Stardew Valley/First Spring

Day 1
You start the game with 500 gold, 15 parsnips, and whichever farm map you chose (the standard map is recommended for your first game). Your farm is west of the bus stop that brought you here and a town is east of the bus stop. Your farm consists of everything you can go to without the screen changing. On your first day you need to get your seeds planted and watered in a layout that is flexible depending on what you want to do for the next couple of weeks and possibly the first month or year: So find a mostly clear or grassy/weedy patch of ground (away from big rocks and big stumps and not too big; you still have city slicker muscles and cheap tools) near a pond and clear it using your tools:
 * Plant 3-tile x 3-tile squares with an empty (at least temporarily) middle.
 * Helps you visualize your layout and count things easily while you till, plant, harvest, and make your shopping list.
 * Allows for your first sprinklers in case you want to stop watering. You can fill in the middle anytime if you like watering and upgrading your can or you want to see giant crops.
 * Trains yourself not to "commit" your sprinkler spaces to anything slow-growing
 * Allow for a scarecrow. Maybe 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.)
 * Zoom all the way out (75%) so you can see your farm.

Then till the soil with your hoe (un-till with your pickaxe), plant the seeds, and water them with your watering can; they should be ready for harvest on Spring 5th if you keep them watered every day. 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.

You can then run into town (exiting your farm to the right while it's still early) and find the general store (Pierre’s; closes at 5) and spend your money on more 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. Getting one of each regrowing crop now and two each of the others as soon as you have more money (no later than Spring 15th) will position you well for Spring quests if you save two from each of those harvests in a chest. Apart from that, you may as well buy, grow, and sell parsnips for a week or two - they are the fastest way to grow your farm and profits until you reach your limit of time and energy for watering and start switching to more expensive, slower cauliflower to keep your field manageable.

You can then go back home and organise the planting of your store-bought seeds.

You’ll need a chest or two very early on and want to repair the bridge at the beach, so if you have energy left, it’s worth using your axe to cut down whatever trees you can manage for a few days. 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.

Running takes no energy, so if you have plenty of daylight, try finding food for energy north and south of your farm. Swinging your scythe also takes no energy, so even late into the night (until you get sleepy, Zzzz) you can cut down any weeds you can easily find around your crops; if you get mixed seeds, plant them tomorrow when you have more energy to hoe and water them.

Week 1
Once you have 50 wood, which might take until day 3 or 4, make a chest - you need to store the wood and stone and fibre you’re accruing. (Do not sell these, they do not fetch any money worth counting, and they’re useful for crafting.)

You’ll get an invitation to go fishing on day 2, and that’s a good thing to try once you’ve watered your plants or on a rainy day. Willy will give you an old fishing rod. Try out the fishing mini game. If you are good at catching fish, then the fishing mini game will be worth the energy right away - eat some fish (and any algae and seaweed you hook) and sell others, for a nice early income. But if you find it very difficult, 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 does not take energy.

When your first lot of crops is ready to pick, take them straight to Pierre’s and sell them to Pierre - then buy more seeds. This should mean you get the money back into the ground on the same day. Later when you are rich you’ll sell things simply by tossing them into the shipping chest, which means you get the money the following morning.

You’ll get a notice that the path to a mine is open on day 5 when your first parsnips should be ready, and that’s good since the ore you find there is all you need to build sprinklers if you are tired of watering.

Time and energy management
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 earliest 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. Or take the food you find to the mines to restore your health and energy when the monsters get you. 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 exhausting at first) until you are a rich farmer with sprinkled crops and a watering can used only on planting days.

As you approach the point where you’re using too much time and energy watering your plants (maybe in a week or two), 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 but plant them before on on 15th since you don't have SpeedGro fertiliser.

If you decide to focus on mining ore for sprinklers instead of expanding your fields immediately, keep your field small enough to finish watering by 9 a.m. and grow some of your produce (kale) to eat in the mines in addition to cash cauliflowers and your variety crops.

If you don't mind watering or just want to expand your fields immediately, grow all the parsnips you can manage so you can plant all the cauliflower you can manage on Spring 15th (or earlier in case you miss any watering). 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.

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 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 to show off at the fair in the Fall if you want. Participation in the fair contest is optional.

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. (Ignore the Rarecrow. You can get the Rarecrow next year when you have lots of cash.) You could save these until you have a Greenhouse (or the beginning of your second spring), but you need the money much more now than you will later. Sell the quality fruit and keep the basic. Strawberries go well in the Greenhouse and using a seedmaker you can get a lot of them ready to go at the beginning of your second or third Spring.

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) 13 days, that really means 13 nights, so Cauliflower should be planted by the 15th (16th 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 levels 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 level 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 stairway 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 staircases from stone to shortcut your descent in an emergency, but it is generally better 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 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, and deliver your can to Clint; 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.