Stardew Valley/First Spring

What do I have?
You start the game on your farm that is west (left) of the bus stop that brought you here. A town is east (right) of the bus stop. Your farm consists of everything you can go to without a screen change. You have 500 gold, 15 parsnips, and whichever farm map you chose (For your first game the Standard map is a good choice; if you’re playing on another map you may need to think about where your water and your open land are, before choosing where to plant your seeds.)

What am I doing?
The story consists of a) befriending the villagers (including eventual marriage and children), which you mainly do by talking and thoughtful gifting especially on birthdays (!) and b) helping to rebuild the Community Center and the Museum, which you do by contributing a variety of items. It doesn't matter at all to the story how many years those take. But some things can only be done certain days or seasons each year. One of the purposes of this walkthrough is to alert you to those things.

Good goals for the month (season) of Spring are:
 * Socializing: Remember every birthday this month with an appropriate gold star gift.
 * Community Center: Get rewarded for the Spring Crops and Spring Forage bundles. Save 5 gold star parsnips for the Gold Star Crops bundle.
 * Museum: Claim a Cauliflower seeds reward before Spring 16 for donating at least 5 items. Plant it by Spring 16.
 * Foraging: Hoe all wigglers, get enough food for mining, save 4 gold star Daffodils for birthdays and one basic of each for the Community Center. Tap some trees, mostly oak.
 * Mining: Mine whenever there is good mining luck, food, and most of a day available.
 * Fishing: Try warming up to fishing for at least half a day, and if you do, keep it up when there is bad mining luck or rain.
 * Farming: Plant all the Parsnips you can on Spring 1 and 2, Potatoes on Spring 5 and 6, Strawberries on Spring 13 and 14, and more Parsnips on Spring 23 and 24 plus at least one Cauliflower, Green Bean along the way. Make a sprinkler or two. This calendar balances energy/time and growth by saving all your money to put the most expensive crops possible in the ground. It also has a day of padding in case you miss any watering, so the earlier days are always safest.

Legendary crop alert: The legendary crop in Stardew Valley is Ancient Fruit, and you can't buy seeds. You must snowball from a single Ancient Seed artifact (or any additional ones) you happen to find into Ancient Seeds (with an "s"), then to Ancient Fruit, more seeds, and more fruit and beyond. So when you happen to find any Ancient Seed artifact, feel very lucky and never sell it or its raw produce.

To do

 * Plant and water 40 parsnips. (They are the fastest way to grow your farm and profits your first 5 days.)
 * Greet everybody you see on your trip to the store
 * Chop trees toward 50 wood for a chest. (Ship fiber just this once if needed for room and extra Parsnips until you get a chest. Sap second if necessary.)
 * Pick up any Spring forage you see
 * Till with your hoe any "wiggly worms" you see sticking out of the ground

Plant your field
On your first day, Spring 1, you need to get 40 parsnips planted and watered near a water source, and you don't want to clear rocks today (later you do!). So find a mostly clear or grassy/weedy patch of ground (away from rocks and big stumps and not too big; you still have city slicker muscles and cheap tools) near a pond. Clear 40 tiles here using your tools:

Then till and water the 40 tiles with your hoe (un-till mistakes with your pickaxe) and watering can.

For the first year, a layout of 3x3 squares is perfect.
 * Leave the middles empty, at least temporarily.
 * Helps you visualize your layout and count things easily while you till, plant, harvest, and make your shopping list.
 * Trains yourself not to "commit" your sprinkler spaces to anything slow-growing
 * Allows for your first sprinklers in case you want to stop watering. You can fill in the middles anytime if you decide you don't want sprinklers or you want to see giant crops.
 * Allow for a scarecrow. Maybe leave a 3x3 square empty in the middle of your field. SDV-scarecrow-middle.png Or leave a space left (west) or right (east) of your field where your scarecrow can stand watch without obscuring any crops. Two scarecrows centered on the edges of a field can cover 3 x 5 squares (9 x 15 tiles) wide or tall. (Scarecrows are very soon cheap enough you don't need to worry too much about optimizing them, so relax and have fun.) SDV-scarecrows-3x5-square-tall.png
 * Zoom all the way out (75%) so you can see your farm. Zoom is under the menu/inventory box, Options tab.  After every zoom change, your screen will reset, and you will need to scroll down again to the Zoom option. Your zoom level is saved when you go to sleep.

Now you can run into town (exiting your farm to the right while it's still early), find the general store (Pierre’s; closes at 5) greet everybody you see, and spend all your money on more parsnip seeds. At the store, you select your quantity of seeds, then you must place it a slot in your backpack before you can exit or continue. Click carefully because Pierre does not offer refunds even if you have not put your purchase in your backpack.

Then go back home and plant your 40 parsnip seeds immediately; they should be ready for harvest on Spring 5th if you keep them watered every day.

Work on a chest
You’ll need a chest very early on, so if you have energy left, it’s worth using your axe to cut down whatever trees you can manage. If your energy bar gets right down to scarlet - and you get the message “You are becoming exhausted,” stop right there and go do something that doesn't use your energy.

As soon as you get 50 wood, make a chest and put it near your field, your house, and your path to town.

Clear and forage
Swinging your scythe takes no energy and weeds stand in the way of your your movement, crops, trees, and off-farm forage, so cut down as many weeds as you can easily find. Just this once, ship fiber to get another Parsnip seed for each 20. If you get mixed seeds, plant them tomorrow when you have more energy to hoe and water them. Running also takes no energy, so if you have plenty of daylight, try foraging for food and money north and south of your farm.


 * Spring Onion: food
 * Leek and Dandelion: food and Community Center Crafts Room "Spring Foraging Bundle"
 * Wild Horseradish: money or food and Community Center Crafts Room "Spring Foraging Bundle"
 * Daffodil: money, birthdays, and Community Center Crafts Room "Spring Foraging Bundle"

Today only, as soon as you get tired (Zzzz), ship everything you found. Some of the above are good for gifts to some people, but it's complicated except for Linus (tent), Leah (south of farm), and Dr. Harvey, who like them and all forage from all seasons. There are four people who would like a Daffodil for their birthday this month. Their birthdays and wishes are given on the appropriate dates below.

Spring 2
Rare Offer Alert: There is an Egg Festival on Spring 13 where you can buy seeds for Strawberry to harvest and sell twice before Summer comes. This is very valuable because it will put lots of money in the ground without taking all your time and energy to water that money. You can do this if you transition to Potatoes (they take 6 days) by Spring 6. It being a Festival day, Pierre's store is closed, so you can't sell your harvest on that day. To snowball from Parsnip (Spring 1 and 2) to Potato (Spring 5 and 6) to Strawberry (Spring 13 and 14), you need to harvest and sell everything on or before the 12th to get enough money to buy lots of Strawberry.

Today is 4 days before Spring 6, so it's the last day to plant parsnips that will be harvested in time to help you buy Strawberries. Buy and plant more Parsnips (with the money from whatever you shipped last night) to sell in time for the Egg Festival Potato transition deadline on Spring 6 (see Spring 5). You won't have time for two more harvests of Parsnips before the Egg Festival, so you may as well save up from here out for Potatoes on Spring 5 and 6. Switching to potatoes on Spring 6 helps you keep your field small to save time and energy to work on other important things.

If you can't plant Parsnips today, save all your money for Potatoes on Spring 6.

Today you’ll get an invitation to go fishing, and that’s a good thing to try once you’ve watered your Parsnips or on a rainy day. Willy will give you an old fishing rod. Try out the fishing mini game for at least half a day. If you can catch the easiest fish that come along and warm up to it, then the fishing mini game will be worth the energy right away and you will level up quickly to easier fishing - eat some fish (and any algae and seaweed you hook) and sell others, for a nice early income. But if you find it frustrating, leave it for later and go foraging instead - there are valuable shells on the beach, and the forest south of your farm has a wide spread of area where flowers and berries may be found. Foraging takes time, but not energy.

Week 1
Prepare for Spring 6 Potato planting. Get your field cleared and tilled to a size of about 80 tiles. Save sap for fertilizer; 20 fiber, 1 coal, and 50 wood for a scarecrow; and your foraging and fishing money for Potato seeds. If you get 60 extra fiber, may as well ship it too for another Potato seed.

Resist the temptation to snowball your field unmanageably large. Instead of overplanting willy nilly, keep your field size well below 80 tiles (ten squares) and save your money for Potatoes on Spring 5 and 6. Keep foraging (looking to save five Daffodil and one each Leek, Dandelion, and Wild Horseradish) and socializing. Four of the saved Daffodils are for the birthdays this month shown below, so gold star would be good.

You need to learn to carry your hoe at all times and notice wiggling "worms" sticking out of any dirt you pass by. Digging up these spots is an important way to get some of the Artifacts to donate to the museum. The rewards for reaching 5 and 10 donations are seeds for Spring and Summer, respectively.

Spring 5
Upgrade alert: Hopefully tomorrow you will be able to craft a Scarecrow (from 20 fiber, 50 wood, and 1 coal) and some fertilizer. So make sure your field is ready for them and Potato seeds today, but maybe wait until tomorrow (last day for planting potatoes to beat the Egg Festival) to plant them with fertilizer and crow protection.

Birthdays alert: Save one of your new Parsnips for Mayor Lewis's birthday on Spring 7. And young Vincent would like a Daffodil for his on Spring 10. Mark the dates! Note that gold star quality always makes the biggest difference on birthdays.

You’ll get a notice that the path to a mine is open today, and that’s good since the ore you find there is all you need to build sprinklers if you are tired of watering. Meanwhile, if you keep your field small by stepping from Parsnips to Potatoes to Strawberries, you will have time to fish, mine, and follow the Stardew Valley story.

Today your first parsnips will be ready to harvest. You have been losing crops to crows, but you need to get Potatoes harvested by Spring 12, a day before the Egg Festival. They take 6 days, and you have 7 days. So decide whether to plant them today for a day of schedule padding or tomorrow for full scarecrow protection and maybe some fertilizer.

If you decide to plant tomorrow, toss all Parsnips but a gold star one for Lewis in the shipping bin and go fishing. Or if you have enough Spring Onion food to mine all day today and your TV luck isn't too bad, make it a long day at the mines. You will get the Parsnip money tomorrow morning. Or take your parsnips tomorrow to Pierre’s and sell all but Lewis's gold one to Pierre. However you get the money, buy all the Potatoes you can afford (up to 160) to plant tomorrow.

Spring 6
Craft all the fertilizer you can and a scarecrow. Place them and plant and water all your Potato seeds to beat the Egg Festival.

Today Lewis may tell you about the Community Center. When he does, take the time immediately to go in the Community Center and find the cryptic writing on the floor slab in the southwest part of the building. Tomorrow the Wizard may invite you to see him about it all. When he does, take the time to do it so you can start getting prizes for donating. The prizes will make a big difference to you at this early stage. Here are the things you can start saving now to get a few prizes right away.

Community Center alert: 1. There is a Community Center Pantry "Spring Crops Bundle" of donations to complete at the Community Centre. These things are only farmable this month. And if you donate them all, you will get a helpful prize now. Be aware of the time it takes to grow them.
 * 1 Parsnip: 4 days
 * 1 Green Bean: 10 days + regrowth
 * 1 Cauliflower: 13 days
 * 1 Potato: 6 days

2. There is a Community Center Crafts Room "Spring Foraging Bundle" also. These things are only forageable this month. And if you donate them all, you will get a helpful prize now.
 * 1 Leek
 * 1 Dandelion
 * 1 Wild Horseradish
 * 1 Daffodil

3. There is a Community Center Pantry "Quality Crops Bundle" you can't complete now. But you need to save one of the following to donate. These things are only farmable this month. Be aware of the time it takes to grow them.
 * Either 5 Gold Star Parsnip (cheaper): 4 days
 * Or 5 Gold Star Cauliflower: 13 days

Spring 7
Don't miss Lewis's birthday today. He would like a parsnip.

Visit the the Wizard if he invites you. Then donate to the Spring Foraging Bundle when you have all four. Plant and water the reward, which is Spring Seeds to grow the foraging items as crops on your farm.

Save all your money for Strawberries at the Egg Festival. Resist the temptation to upgrade your backpack until you get your Strawberries in the ground.

Spring 10
Young Vincent would like a Daffodil for his birthday today.

Keep saving for Strawberries.

Spring 10-12
Get ready to buy Strawberry big at the Egg Festival on Spring 13. Prepare your field with fertilizer. Sell all your harvests except 1 Potato for the Community Centre. Buy and plant seeds for any missing Community Centre Spring Crops (1 Green Bean and 1 Cauliflower if they aren't already growing from Mixed Seeds) and about 16 Parsnips on fertilizer to try repeatedly for five gold star (six including Shane's birthday on Spring 20) through the end of the month (12th, 16th, and 20th). Depending on your Farming skill level, around 1/4 of your fertilized crops will be gold star, and that will increase through the end of the month.

Spring 13
Egg Festival!

1. BEFORE you go, water your few crops that are in the ground, and prepare and water spaces for all the Strawberries you can afford at 100 gold each. When you get back at 10pm, plant the Strawberries in the prepared and watered spaces.

2. At the festival, buy Strawberry seeds BEFORE you start the egg hunt.

Spring 14-16
Birthday alert: Haley (Spring 14) would like a Daffodil on her birthday.

Cauliflower season: These three days are good for planting Cauliflower with any money you get.

Festival and Friendship Alert: There is a Luau on Summer 11 where you can win friendship with every villager by putting a gold star Cauliflower in the soup. This is potential friendship boost is unique among all the festivals. So plant whatever Cauliflower you can afford these three days now and save the best Cauliflower you get for the Luau.

Museum reward and cauliflower deadline: Gather your geodes, artifacts, and minerals as soon as you finish watering on or before Spring 16 and take them to the blacksmith (closes at 4pm) and the museum to see if you can reach 5 donations to the museum and get Cauliflower seeds as a reward. It's worthless to plant them after Spring 16, and a day of padding doesn't hurt.

Spring 17-21
Birthday alert: Pam (Spring 18) would LOVE a Parsnip on her birthday. Shane (Spring 20) would like a parsnip, green bean, or potato on his birthday. Gold star is always best, of course!

Plant potatoes as money comes in. Do not keep any Strawberries. Sell them all. Now is when you need the money most.

Spring 22
Last day to plant potatoes. Don't plant any more crops this month.

Spring 23-28
Birthday alert: Pierre (Spring 26) would like any of your vegetables or a Daffodil or Dandelion on his birthday. Emily (Spring 27) would like a Daffodil or LOVE an Emerald, Aquamarine, Ruby, Amethyst, Topaz, or Jade on her birthday. Gold star is always best!

Do not keep any Strawberries. Sell them all. Now is when you need the money most. Next year you can buy plenty when you are rich.

A good routine
Most of your days in spring will revolve around watering your crops, and then fishing, mining, or exploring. Wander around the forests and the beach, picking up foraged items when you find them - in the first few days, an extra 200 gold pieces (gp) becomes that many more seeds in the ground, and it gets your financial snowball going just that bit faster. Later, use the food you find to restore your health and energy in the mines when the monsters get you or to clear your farm and forage areas. If you are feeling sociable, wander around town, introducing yourself to everyone (first quest!), or it's okay to put your social life on hold (gifting and quests can be expensive and overwhelming at first) until you are a rich farmer with sprinkled crops or an upgraded watering can. On rainy days, if your luck on TV is good, try mining another 5 floors down, and if it's not so good, go fishing, foraging, exploring, and socializing.

Lazy seeds
As you approach the point where you’re using too much time and energy watering your plants (probably at your first harvest), it’s time to move to more expensive seeds. Cheap seeds build your wealth fastest, but planting more seeds than you can water will just prevent you from getting important experience fishing, mining, foraging, and socializing. See if you can plant more expensive seeds instead; in general the more expensive seeds save you time and energy. Cauliflowers are great to plant on Spring 7 to 16 (last planting day assuming you don't have SpeedGro fertiliser), otherwise potatoes are best to beat the Egg Festival (up to Spring 6) or end of Spring (up to Spring 22).

Limited fields
Limit the size of your fields carefully.

Even if you want to stay on your farm and have the biggest field possible, you will want to move beyond your basic watering can, and to do that, you have to explore the rest of Stardew Valley a little. So it's a good rule of thumb to be able to finish watering your field at its largest by 2pm at your fastest. That will allow you time on days when you need to harvest and replant or make a pre-rain upgrade trip to the blacksmith who closes at 4pm.

Conversely, if you decide to focus on fishing for cash and energy or mining copper, iron, and beyond for sprinklers, you may want to finish watering as early as 9am at your fastest, which you can do and still profit well if you step methodically from Parsnips to Potatoes to Strawberries.

Don't sell/ship everything; start organizing
As you get richer, but before Spring has ended, make sure you've kept a few things for quests, the community center, and maybe the fair. Organize them in dedicated chests you can color code if you want.

In your Quests chest, keep one basic example of every item on hand throughout the month for quests. As you get richer, keep two.

In your Community Center chest, keep one example of each item of Spring Forage, and one of each item of Spring Crops to complete the first two Community Centre bundles. And if you want to put 5 gold parsnips (instead of waiting until you are richer to get gold corn, melons, and pumpkins instead) in the Quality Produce bundle you also need to set them aside in the chest.

In your Fair chest, keep a gold star example of the most valuable items you want to show off at the fair grange display in the Fall. Showing off at the fair is fun and optional (There is something special to buy at the fair, but maximizing your grange display is not the only way to get the tickets to buy it).

Special tips for Spring only
Try to have a little coin on hand when the Egg Hunt rolls around (Spring 13) - Pierre will sell Strawberry seeds at 100gp each that are great for income and experience. (Ignore the fun Rarecrow. You can get the Rarecrow next year for fun when you have lots of cash.) Right now you need income and experience more than you ever will again, so plant them and save one Strawberry in case you want use a Seedmaker before the next Egg Festival to start a Strawberry crop in your Greenhouse.

Salmonberries will be available from Spring 15-18. (The TV show "Living on the Land" will alert you to this on the 15th.) These are a foraged item - “use” a bush that is decorated in berries to collect them. They’re worth only 5 gp each - even for a new player that’s negligible. But they provide energy, and you can collect a lot of them - some simply as you walk around to places like town and the community centre, but there are many many suitable bushes in Cindersap Forest, south of your farm. You might collect as many as 100 Salmonberries, and this provides good fuel for trips to the mines.

If you cross the river that runs through Cindersap Forest you should find the entrance to the Sewers and some trees near large patches of dirt. These patches of dirt often contain Spring Onions (during Spring, of course) and the Spring Onions regrow - you can pick them right from day 1, and revisit them later. Like Salmonberries, they sell for very little but they are worth eating when you’re running out of energy.

If you can afford the energy to collect 300 wood, you’ll be able to repair the bridge at the beach. The tidal pools on the other side usually yield about 300gp worth of foraged items per visit - varying between 100gp on a poor day and 1000 gp on an exceptional one. This is usually well worthwhile. Forageables do not disappear every night - they accrue over a few days, then they reset. This means that you are best advised to forage once or twice a week. (Berries are an exception; berry bushes replenish daily.)

After Spring 15th you need to stop and think before planting, or preferably before buying seeds. Have you got enough time for these seeds to grow? If the packet says (in mouseover text) 12 days, that really means 12 nights, so Cauliflower should be planted by the 16th (17th with Speedgro, which you might get from a Community Centre bundle) to be harvested on the 28th. You can plant parsnips as late as the 24th.

Mining
Rainy days are particularly good to go mining as you have not exhausted yourself watering plants. You will be using your pickaxe to break rocks. Take food with you as even a full day’s energy doesn’t last long when you’re breaking rocks in the mines; it also restores your health after fighting with the monsters. Kale is the best Spring food crop. As you proceed through the mine floors your skills, defenses, and weapons will grow along with the monsters, so you will need food all the way. If the screen goes “glowy” then you’re going to come under attack by several air creatures, which is a good time to either eat to refill your health bar, or run for the ladder. Or just get ready with your sword. Every 5th floor in the mine, there is an elevator door, but the elevator will only take you to floors you have already visited. So your goal is usually to get down 5 floors (or rarely 10 on Good Luck days if your farm is small) per visit to the mines. This means that if you uncover a ladder down, you may take a short look around for any particularly attractive rocks, but otherwise you’re best advised to go down. You can build stone staircases to rush your way to the bottom in an emergency and come back later with better tools for more mining. Or you can take more time to mine the goodies on each floor using bombs if necessary to rush things along.

Fishing
See Fishing article

It's common to find fishing frustratingly hard. The only way through that is to level up your character's skill, and you may not have time for that until later in the year if ever. Depending on how bad your skill is, you may want to start by fishing even for trash for hours in your own pond or the mountain lake east (right) of the Carpenter Shop (the south end of the island in the lake is often recommended) until enough skill-free fish happen along over a few sessions to level you up. Once you have any personal skill at all or are able to put bait on your upgraded pole to keep the fish biting, buy trout soup from Willy to boost your fishing level for a few real-world minutes while you fish. Maybe you will even start to like fishing!

End of Spring
At the end of Spring, if you have spent most of your days watering, you will have hundreds of crops, and hopefully enough money to buy a nice fat heap of Summer seeds, to upgrade your backpack for the first time (2000 gp) and preferably to also buy and plant an Apple and a Pomegranate tree which will fruit in Fall. They take 28 days to mature, and you want them for the Community Centre bundles; the fruit is also good for wines, jellies, or just selling outright. If you can only afford one, make it the Apple, and consider getting the Pomegranate in mid Summer. But if you don't have enough, there is always next year. Alternatively, if you have spent most of your days mining you will have limited your field to around 120 crops, but you will hopefully have lots of ore to automate your watering to focus on fishing and socializing soon.

You could chop down all your plants on the 28th, but it’s far less work to take a scythe to the dead remains on the first day of Summer; you don’t have to re-hoe any soil after that.

Late Spring or after
Once you have some copper to spare, craft three Tappers and put them on the three different types of trees. Choose trees you will often pass near, so that you notice when the sap is ready. (Later tappers will mainly go on Oak trees because the resin is needed for Kegs.) The different types of sap are useful for Community Centre bundles and for crafting; and most villagers like Maple Syrup. It is rare to sell the produce from Tappers!

A silo and a Coop are nice additions to your farm if you are doing well enough to afford them (and the chickens) by the end of Spring, but otherwise you can probably invest in animals after you’ve got some Summer harvest in. Mayonnaise sells for a lot more than eggs do, so craft one or more Mayonnaise machines once your hens start laying. Carry your scythe when walking across the farm, and swing it just once every few steps through grass, to cut some but not all of the grass and fill your Silo with hay.

If you have chosen not to mine much, getting the Copper upgrade on your watering can will noticeably increase your capacity to water your crops. The problem with upgrading tools is that Clint holds onto the tools for two nights, and if you don’t water your crops for a day, they grow only slowly; if you miss two days they die. So the way to manage it is to check the TV’s weather forecast every morning until the forecast includes rain. Water the crops by 2pm, and deliver your can to Clint by 4pm; the rain will water your crops for you on the middle day, and on the next day you can collect the upgraded watering can at 9am, take it home, and water your crops - and never a day has been missed! Alternatively, there’s no benefit to watering your crops on the 28th, unless you have a Coffee Bean somehow. So if you can spare the Copper and the cash, you can take your watering can to Clint’s on the 27th.

If you have focused on mining, you probably will have plenty of copper and iron to make a dozen basic sprinklers before the end of the month and before you ever upgrade your watering can. Basic sprinklers cut your watering in half and free you to expand your farm more. Sprinklers and watering can upgrades don't work particularly well together.

If you have done particularly well earning money in Spring, you may reach the point of having earned 25,000gp before the end of Spring. Whether this happens in Spring or later, Demetrius will drop by and ask to use your cave for Science; Fruit Bats or Mushrooms. Fruit Bats deliver an erratic range of fruits and berries - they can bring you anything from Salmonberries (5gp) to Pomegranates (140g), often one, sometimes four; the frequency is also uncertain. Mushrooms deliver different sorts of mushrooms (mostly Commons), every second day - from six planter boxes. Mushrooms are usually recommended; they’re more reliable, probably worth more, and it’s harder to come across them by other means.