spawn in the hospital. Your day won't end, but... It'll put a damper on things. Defeating enemies also has a chance to spawn staircases.

In fact, it's a higher chance than you have breaking rocks. So I usually prioritize the enemies if they're easy enough to beat. In the mines you can find these forgeables just like you would in the overworld. If you ever find these crates, you can break them open and sometimes get very rare items.

Wow, I got an amethyst and a hardwood there. Hardwood's pretty rare. If you find it, you probably want to keep it. Now the main reason you're going to want to come into the mines are these.

This is an ore node. This specific one gives us copper, which you might remember is what we use to upgrade our tools. Once you hit floor five, you've now unlocked a checkpoint. You get a checkpoint every five floors, so...

You never have to worry too much if you're having trouble getting any farther. Next unlock, this is a big one, the community center. Starting on day five, if you walk into Pelican Town after 8am, but before 2pm, you'll get a cutscene that unlocks the community center.

But it's not completely usable yet. You're gonna have to go in, go to your left, it's a lot of stuff here, and interact with this little thing here. Once you do, you've set plans in motion.

You'll get a letter the next day inviting you to the wizard's tower. During the tour we found that the wizard's tower is to the left side of Cinder Sap Forest. Head on in and you'll get a cutscene that allows you to read that weird language. And now if we come back to this plaque, we can see that there's bundles that we need to fill. And it shows you the spring forging bundles shaking because it wants you to see it first.

And it's these items. Now what we can do now is donate these items and that will complete the bundle, give us a little reward which is usually pretty nice, and it'll unlock a new room of bundles to look at. This is what many people consider to be the main quest of the game.

This is going to take you a very long time but the rewards will be more than worth it. Oh, also you don't have to come to the community center to check what's in the bundles. You now have this new little icon on your inventory screen. And the fun part about it is if you put your cursor over an item that can be donated, it'll start pulsing.

But you can click on it and scroll and look through the bundles as you see fit. Now there is an alternative to the community center, although most will say it's not as fulfilling. Starting on day 5, same time you can unlock the Community Center, if you go into Joja Mart on the right side of Pelican Town, this is a store very similar to the general store by the way, just more expensive. You can go over to Morris here, and you'll have the option of buying a Joja membership which costs a lot of money.

If you do this, you will be permanently locked out of donating items to the Community Center, and instead, you'll get the option to donate money to Joja Mart to unlock them instead. Despite what you may hear, there are no major downsides to this method other than maybe your personal fulfillment. So I've talked about cooking a lot up to this point, how do you actually unlock it? Well, it's gonna be a while because what you need to do is upgrade your house, which as we previously went over is 10,000 gold and 450 pieces of wood. You'll suddenly notice that your house is a lot bigger and if you go over to your kitchen over here, you can cook!

Before I let you out, here's just a few extra tips that, while they're not super important, could make your first experience a bit more smooth. Number one, don't be afraid to make chests. They have a ton of room in them and you can place your tools in there if you don't plan on using it for the day, giving you a ton of extra space to work with. And on that same note, try to keep just about one of everything you find in storage. You never know when it's going to show up in a bundle later on, or in a cooked recipe that you want to make.

Next, when you open up a chest, you'll see this button on the side. What that does is automatically organize any stacks that you have both in your chest and in your inventory, so you'll see that we have wood, and automatically organize it into the chest. This is great for just doing a quick organization, open all my chests, press that auto-organize button, and then boom, my inventory's ready for me to go out again.

Some items can come in four different qualities. For the most part, this only affects how much energy they give if it's an edible item, and how much they sell for. Higher quality items become more and more common as you level up that respective stat.

Once you've filled up a chest, you might notice that it's kind of hard to move. Well, if you have an empty item slot, I've selected two, you can mash the use button to move it over one spot. Note that this will actually use a little bit of energy for some reason, but it's an easy way to move things around if you just didn't like where it is and you have 30 items in here and you don't want to move them around. You may have noticed that you have a TV in your house.

You should check this pretty frequently. You can see what kind of weather it is, ...will be on the next day. You can see what luck you have for that day, which affects so many things that I can't really get into it right now. If anything feels like it would be affected by luck, it probably is. On Sundays, there will be a special channel called The Queen of Sauce, where you can unlock a new cooking recipe.

And if you miss any recipes on Sundays, you can watch it on Wednesday, and it'll give you any recipes that you've missed. A very important channel if it's your first time playing the game, on Monday and Thursdays you can watch Living Off the Land. And this will generally give you a little tip like, oh it's salmon berry season, you can find berries in the bushes.

And sure enough, oh here's a bush, interact with it, oh wow a berry, that I can eat, for energy. That channel kinda just keeps you up to date on any weird events that are happening that you wouldn't know about elsewise. My final and most important tip. Everything repeats.

Nothing is missed forever. There will always be another spring, another holiday, another chance to do whatever you think you missed out on doing. There's no need to feel rushed. That's something that really gets a lot of new players to the game.

They start it up and, Oh, the day is only 13 minutes long. How can I possibly do everything? You don't.

And you don't need to. I generally choose one task that I want to do today. Oh, today will be a Minds Day.

And I spend... All day in the mines. Then once my energy's out, I'll go around and do something else that I make up on the spot.

It doesn't really matter. You can do whatever you'd like. Thank you for watching.

I really and truly hope that this video has made getting into the game easier. That's always the biggest compliment that I see in any comments of any videos. Oh, this really made the game more fun.

I love that. Speaking of other videos, if you ever find yourself stuck on something, I have videos on just about everything in the game. So I've probably gone over it.

In the end, I just absolutely hate seeing people try the game out and get discouraged, so hopefully this video alleviated that. I'll see you in the next one, and good night.

Transcript for:Beginner's Guide to Stardew Valley Farming

Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to Stardew Valley Farming