Stardew Valley/First Summer

Your first Summer
Spring is a wrap and it's time now for new stock at Pierre’s and new kinds of fish and forage! Check your field size and cash on hand and make your shopping list. Buy a little of everything, but since your field is now at the limit of what you can manage, focus mostly on Melons (which give you the most for your time and energy), maybe some extra Hops for food and Pale Ale (though it is an inconvenient trellis crop), and maybe extra flowers for wooing or friendship gifts. Through the month, as you are able to get more sprinklers or an upgraded can, you can grow and diversify more--limited again by the time and energy cost of planting and harvesting anything but the slowest, most valuable crops. Keep focusing mostly on Melons.

Three days into Summer, an earthquake will open up a new area. This is the train station and Spa area to the north of Robin’s house. As in Spring, you’re probably working til you’re nearly exhausted. The Spa is refreshing! Once you’ve run low on energy, you can go and soak in the pool for 20-30 minutes - sit *still* - and your energy bar will refill. The shortest way to the Spa is via the Backwoods - in other words, the northern exit to your farm. After you’ve had a soak, you probably have the energy to chop wood or go fishing, and sometimes you’ll have the time to go mining. It may be worth doing this every day!

Any time rain is predicted, consider taking your watering can to Clint for an upgrade before 4:00 p.m. and picking it up after 9:00 the morning after the rain. On the rainy day, if your TV luck is good, keep mining with lots of food on hand. If it's bad, fish for hours until you catch enough easy fish to level up. Any day you finish your chores early, go fishing or go back and mine a previous good floor for ore even if you can't advance another 5 floors. Iron is very useful in your first summer, it is needed for crafting several highly desirable things, including sprinklers and kegs; you’d also like to upgrade your watering can, then your axe and your pickaxe. For that you have to get past floor 40.

If you can get a steel axe before the end of summer, you can cut your way into the Secret Woods and find some Fiddlehead Fern; otherwise you will have to wait until next summer for Fiddlehead. (You can’t complete the Bulletin Board bundles before Summer of year 2 anyway, because Red Cabbage seeds aren’t available until then, so don’t get too upset if you miss this one in your first year.)

Steel axes also let you get Hardwood, which is initially useful for crafting the Cheese Press. If you can afford a Barn and some Cows before the end of summer, cheese sells for nearly twice as much as milk. If you haven’t got a Coop, you probably want that before the barn.

Use the hopper in your Coop or Barn to draw hay from the Silo (the day after rain, so that the hay rack isn’t full) - you’ll want 10 for the Community Centre, but stow the rest in a chest and then you can cut more without paying for a second silo.

Craft Preserves Jars and Kegs to start earning big farm profits; wines and juices are very profitable. Of the two, Preserves Jars always have the highest rate of return due to their faster speed, so they are good for your first year even though Kegs have higher profit. Later when you are even richer and lazier, you will want to put your crops in Kegs and forget about them, then put your Wines into Casks for a month. But for now, keep your income flowing mostly with Preserves Jars and a few Kegs.

Preserves Jars are very easy for you to make at this point. To get kegs, you need copper, iron, wood, and oak resin - it’s a good time to Tap another oak tree or two. You might even plant some oak trees in a nice line - when the nearest has syrup, you’ll know to collect from all of them.

A keg turns Hops into Pale Ale very quickly, taking about 1.5 days to go from a 25gp crop to a 300gp artisan good, and this is an unusually good rate of return on both money and time. Wheat into Beer is just as fast but the output is not quite as profitable.

Keep your Jars, Kegs, and Chests in a barn. Your buildings are all bigger inside than outside, and barns scale the most. Or keep them in a shed for good looks. Either way, the nice thing is you can rearrange your farm any time without disturbing them. Put one Jars and one Keg in plain sight and fill it last as an alert for when the others are ready.

Try to go fishing in a few different times and places - if you’re serious about the Fish Tank bundles, make a list of the fish you need, and consult a reference to find out which ones you can catch in Summer and what the conditions need to be.

The last few days of summer (specifically, 24-26) is actually quite a good time to plant some wheat. It survives into Fall (as does Corn, but that’s most profitable if planted earlier in Summer) and ripens in only 4 days. So any soil under Wheat is still hoed, and even still fertilized (normally the fertilizer disappears at season change), and you should still be able to get two Pumpkin crops through before Winter. (If you plant wheat on day 27 or 28 this won’t quite work. There’ll still be time for other crops.)

It’s good if you can put together one or two lightning rods by late summer - these will yield batteries the day after a thunderstorm, and a few batteries may let you craft iridium sprinklers for the Greenhouse in winter. This is not the only way to water the greenhouse, of course, just the easiest.