Stardew Valley/Second Year

Your goals for your second year are naturally determined by how far you've come in the first year.

Usually you'll have several things left to find for the Community Centre, and finishing this before the end of the second year is a major goal, and usually fairly readily achievable.

Common things to still be pursuing for the Community Centre
Many but not all of the Community Centre items have a chance of being sold from the Travelling Cart on Fridays and Sundays. It's well worth making a point of visiting it regularly.

If you haven't made a list on a bit of note paper yet, now is probably the time.


 * Truffles: You'll need a fully upgraded Barn from Robin, and some Pigs from Marnie.


 * Fiddlehead Fern: if you haven't found the Secret Woods yet, take a Steel Axe and go looking around the forests for something that might be blocking an exit. It's more likely that you have found your way in by this stage, but you'll have to wait for Summer before this fern will be forageable.


 * Red Cabbage: This will have to wait until Summer of year 2, when Pierre begins to sell seeds for it. Make sure you plant some!


 * Pufferfish: There are usually several fish outstanding and you'll want to look up where and when to find them. There's no in-game reference but plenty of websites.  Pufferfish is the hardest to find, and to catch - it's only available in Summer from the Ocean between 12 noon and 4pm, and it's a pretty difficult fish.

Making the most of your land on the farm
If you have a highly upgraded watering can and/or a lot of sprinklers, you can grow crops over a very large area. This will let you make a lot of money.

There's a trade-off here - do you want to get the same money for less work, or more money for the same amount of work? One way or another it's time to really work on getting the financially rewarding stuff going. The less often you have to touch things for your money, the better. This means, high value produce, and high value processing.


 * Iridium Sprinklers: You need a bar of Iridium and a Battery. (And a bar of Gold, but by the time you have Iridium, Gold is plentiful.)  An Iridium Sprinkler will water 24 surrounding squares for you - so you can keep more of your soil tilled and producing.  In order to make your own, you'll want to have a bunch of lightning rods somewhere, so that when lightning storms come through (usually in Summer) the rods produce Batteries for you.  (There is no advantage to spreading the rods around your farm.)  You'll also need to be visiting the Skull Cavern, which requires repairing the Bus and getting to the bottom level of the Mines (120).


 * Truffles: Cows are good money up to a point - past that point, it may be time to sell them. (You might keep one to produce milk for cooking purposes.)  Pigs are the new Black - confine them in a modestly sized field with plenty of grass, and you can pick up their truffles whenever you feel like.  Basic truffles should be fed through an oil maker, but if you develop Foraging until you have Botanist, you'll be picking up Iridium Quality truffles and they are worth as much as Truffle Oil.


 * 13 day crops: The produce that takes longest to grow, needs least attention. In order to get two rounds in a season, you'll need to plant these crops on day 1, 2, 14, and 15.


 * Recurring Harvests: Berries, and Coffee. Although these involve more harvesting effort than the long term crops, you only need to plant them once - and usually they yield quite good profits for the season.  You'll generally want to plant these as early in the season as you can.  Corn, unfortunately, is not nearly so profitable.


 * Extremely valuable crops: Rare Seeds take most of Autumn to grow into a single Sweet Gem Berry, but that berry is worth thousands! In the second year, whenever you visit the travelling cart, you can probably buy any and all Rare Seeds that are available.  These can be saved for Autumn or planted in the Greenhouse.  Wherever you put them, try to give them Quality Fertilizer - unlike produce you're going to process, it *really* helps if this comes out Gold Quality.


 * Star Fruit: Make sure you've fixed the bus by Summer of your 2nd year, because in the Desert you find the Oasis where you can buy Star Fruit seeds. The seeds are pricey - 400gp each - and take 13 days to grow, but the fruit is quite valuable at 750 gp.  The profits from growing and selling regular starfruit are respectable, but the real money is in star fruit wine.

But the effective way to make money isn't to grow Ancient Fruit outside. Plant your first seeds in the Greenhouse, and don't turn the first few fruits into wine - put them through seed makers and get more vines growing. Eventually you may have a greenhouse full of Ancient Fruit. If you've not had any luck digging up artifact spots, there's another way to get your first Ancient Seeds; a seed maker has a small chance of returning them instead of the right seeds for the produce you fed in. So get several Seed Makers together and keep feeding stuff to them (berries, most likely.)
 * Ancient Fruit: One of the artifacts you can dig up and donate to the museum is Ancient Seeds. If you do this, Gus will give you a packet of seeds to plant.  If you plant it outside, it will take a season to grow, then give you a fruit every 7 days ... the fruit is second only to Star Fruit in value, which means it's well worth turning into wine.


 * Kegs: Wines and Juices are significantly more valuable than the produce they come from. The value depends on what you put in - Salmonberries are only worth 5 gp raw; and 15 gp wine; but Pomegranates are worth 140gp raw and the wine is worth 420gp.  So you want to be putting in the most valuable stuff you can.  Alas, Sweet Gem Berries can't be processed; Starfruit and Ancient Fruit yield the most valuable wine.  Hops and Wheat take less time to process in the keg, and although the input material is very cheap, the resulting ale or beer is 300 or 200gp; very profitable!  Once you can grow lots of starfruit, however, the wine is more profitable and less work.

So you want a lot of kegs. Iron, Copper, and Wood are straightforward to obtain; the limiting factor is usually Oak Resin. Set yourself up well by placing tappers on several oak trees.

As your farm develops you may run out of room for your kegs. Once your house is getting crowded with kegs, it's time to build a shed or two, and set kegs around all the walls and in double rows through the middle. In later years when you're filling the kegs all at once, it's worth putting one keg outside the door, and doing that one last - when it's finished, so is everything inside.

Positioning yourself to win Grandpa's approval
At the beginning of your third year, Grandpa's spirit will visit, and candles will light up on his shrine according to how well you've done. If you have achieved enough that he lights up four candles, then interacting with his shrine will yield you the Statue of Perfection, which produces some iridium ore every day. That's pretty special; it will make it easy to further develop and automate your farm. There are 21 points available and you need 12 of them to get this full approval. If you don't get it at the first opportunity, you can feed a diamond to the shrine later, so don't think that this introduces a hard time limit to the game. There is still no Fail, just different rates of success.

You can win a lot of approval by simply making a lot of money; if you've earned a million dollars you'll get 7 points.

Points can also be earned by:
 * Completing the Community Centre bundles
 * Winning your pet's love (you can get this in the first year, if you both pet and water it.)
 * Developing close friendships (8+ hearts) with 5 or 10 villagers
 * Getting your house and spouse to the point where kids are possible
 * Developing your Skills to a high level
 * Completing some of the collections - Full Shipment is probably the easiest, but Master Angler (fishing) and Complete Collection (Museum) also count. (The latter two also reward you with stardrops!)
 * Getting to the very bottom of the Mines
 * Giving 60+ items to the Museum (Gunther will give you a Rusty Key after this point.)

So you want to:
 * Make lots of money in the second year.
 * Hand out berries whenever you see anyone in town. Visit regularly.
 * Pick a single person and always carry some of what they love to give to them. Buy them a Bouquet at 8 hearts, pamper them to 10 hearts, and then visit the Rock Pools on a rainy day to buy a Mermaid's Pendant.
 * Plant a bit of everything, ship some and process some. (You'll need Pierre's Year 2 seeds, and the seeds from the Oasis, a Rare Seed, a Void Chicken.)