Stardew Valley Tips and Tricks
(for Jo)

Let's Start at the Beginning...

I start each day by getting out of bed, go outside to pet my dog and fill his water dish.

Very early in the game, you leave your house one morning and a neighbor is there with your favorite kind of pet (which you chose when you started the game - dog or cat) and gives it to you.

After Sam is taken care of, I go to my chest and pick up the tools I will need for that day (maybe a fishing pole to spend the day fishing, an axe and pickaxe to clear out my property, a hoe to tend to my crops, etc.).  You'll spend the early part of the game clearing away all the rocks and weeds and trees from your property and then begin crop-growing by hoeing fields and planting inexpensive seeds.
You'll want to begin earning money in the game right away because the first thing you'll want to buy is a backpack that will increase your inventory and allow you to carry more things at once.  When you start the game, the amount of items you can carry is frustratingly small but that will quickly change into something more comfortable when you buy that brand new backpack.  This first goal is easy to accomplish and will give you your first sense of accomplishment.

The absolute best part of this game is that it really has no way to fail.  Not only can't you die but you really can't fuck anything up too badly.  Just about the worst disappointment you may face is not harvesting crops in time and then losing that investment.  But because you'll start the game growing very cheap things, we're talking a loss of pennies here.

Some peoples' farms are amazing...  And big.

Above everything else, the game doesn't put any pressure on you.  Spend your days doing whatever you want and don't ever worry about the 1,000 things you're NOT doing.  Like I've hinted at in the past, there really are dozens of ways to spend your day here.  You can spend the entire game just running your farm, planting and harvesting, learning the best ways to make the most amount of money in the shortest time.  The money will start rolling in very quickly and just running your farm is a full-on complete farm simulation.  

You'll get the hang of managing your crops and quickly fall into a pattern of chores each morning: check your crops right after taking care of your pet.  The games time is always passing: day into night and seasons.  The changing seasons are beautiful and certain crops can only be grown in certain seasons.

You'll go from watering your crops with a watering can all the way to installing expensive irrigation and sprinkler systems.

There's a crafting system and you'll go from making simple things like scarecrows, fences and cobblestone walkways up to many little personal items to decorate your farm.

You'll start the game with a small property with one farm house and one run-down broken greenhouse.  After fixing up that greenhouse, you'll continue to build additions to these two buildings and then adding more structures, things like barns to house the animals you might buy in the future.

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Besides farming, there's relationships.  There's 30+ people that live near you and the game will track your relationship with each.  Each one has a personal backstory and life and as you get to know them, you'll begin to learn about their lives, some happy and some not-so-happy.  Eventually, you can date, marry and have kids with a person but that doesn't come quickly.  Getting to know people better takes real work, just like in real life.  To help you along, this little town throws two special events every month, festivals that will bring the whole town out.

Early in the game, I was at some Flower Dance and was bummed that no one would dance with me.  "What do you expect," one person asked me.  "You're a stranger who just moved here!  Just wait until next year when you'll have scores of people lined up."

Despite looking like a Super Nintendo game, the game contains a David Lynch-like dark underbelly if you want to uncover it.  There's spookiness right under the surface and when night falls each day, the town becomes much different.  Besides the ghosts and spirits you may find floating thru the graveyard and deserted Community Center, some people have sad realistic lives if you take the time to get to know them.  There's a seemingly homeless guy living in a tent on the edge of the park who will eventually tell you how he got into that situation.  Penney has an alcoholic mom and one toon suffers from depression.  None of this is played for laughs and is taken seriously.  Finding this stuff out takes a lot of digging and if its something you'd rather not know, it's easily avoided.  Just like the deep farming simulation, this relationship simulator is just as complex.  Nothing in this game is half-assed which makes the fact that it was mostly built by just one guy over years all the more impressive.

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Besides farming and people, there's a D and D-type adventure component waiting to be discovered.  There's a few mines waiting to be found, one with HUNDREDS of levels down, each one getting more dangerous but also containing more and more valuable treasure.  The combat is just involved enough to be satisfying.  There's a wizard's tower and I have no idea if that guy is good or bad.

The game's creator has never stopped adding content to the game through patches, not only fixing bugs but adding new things to do.  I hear a whole island was recently added and no one yet knows what that's about.

(to be continued...)