1-Year Community Center Challenge

Has anyone out there gone for this challenge? How did it go for you? How many times have you tried?

I just completed it last week on an alt save file, my second try. Ended up getting the red cabbage in the first week of winter, right after lamenting publicly on Twitter how I'd been to the traveling cart twice every week with no luck!

For those who might not know, the 1-Year Community Center Challenge is the challenge of completing every bundle in the community center and opening it before Spring 1 of Year 2. Nearly every bundle is do-able with diligent work, except for one item in the Dye Bundle—the red cabbage—which requires luck from the traveling cart to complete (eased by MousyPounds' Stardew Predictor).

For those who've completed the challenge, what was your strategy?
Mine ran something like this...

1. Choose the Forest Farm. Easy early mushrooms for the Exotic Foraging Bundle.
2. Buy and plant three each of cauliflower, potatoes and green beans on Spring 1. Buying three each increases the likelihood of at least one surviving crows feeding.
3. Buy 20 strawberry seeds during the Egg Hunt. With number 2, I guarantee having the Spring Crops Bundle complete that night, giving me 20 speed grow, which allows three full harvests of the 20 strawberry plants and a nice wad of cash for the start of summer.
4. Go batty.
5. Get the crab for the Crab Pot Bundle from killing rock crabs in the mines. The other slots can be filled by combing the beach.
6. Build and upgrade the barn first, securing at least two truffles before winter (and any extra for cash). All other animals can be addressed in winter if anything were to delay them from producing what I need sooner.
7. Plant an apple tree sapling by Summer 26 and a pomegranate tree sapling by Summer 28, if the bats have not already provided each, respectively. (Trees do produce a fruit on their first day of maturity.)
8. Make friends with Linus early, as he sometimes mails catfish and maki rolls.
   
9. Check the traveling cart EVERY Friday and Sunday with at least 1300 gold in hand, in case the red cabbage or red cabbage seed is available. I also tended to buy the specialty fish if she had them, as getting the bundle reward early—Dish o' The Sea—made fishing for the rest of the tank bundles significantly easier.
10. Spend extra time and energy between 81 and 84 of the mines. With the Miner skill, gold ore smelted into bars becomes great for supplemental income and makes finishing off the last community center room, the Vault, much quicker as Fall comes to a close.

I'm curious how everyone approached (or will approach, if planning on) this challenge. What farm and cave did you choose? In what order did you complete your bundles?

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Note for Admins: I did a search but could not find a thread or discussion dedicated to this. If there is and I missed it, I apologize for spamming. Please direct me to that thread and I will delete this one if desired. Thank you for understanding.

Edit (2018-04-19): added link to MousyPounds' post on the Stardew Predictor

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For me it's just clockwork, with one vulnerability, and of course you've got to get the cabbage.

Spring:
Day 1, buy 25 parsnip seeds. Plant all 40.
Days 2-4, fish the mountain lake hard(sell everything) get level 3 at least. Daisy chain your trail snacks(cut trees for seeds to get snacks, for more tree cutting.) Collect 160 sap. Rebuild the bridge to the east beach.
Day 5, harvest but don't plant back. Sleep and level up. Then day 6, plant back 40 Parsnips, 39 potatoes and 1 bean all with fertilizer.
There's 22 days left. That's time for 1 cauliflower, 1 potato and 1 parsnip from each spot on a 9x9 plot(minus the bean and a scarecrow.) But remember it sets you up for harvest/replants on Wednesday(spring 10) and on the flower dance day. Gotta get your seeds the day ahead.
Get at least 5 artifacts or minerals into the museum to get the cauliflower seed reward.
Spend the remainder of the month grinding fish in the mountain lake, chopping trees and get to level 40 in the mine. Watch for the crab drop from rock crabs in the mine. Everything else for the crab pot bundle can be gotten from beach foraging.
Craft 3 tappers, and tap one of each tree. Build a silo, and a coop(but make sure you've got money for summer seeds. Fish hard for coop money.) After watering on day 27, upgrade your water can.
Get friendly with Emily. She loves any gem(but not diamonds) She may gift wool or cloth.
When Demetrius comes calling choose the mushroom cave.

Summer:
Expand you crop space to 15x9. Pick up your copper water can. Plant 110 melons, 6 each peppers, blueberries and tomatoes, and 3 each poppy and sunflower.(some of that melon space could be given over blueberries, but remember melons for the quality crop bundle.
Fish hard and build a barn at the first opportunity.
First blueberry harvest should fill out the summer crop bundle, and earn the quality sprinkler reward. Craft quality fertilizer and set up the sprinkler with corn(That's the last quality crop. Just give it time.)
Each melon harvest upgrade the coop then the barn. Fish hard cause the money's tight. Mid summer plant pomegranate and apple saplings. Make sure to get into the secret woods for the fiddlehead fern.
By this point you should have 1 brown chicken, 1 white chicken, a duck and a dairy cow(maybe a goat, but it's not really needed.) For the best profit make mayonnaise and cheese from everything.
If you've been able to afford an iridium fishing pole, look to get the crimson fish, the dorado and the octopus. If you get those, it's pretty straight forward to get the master angler achievement by spring of year 2.

Fall:
Again, 15x9 crop space. Plant 3 each eggplants and yams, and the remainder pumpkins. Upgrade to a deluxe coop. Then upgrade to deluxe barn at first pumpkin harvest. You want the rabbit first because the rabbits foot takes time and RNG. The pig will start snuffling truffles his first day as an adult. AND HERE'S THE VULNERABILITY! If it rains the last 3 days of fall you won't get the truffle.
Second pumpkin harvest, pay 42,500 to fill the vault.

Of course it's all just a little more complex than that, but that's my general strategy.

EDIT: Fish the rain in the fall! The eel, red snapper, tiger trout, catfish, walleye and shad are all biting on rainy autumn days.

 

Interesting! I've been debating about going for the 5 artifacts, but I'm usually nose-to-the-grindstone focused on the bare minimum for the bundles. I notice your strategy includes a lot of preparation for other achievements, too.

Nice work up!

 

My typical runs are as follows:

* Forest Farm, Bat Cave. Exotic Foraging is trivial to nab. All three taps, cave carrot, and either red mushroom from cave dive or morel from forest farm foraging. Copper axe stump grinding lets you hit Foraging 6 and lightning rods before summer.
* Day 1 are just 40 parsnips, due to likelihood of crows eating your early crops.
* Day 5 (after getting Farming 1), plant the following: 40 Parsnips on Fertilizer (for gold-star bundle and spring bundle), 1 Bean Sprout (bundle), 40 Potatoes (cash and bundle), and the cauliflower from the reward from Gunther for five turn-ins.
* Buy and plant 40 strawberry plants for cash purposes. You won't have the speed-grow yet because you didn't have day one cauliflower and likely won't have Farming 3 yet, but 40 is a good solid number. Best of all, your potatoes should come up the day before the egg festival so you should be flush with cash to make the purchase.
* Silo first, then Barn, then Coop. Upgrade Barn and Coop at least once before mid-summer. Deluxe Barn before the end of the third week of summer, and pig as soon as it is done so you have a good chance of getting your truffles before mid-fall.
* Plant an apple tree by mid-summer. Pomegranate tree isn't necessary, as there will be many of them going in the greenhouse.
* Stand of 30 oak trees up by end of Spring for tapping by the end of summer for keg production for money generation. Two sheds to house your production facility, graduating to three as needed. This also nets early Artisan bundle completion as well as being able to plant 32 Hops in summer and process ALL the results into Pale Ale for simultaneously hitting the 1m/1y challenge.
* Check cart vendor every Fri/Sun. Look for Duck products (duck egg/feather), Truffle/oil, and that blasted Red Cabbage/seed. If you can obtain both duck egg and feather, you save the coop upgrade. If you get both truffle products, you save the deluxe barn rush, and makes the run much easier to complete. Picking up Wool means not needing either a Duck Egg or a Large Goat Milk, so it is kind of a wild card but can mean skipping either the barn rush or the coop upgrade.
* Get crab pot bundle from beach combing and rock crabs in mines, put all reward pots in farm. Keep all 'trash' for recycling. This can net cloth from soggy newspaper for artisan bundle, and quite a tidy sum of refined quartz for various projects.
* Complete Pantry by Fall 10, get at least one Pomegranate tree down in the greenhouse by the 11th.

 

I've never done it. The reason being is Kent. He doesn't appear till year two. I hold off on the Barn upgrade and the Pig till middle of winter. This way I know the pig will mature by the time spring rolls around. I wait till it's Ken's birthday, give him a daffodil, then complete the CC.

My primary goal in year 1 is to complete the Greenhouse on the 12th of Autumn.

 

You've got 5 items... He wants quartz, earth crystal, topaz, amethyst, frozen tear... You don't need to dig artifacts. Busting a dozen geodes will probably give 5 things Gunther wants. Another 5 and there's a 9 melon seed reward.

 

I'm not sure I understand the relevance. He's not required for any bundles or the community center in anyway that I'm aware of.

 

Presumably La Chair wants the friendship increase you get from completing the Bulletin Board Bundle to affect everyone, including Kent.

I've thought about doing this challenge, but have yet to give it a go.

 

That is correct.

 

Couldn't you still do this challenge then, but gather the last item for the bulletin board and then just keep it stored in a chest until year 2? You would've still done the work to complete the challenge, you just wouldn't have opened the community center. I don't know if other people would think that counts, but as far as I'm concerned, if you can do it before winter 27 I think you would still be technically completing the challenge itself.

As for myself, I'm highly "altoholic" (I've seen someone else use this term in another thread and I love it lol) but instead of just creating different save files, I often tend to delete and re-create the same characters over and over, and I also play with cheats (though I've never cheated the community center, except to sometimes fill in items I've already gathered on previous runs) to make the less-fun parts of the game irrelevant, so I don't really look to challenge myself in any particular way... yet. Though I tend to get everything as fast as I possibly could anyways, just because. I don't really have much of a strategy though, except getting the cloth is easier from fishing, which is also where I usually get most of my money.

Now I'm wondering if someone would make a challenge masterpost. I've also seen things like themed farms, which would theoretically make completing the CC difficult.

 

I think you can't do this, because Red Cabbage.

 

I do themed/restricted farms, all in year 1 or 2 now, and it may not even be possible to finish the CC in year 2 for some of them if the cart doesn't play nice. It's those animal products for me. If you do no animals or only one type as I've done on a couple of farms (pigs and dinosaurs), you have to get lucky so many times.

 

The travelling cart can sell pretty much any item in the game (not quite, but almost), including Red Cabbage and Red Cabbage Seeds. You just have to be vigilant enough to check twice a week and lucky enough to actually get them. It's definitely possible, though, as stated in the first post.

 

I never had done this challenge before but reading this I thought I'd give it a go. I was already half way through Summer when I decided to go for it. My normal way of playing already gave me most of the things I needed to that point, so it was just a matter of building a barn and upgrading it all the way, plus the coop one more level.

So here I am half way through Fall, year 1, and I just have two Winter Forage items to go, and the dreaded Red Cabbage. I just had my two pigs drop 5 truffles on their first day as adults, and the Traveller's Cart had the rabbit foot, so I'm in pretty good shape. Twelve more shots at the Traveller's Cart for the red cabbage before the end of the year. The two winter forage will be no issue.

Come on Cart!!

 

Good luck, dude! That cabbage... Why.

 

I think CA would be doing well to add random red cabbage drops from the train. Imagine the frantic rushes from the far edges of the map, every time the whistle blew.

 

I was really lucky with the cart a couple days after I decided to do the challenge. The cart had both the wool and a milk, so it was awesome sauce day!

 

RUN FORREST! RUN!!!

And it's pretty known at this point, but an easy way to get cloth without raising sheep is fishing/driftwood/recycling machine.
I've heard NPCs can mail you gifts with enough heart levels, that might be useful for this challenge? Even if the chance is low... I've gotten a few from Clint, but his gifts are usually easy items to get. I remember getting a battery from Pam once and practically cheering for joy because I was still in Spring and forgot that the Mr. Qi quest can't actually be done until summer.

 

This last run I got the bolt of cloth from recycling soggy newspaper. It seems to be about a 1 in 10 chance, with the rest coming out as torches.

I do remember having gotten cloth from Emily in the mail before (which is convenient if you're working on her hearts, as you can turn around and gift it back to her...), but I haven't aimed for it during a 1/yr CC run. I usually opt for the largest coop, since I'm fishing for the rabbit's foot (Enchanter's Bundle) as well anyway. (The chance for it to drop from Serpents in the Skull Cavern is too low for me to go that route.)

 

I meant newspaper, that's how I got mine too. Not sure why I said driftwood, those get you wood or coal from.