New Player, not sure if I'm playing right

Hello! So I've been playing for a few days now and I love the game. The only problem is, the ratio of time spent running from my house and then back again every night compared to the amount of time I spend actually playing seems really off to me. Feels like I spent more time running than doing things like mining, going to the beach, cutting down trees, and talking to other characters. I feel like I must be doing something wrong because the game seems really off balance :/ I would love to keep playing but I won't if 50% my time is getting home and back. The days are so short and energy goes quick. Is this normal? Thank you!!!

 

Well, it doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong, per se, although you'll probably spend more time doing stuff if you do one thing for most of the day as opposed to doing multiple different things in different areas of the map. If you're trying to mine and visit the beach and talk to everyone and work on your farm every day, there will definitely be a lot of running around. If you just harvest crops and then go to the mines and stay there for the day (for example), it will be a lot less.
There's some foods that will help you move faster (see https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Speed, specifically the section on Player Speed), and later you'll be able to get a quick-travel system. Plus you'll eventually be able to buy a horse that lets you move around faster.
If you're playing on PC, and you really feel like it's a problem, there's a mod (called Timespeed, I think?) that can make the day longer.

Also, it's worth noting that sometimes it's worth passing out at 2 am away from your house. Unlike hitting 0 health, passing out at 2 am or passing out from lack of energy doesn't get rid of any items. It does means you wake up with half energy the next day and lose 10% of your gold up to a max of 1000g/night, but sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, especially since the energy penalty doesn't happen if you levelled up that night.

Re: energy, as you level up using your tools will cost less energy, and there's some items that permanently increase your max energy. (Trying not to spoil it, look up stardrops on the wiki if you want to know where they are.) Eventually it basically won't be an issue. In the meantime, just try to keep some food on you. If you've gotten decent at the fishing minigame (which is probably unlikely if you've only been playing for a few days), keeping some fish is a good way to have food. Otherwise, green onions are nice in spring, make sure to collect the salmonberries during the days they show up, and of course you can always hold on to some harvests to eat instead of selling them - parsnips are pretty good for that. If you have the money, salads bought from Gus are pretty good energy too.

 

Thank you! That's all very helpful!

 

First off, while I've said it before, it bares repeating... there is no right or wrong way to play the game.

Having said that, in the very beginning of the game... yes, there can be a lot of running around. Some things to help mitigate this:

* You don't have to hit up the beach daily. Foraged items, including beach shellfish, remain until Sunday. So if you feel you are spending too much time, only go on Saturdays to get the most 'bang for the buck'.
* You can 'batch up' chores. For example, finding a single geode isn't worth going to Clint over. Take him a dozen at a time.
* Mining is a thing that should be done when you don't have a list of other things to do, barring watering the crops. That way you can devote the whole day to the affair.
* Later on, you will unlock a 'fast travel' system with several fixed points.
* Also later on, you can unlock a horse mount to help you go faster
* Spring Onions are found south of your farm, across a pair of bridges, a bit further south, and in the dirt areas. They will appear in the first two weeks of spring. They can be eaten to regain stamina, since they aren't worth much money
* Salmonberry season starts after the Egg Festival, and are an *amazing* stamina (and health!) recovering food. Spend a day or two doing nothing but foraging salmonberries and you'll have enough to see you through a good chunk of the mines
* Once you have sufficient skill in Farming, the Cheese Press recipe unlocks. Getting a barn, a Silo, and some cows will keep you in cheese, which is an amazing stamina and health recovering food. One of the best in the game, actually.

This game places a high emphasis on time and stamina management. At first, it seems like there's never enough time in the day. As you become more familiar with your surroundings, it will get easier for you.

 

Another new-ish player de-lurking here (been playing SDV for less than a year), and I'll be a third to say that there's really no "right" way to play. There are more efficient ways and less frustrating ways, but no real "right" way since the game's repetition is really forgiving! I've been cringing while I watch one of my kids not time his crops or pay attention to what he needs for the Community Center, but since he's having just as much fun as I am, there's no point in my telling him that he's doing it wrong. FWIW, I'm one of the "try to do it all in one day" types, and I've still managed to build the stuff I want to, and I'm developing a better sense of how I want to play to make it fun. So experiment, see what you enjoy, and don't feel weird about starting half a dozen games at once.

 

De-lurker here myself, but not new player.

On your first playthrough of the game, I would have to say to just take it easy. Get to know the game. You don't have to finish the CC on the first year, and there are no GoneForever time limited events in Stardew Valley (unlike the Harvest Moon games). The one-and-only major thing you got, is Grandpa's Visit in the Third Spring, but even that... you get two whole years to learn the game, and build up enough to light his 4 candles, AND, you can get a re-evaluation anytime you want by offering a diamond at his gravesite once you've gotten more things completed.

Even for the first-time player, lighting all 4 candles in 2 years is not hard whatsoever. All of the quests you are given with the exception of the Help Wanted tasks are not time-limited, you can hold them on you as long as you like, seasons will come and go, if you miss something in a season, just wait till next year and it will be waiting for you again.

So, all in all, take your time, learn the game, play the way YOU want to play. As you play the game, you'll learn where things are, what happens on what days, and you can gradually increase your efficiency once you learn what works well, and what doesn't work as well from the game's many options.

The only thing I'd say to a new player, is if you get killed in the mines, immediately exit to title screen and reload. The loss is just not worth it, you might as well just replay the whole day.

 

Patch notes for 1.4 indicated that there's now a way to recover your lost items from the Adventurer's Guild

 

Well, they indicate you can recover one item. There's definitely still a lot of scenarios in which I'd opt to restart.
Although at least you can't lose mine levels anymore.

 

Recovering 1 item, with cost vs just trying the whole day again.

Though I suppose if you found, say, a rainbow gem or something then you might see what exactly you lost and which is worth more, the rainbow gem, or the stuff you lost. But yes at least you don't lose progress.

Just being able to see what you lost is a godsend. I assume that being able to check Marlon, his list of items would tell you Exactly what you dropped which is better than 1.3 was where you wake up and you open your inventory and go "OK what did I have on me again that I actually cared about?"

The Not Knowing is what caused me to restart more often than not.

 

Hi there, if you're saying that you might be playing wrong, means that you're not doing what you want to do, so let me ask you: what you want to do in the game? A common mistake is to try to produce a little of everything at once, just focus in produce one kind of product and you will be fine (harvest, animal goods, metals and now with the update: fish).
The reason for that is that you're still learning the game, I also don't recommend for you to check for guides yet, play a little longer because this first time is what almost everyone here cherish the most. @ShneekeyTheLost already summarized everything that you can do for improve, what you can try to do is invest into sprinklers because they increase your autonomy by a ton.

 

IMO, if you're a starting player, and the game tries to heavily emphasize this, and for good reason, the easiest autonomy you can get are animals and the products they produce. Quality Sprinklers aren't until you get to Floor 80+ reliably (or you blow lots of gold buying gold bars) unless you get lucky and see them on the travelling merchant, and you need a decent amount of farming skill to make them in the first place. Regular sprinklers only water 4 crops per and takes quite a bit of space to set up. So, for this reason, I highly suggest building at least a Coop early game, and also try for a Barn too (they're great for filling in the bundles earlier too!).

They will not bring in tens of K per day, but yet once you get a barn and a coop up, even the basic barn and coop will give you 3-4k per day if you have 4 chickens and 4 cows. This is not hard to do by mid-summer to early fall, and building the respective machines (mayo/cheese) isn't hard either. The mayo machines especially are easy, only requiring items you find in the first 10 levels of the mine fairly regularly. The Cheese presses might be slightly more difficult, but it isn't That hard to get down to the Ice area of the Mines, so that you can get a reliable source of hardwood to make the presses (once you've gotten the Steel Axe so you can cut the log blocking access to the Forest).

Once you get the animals nice and friendly wit you, you're reliably pulling in almost 3k by doing almost nothing (click 8 animals, pick eggs and milk up, drop them in machines). It takes very little energy per day and is a constant source of income and by the time you click the animals and dump the stuff in the machine you still have plenty of time and energy for other stuff. 3k doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a season, that's 84k which is not exactly a small amount of money.

And of course, once you get the buildings upgraded a couple times and get more cows and chickens, especially once you get a few void chickens in, well, I'm pulling in like 8k a day and it only takes ~1.5h and zero energy (once you buy the item grabber to milk the animals for you) to make 8k per day.

There's a reason why one of the first quests wants you to build a Coop ASAP. It's good for newer players.

Alternatively, instead of the barn, you could do instead a 2nd coop, as there's only a 10-15g difference between mayo and cheese (assuming Wiki has been updated for 1.4, I remember reading that cheese sells for more now).

Either way, animals and the artisan goods they produce are great for the early player who needs time and energy to figure out what they wanna do with the rest of their days.

 

Ehh. The trap with this is that you have to keep them fed, which means Silo FIRST then after silo is up, go clearing some grass. But not too much because you want it to grow back. Or pay 50g/day per animal to Marnie to keep them fed. This is a common trap for newer players to fall into.

I quite agree. Plus you can get your bundle completions done earlier. Just make sure you have at least one white and one brown chicken.

Ehh... void chickens are more of a side thing. With max hearts, your chickens and cows should be producing almost exclusively Large products, which are processed to make gold-star mayo/cheese, which is a way better thing to do with your time and effort.

I would really disagree with this for one major reason... Cheese is an amazing food for mining. If you are new, you're also probably trying to figure out combat, and you're NOT going to want to die in the mines. Having four cows means having four cheese *per day*, which is enough to help you dive the mines in safety. The lost revenue from eating your cheese instead of selling it is a drop in the bucket compared to the savings you'll reap when you get your sprinklers online.

 

I think that's a lot for him to chew on... I remember that in 3 game years I only made around 500k in my first time, I'm suspect to suggest investment on animals since it's my favourite way to play (and the easiest on my opinion), but even for animals you have to focus between the barn or coop, not to mention all the wood and upgrade costs that only the farm provides you. By remembering the way that I used to play and my friends first experience is most likely that he is planting and selling crops raw, but not making a huge crop field for not burn his energy to get into the mines, I don't see the problem into selling raw crops if you're casual, but you start to lose time and money by the autumn if your farm isn't set up.

I make new characters all the time, I think that I never made past 3 game years (aside from my first time) because I get bored and without nothing to do, I don't want the @thefemmenatalia to have this kind of experience for his first time, it's better to take easy and enjoy all the relationships, dialogues and complain about how the time pass faster the game is all about management and that's why I'm suggesting to stick only with one thing first, instead of try to do a lot at once.

@Xylia I wouldn't say that about regular sprinklers, I saw some speedrunners making a good use of them, they are just very tricky to use but better than nothing.

 

I've been playing farm sims since Harvest Moon and even this was overwhelming at first. Take your time and learn the systems the first year. I suggest focusing on a few tasks a day while moving toward overall weekly and monthly goals. Once you get a feel for the game you'll be more confident in what priorities you want to set for yourself. Soon you'll be starting farms in the river map and hating yourself for it . Like others have said there's no right way to play so play how you want and get into your own groove.

 

......except I am not talking about speedrunners.

I'm talking about newer players, which I said several times in my post.

Silos are cheap, and you only need one for a basic barn and basic coop.

Also, you don't even need a silo until it rains, and even then, you could just simply skip 1 day of feeding the animals if it did rain. Instead of buying the 50g hay from Marnie, just don't feed them on a given day if you really can't get a silo up before it rains.

I like to keep 1 void chicken for effortless Krobus affection. Void Mayo is his Loved gift and the chicken gives one every day and it is Almost as good as Star-Mayo. I suppose once you max Krobus out, you could simply sell the Void Chicken and replace it with a regular.

I suppose it varies player-by-player, but I usually do the mine with little to no food whatsoever until I get down to Floor 80+.

I've just... not needed food whatsoever. But then I only do 5 floor pushes, unless I get insanely good luck in a run then I might try for 10 if things are going extremely well.

5 Floor Pushes might be somewhat slow by established player's perspectives, but I'd think a newer player might wanna take it a bit more gradually while they explore other areas of the game, instead of flinging themselves head-first into trying to unlock sprinklers (which they may or may not even know about) ASAP.

Also, a good reason to take the first 40 floors a little slower, is to rack up bug kills for the insect head weapon. Free weapon that's the best thing that you can find (you can buy slightly better, but why spend all that money?) until the Obsidian Sword but if you rush the mines too fast, you'll never get that many bug kills on your way down.

 

I just used speedrunners as an example, chill down.
But I agree with you that the hennery is easy to make and mayo isn't all that bad, now that autograbbers works with chickens managing a coop will not be a nightmare. But if you're suggesting animals for the topic owner you shouldn't forget to talk about the grazing fields, takes 9 titles of grass for each animal but nothing stop them to derp one day and all eat grass on the same patch, I think that setting a grazing field alone already is a pain in the @$$, you have to use the web planner to be more effective.

 

Hmm? In all of my playthroughs, what I'd do, is just simply not cut any more grass than what is actually necessary. Usually by the time I'm able to set a coop up, there's a large patch of thick grass already there I will simply build a fence around a good portion of it, especially if you start out with a wood fence at first. If there are weeds near the grass, use a pickaxe instead of a scythe or sword to get rid of them so you don't damage the nearby grass.

I have never, ever, ever, ever had to worry about setting up grass starters during my first year, ever. Now..... year 2.... my current playthrough? I have a deluxe barn and a deluxe coop and I've had to buy some 100 grass starters now and I'm only in like 6th day of Spring because I'm finding it difficult to get the grass to actually take off fast enough to handle 24 animals. But, by then, I make 12-14k a day passively and 100 grass starters is only 10k.

EDIT: And I apologize about the speedrunning thing, it's just anytime I try to talk about new players, there's always someone who comes on and talks about how speedrunners/experienced players/perfectionists/ultra efficient players play when I am obviously talking about new players. Or at least that is what used to happen years ago when I used to be more frequent on these boards. One of the reasons I don't post here much, is because it is very difficult to talk about casual play, everybody's all about maximum efficiency, speedrunning, etc like that's the one and only way to play this game, and that everything one does, has to be done to the max. I'm here trying to give advice to a new player who is stressed about finding enough time and energy to enjoy the game, and people are on here telling me why my advice is wrong and why it is bad, and the advice they offer is geared towards speedrunners and min-maxing which is the exact opposite of what a casual or first-time player wants or is able to do without tons of prior research. Not saying *you* are doing that, but surely you get why I get a little... ruffled when speedrunning is mentioned in such a thread?

 

If properly tessellated, they offer 80% space utilisation (not including an occasional scarecrow), which isn't bad considering quality sprinklers are only about 10% better than that.

And you don't need to be a speedrunner to google how to tessellate crosses

 

Unless it got changed in the patch, and I REALLY hope it didn't, the "plant grass on Day 28 of Winter" thing has worked beautifully for me. Just scatter grass patches around on Winter 28, and voila, thick, beautiful grass on Spring 1. Also, note that Pierre is now selling a grass starter blueprint. I haven't picked it up yet (I've been playing on one of my "poor" farms with no money to spare), but that may make a difference.

Edit: just picked up the grass starter blueprint, and it's worth the gold--just 10 fiber for 1 grass starter. I definitely have plenty of fiber pretty much all the time, so it would only take making 10 of the things to make up for the money spent.