Tips request for the first Spring / year

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by GreenOaks, Feb 27, 2020.

  1. GreenOaks

    GreenOaks Orbital Explorer

    I started my first game and it's been fun, but I fear I've made too many mistakes and it might be worth starting over.

    I have almost completely missed mining - I've done the 1st 5 floors but came to it late because I didn't realise it had opened up and then I was trying to get the hang of fishing and doing a poor job of that too (thanks to those who helped in that thread).

    Now the 1.4 update has come to iOS I think I might have a better chance with fishing.

    I've posted my Summer day 3 stats and wondered if there were any tips for going forward.
    IMG_1980.jpg IMG_1978.jpg
    I used most of my money on Blueberries, with melons, chillies etc to get the summer crop bundle

    I know there are min/max first day options like 40 parsnips but:
    1) Is there a good first spring crop option/combo to grow to do well enough to make money and enjoy the game
    2) What should you aim for in the first spring
    3) Same for the first year?
    4) Can I do anything to recover my bad start?
     
    • ThorfinnS

      ThorfinnS Orbital Explorer

      1. My personal fave right now is planting all mixed seeds, and if necessary, enough of the original parsnips to get me to 16. Sell the rest. I've never had crows cut that down to 12 or fewer parsnips. Probably even 1 or maybe 2 more than I need. I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a cauliflower or 4, and I'll buy a bean to plant after I have a scarecrow.

      2. Fun? This game is very platform dependent. I cannot do fishing without a keyboard, for instance. I can't imagine trying to play on my phone. I have enough trouble texting, for pete's sake.

      4. Of course you can. Depends on what you find enjoyable. If you are having fun, it's not a bad start. If you think it's a bad start, then by all means, begin a new game.
       
      • Pangaea

        Pangaea Forum Moderator

        There's really no such thing as a bad start, in my opinion. There's no deadlines for anything so just because you didn't make a lot of money your first doesn't mean you can't your second or third. Stardew Valley has no 'correct' way to play. Just do what you find enjoyable. If you do think you want to start over for more money earlier on then check out some of these threads.

        https://community.playstarbound.com...farming-strategies-for-your-first-day.159542/

        https://community.playstarbound.com...rer-look-at-the-unloved-little-squirt.159381/

        https://community.playstarbound.com...n-of-when-to-get-the-24-slot-backpack.159663/

        https://community.playstarbound.com...-to-spring-for-the-experienced-player.159623/

        https://community.playstarbound.com...digious-profits-in-1-4-x.159423/#post-3359117
         
          Lew Zealand, Borodin and WilliamZ like this.
        • GreenOaks

          GreenOaks Orbital Explorer

          Thanks guys :) I guess if there’s no real negative impact I might see how it goes and try and do better through the summer.
           
          • WilliamZ

            WilliamZ Phantasmal Quasar

            You start was very common, I remember that I made 250k in almost three years, while nowadays people make this amount by the end of the first spring. If you want a suggestion, plant crops and sell them raw, or stick with animals cause they are easier, cows for example are very cheap to start and makes a decent money. Slowly start to make sprinklers to try to make the watering process automatic, this will free a lot of your time and energy, then decide if you want to specialize in kegs or jars.

            When you become more familiar with the game, controls and etc I think that's worth a try to min/max, by what I see you're talking, you look like a perfectionist. Fishing in summer is definely hard if you don't got a few levels first in the spring, so it's best to stay at the mountain lake.
             
            • GreenOaks

              GreenOaks Orbital Explorer

              Thanks @WilliamZ I did try fishing in the ocean yesterday and basically got 2 Halibut late on and the rest was missed or trash/seaweed. I tried the training rod first and got no fish biting at all. I’ll try the mountain lake.

              thanks for the tips. Yeah, I may be a perfectionist but it can lead to not enjoying the game so trying not to go too crazy!
               
              • WilliamZ

                WilliamZ Phantasmal Quasar

                The perfectionist actually was a cumpriment lol. The lack of bites is because the training fishing rod cannot equip lures, lures speed up the bitting process a lot.
                 
                • GreenOaks

                  GreenOaks Orbital Explorer

                  @WilliamZ Thanks, I get it.
                  I don’t have lures yet anyway as I’ve not yet unlocked the fibreglass rod.
                  I was just getting all trash whereas with the bamboo pole I was getting fish biting. I just couldn’t catch them!

                  I’ve had a successful 2 days fishing with the training rod! Managed to get up to L3 finishing and enough money to buy the fibreglass rod should I wish.

                  makes such a. Difference when you can actually catch fish. Thanks for the tip about the mountain lake. Only problem is I keep getting lost in the dark on the way home and only just made it back before 2am! I left before midnight!

                  I am finishing it frustrating casting the rod though as Sometimes it’s fine and then other times I end up walking back and forth, even though I’m pressing in the water. Not sure what I’m doing wrong.

                  at least it’s a start and if I do restart Spring then I know I can now go fishing the first few days as a viable option for early money.

                  one question though... what’s a good spread of activities between fishing, mining, foraging in a week?
                   

                    Attached Files:

                    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 1, 2020
                  • ShneekeyTheLost

                    ShneekeyTheLost Master Astronaut

                    First off... welcome to the community! This is a really fun game, no matter the playstyle you enjoy.

                    Personally, I feel you should go through the game once, at least until you get to Grandfather at the start of year three, just to have a chance to enjoy the game. You only get one shot at playing the game for the first time, after all.

                    Having said that, and with the caveat that this is purely my own personal opinion and should not be taken as the 'only' way to do things, let me try to address your questions:

                    1) Well, you'll want at least to complete the Spring Crops Bundle. The 40 parsnip start is a pretty solid one. For a somewhat more complicated start, try 13 parsnips (yes, you'll be selling two parsnip seeds), 1 bean starter, and 1 cauliflower. It gives less up front farming xp, but lets you complete the Spring Crops Bundle before the end of the day on the Egg Festival, which means 20 Speed-Gro you can put Strawberries on for a third harvest.

                    When you turn in five artifacts/minerals into Gunther, you get 9 Cauliflower. Make sure you do this before the Egg Festival so you can plant and harvest them before the end of the season.

                    After your first batch of parsnips comes up, start planting either Potatoes or Kale. Potatoes on average are worth more money because of a chance of a bonus potato, but kale will give better xp returns. I used to suggest planting another 40 parsnips at this time, but that's not a particularly profitable thing to do, so I generally avoid that these days. So general planting times are...

                    Day 1: 40 Parsnips
                    Day 5: Harvest your parsnips, less however many the crows took
                    Day 6: Create Scarecrow(s) and plant 40x of either Kale or Potatoes. If you have the 9x Cauli from Gunther, plant that as well, otherwise obtain and plant at least one Cauli. In addition, plant one Bean Starter.
                    Day 12: Harvest your Kale/Potatoes. You should *really* have those 9 Cauli from Gunther by now. If not, don't bother with them this year.
                    Day 13: Purchase as many Strawberries as possible. Minimum 40. You probably don't want more than 80 though if you're going to be hitting the mines, due to stamina concerns.
                    Day14: Another 40 Kale goes down.
                    Day 20: Harvest Kale, put another 40 Kale down
                    Day 26: Harvest Kale, don't bother replanting

                    XP gains from the aforementioned crops are:

                    40 parsnips = ~ 320 xp, less a few from crows
                    10 Cauli (9 from Gunther, 1 purchased) = 230xp
                    40 Potatoes (day 6) = 560 xp
                    40 Strawberries (2x harvests) = 1,440 xp
                    80 Kale (post Egg Festival) = 1,360 xp
                    1 Bean Sprout planted on Day 6 = 45 xp

                    Total xp for Farming from this crop setup: 3955 xp, which puts you firmly at Farming level 6 at the end of the year, even missing a few parsnips at the start. However, you'd need an extra 2k xp to hit Farming 7, which is *possible*, but not very viable if you're wanting to hit the other skill levels I'm outlining below. Speaking of, that is a great segue into our next bullet point!

                    2) I'm going to start off by talking about hitting xp goals, then about cash and infrastructure goals, since these are both important.

                    Skills:
                    Farming 6, as outlined above
                    Foraging 6 at minimum, 7 if you're wanting to guarantee your tree farm going by now
                    Mining 2 minimum, probably will end up with around Mining 5 if you can make it to level 80+ in Spring
                    Fishing: Meh. I don't like fishing, with the caveat that I'm fully aware that this is the single most *profitable* thing to do in your first Spring, I also don't bother with it more than the minimum necessary to complete bundles.
                    Combat: Meh. Your goal is to avoid combat, not get into combat, while diving. So who cares?

                    Now let's talk about infrastructure, because that's a core element to the game.

                    I like to have 30 oak trees planted and (hopefully) fully grown by the end of Spring, with tappers on all of them providing me with 30 Oak Resin per week starting the first week of Summer. You can guarantee this if you hit Foraging 7 and make some Tree Fertilizer, or just by planting early enough in the season.

                    One Silo. Do this before either Coop or Barn, unless you wish to pay usurious prices for hay at Marnie's. You shouldn't need more than one silo, though. You can store hay in a chest, keep it next to the silo, and if the silo becomes full you can empty it out and fill the chest. Then during the winter, empty from the chest and fill the silo. You still want one silo due to automation reasons (especially with Deluxe Barn/Coop) and because you won't get hay while clearing tall grass with a scythe if you don't have at least one built, but you'll never need *more* than one.

                    Coop with four chickens. Two brown, two white. You need a large brown and a large white egg for the Animal Products bundle. Plus Mayo is pretty darn valuable at 285-399g depending on your perks. Four per day nets you a tidy sum of passive income. Plus they make excellent gifting options for the majority of the townsfolk.

                    20x Quality Sprinklers around a Scarecrow. This requires more in-depth mining strategies, but is invaluable. It means not spending energy on actual watering except once a season (if that). You need Gold, and for that you need to hit up level 80+ in the mines. Or you *can* buy it from Clint, but at 2k per gold bar's worth of ore, you aren't going to hit your numbers any time soon unless you become a Pro Bass Fisher(tm). It's a total of 40k in cash, which isn't impossible for a fisher to get, but it's a lot, and there's other things you could do with that money if you didn't need to buy them. You'll also need Iron, so that's a minimum of getting into the 40+ mine levels, and Refined Quartz as well, which you should have by now if you fish just from recycling all the glasses and CD's, but can also be obtained via mining.

                    Now let's talk about what sort of crops to be planting in the Summer...

                    Hops are, bar none, the most profitable crop you can ever plant in the entire game. Pale Ale, with the Artisan perk, is worth 420g/ea, and hops produces *daily*. However, you only have Farming 6 walking into Summer, so you're going to have to store your hops, and brew it over the second half of the season, and probably into the fall. Don't sell the ale until you get the Artisan perk. This is a 'sacrifice a bit now for huge returns later' strategy.

                    Blueberries are very spammy, and if you get some preserves jars you can very rapidly get some very good cash returns. And since you have Farming 6 walking into Summer, you can actually make jars. I'd suggest a Shed first to hold them, though. Especially if you're wanting them in bulk. As far as actual profits go, however, they're rather lackluster.

                    Melons are a staple summer crop, because you'll want 5x gold melons for your Quality Crops Bundle. Make sure to plant many of them. You'll get 9 of them from Gunther, so there's that.

                    Corn should also be planted to get your Quality Crops Bundle completed with 5x Corn. Don't go hog wild, though, their profit margins suck. Plant maybe 16 on Fertilizer and call it a day

                    At least one hot pepper and tomato for bundle's sake. If you want to make yourself Pepper Poppers for making mining dives faster, you'll want more hot pepper plants

                    You should have gotten a Starfruit seed from Gunther. Plant that as well.

                    Also by now you should have the ability to make at least one apiary. Plant a Poppy nearby to maximize honey profits for the season. You can later on gift it to Penny, who apparently loves them.

                    Planting 10 wheat now means not needing to worry about it later, for the Fodder Bundle.

                    You will need a Sunflower for the dye bundle as well.

                    So as you can see... there's a lot of things you need to be planting in Summer that you need to be ready for.

                    Now, I generally set up 160 farming plots for Summer, hence the 20 sprinklers. Arrange them around a single scarecrow. Think of it as a grid of 3x3 squares, where the middle square is a Quality Sprinkler. Then do a 3x3 of those 3x3 squares, so you're looking at a 9x9 grid, with the center being the Scarecrow. Then you extend each of those four sides out an extra row of 3x3 squares so you have a grid of 5x5 sets of 3x3 squares except the corners. With that in mind, let's look at what to plant:

                    40x Melons. Bar minimum. Put them on Fertilizer, sap is cheap and you want those gold star melons.
                    32x Hops. Spacing is important here, since hops are on a Trellis that can't be walked through. I like to put them on corners to ensure nothing is around them. Fertilizer is irrelevant since you're brewing them all. Speed Gro gives you more harvests.
                    16x Corn. Also on Fertilizer.
                    1x Starfruit, 1x Tomato, 1x Pepper,1x Sunflower, 4x Wheat. Around the same sprinkler. This takes care of your assorted sundry crops. Replant wheat as they come up. Unused wheat can be brewed into beer after you've got your hops brewed.
                    1x Poppy, but this is planted outside of your farming plot, may need its own scarecrow. Plus however many Bee Houses you can afford around it.
                    40x Blueberries. Speed-Gro can net you an extra harvest if you have enough.

                    That leaves 24 spaces open for other things. If you are wanting to go full-bore on your pepper poppers, those might not be a bad choice. If you want more Hops and can space them out so you can get them all, that might work too. Otherwise, either Melons or Blueberries, depending on your strategy.

                    Now, Blueberries have a secondary purpose here. Sure, they're not a bad profit item, and they do really well in Preserves Jars, but they also can be used in Seed Makers. They're going to be more profitable in a seed maker than just selling raw, which is one reason, but they can also be used to force out the 0.5% chance of a viable Ancient Seed from a Seed Maker, since you get flipping tons of them. If you already have an ancient seed from the mines, you can skip this step and probably focus on profits instead of blueberries (which means either Hops or Melons). If not, it's an option.

                    3) Rounding out the year, some things to get:

                    Barn, upgrade Barn to Big Barn, possibly even Deluxe Barn, by the end of Summer. You need at least one pig grown up and producing truffles by the end of Fall if you want a first year CC completion. Other than that, Cows are excellent because Cheese is an amazing stat food, good profits, and good gifting options.

                    Sheds. Depending on how heavy you lean into processing, you're going to want a place to do that. I'd suggest a minimum of one just for kegs and one just for jars by the end of Summer, or by mid-fall at the latest. You can start upgrading them to Big Sheds and building additional ones as demand and resources permit.

                    Big Coop. At some point in the Summer you're going to need to upgrade your Coop to a Big Coop for a Duck. If you can't get a Rabbit's Foot any other way, you may have to bite the bullet on a Deluxe Coop as well.

                    You should be hitting Farming 10 in Summer at some point. Go Artisan, sell your Pale Ale, and go to town.

                    Fall should see at least 40 Pumpkins down on Fertilizer or Quality Fertilizer. Don't forget your bundle requirements, and the rest should be Cranberries. Maybe 10 Beets for a certain quest.

                    When your first batch of pumpkins comes up, you should net 5x gold pumpkins which should be the last thing you need for your Greenhouse unlock. You'll want to start your Ancient Seed on Deluxe Speed-Gro ASAP. You'll also want six Iridium Sprinklers, but you will settle for a couple of extra quality sprinklers if you haven't unlocked the sewers or the skull cave yet. But by mid Fall, you should have the Skull Cave unlocked and the Bus opened.

                    Fall sees you continue to grow your production infrastructure, expanding sheds into Big Sheds. You probably want at least 90x preserves jars and 120 kegs by Winter. When you get done processing your blueberries, you can seamlessly start processing cranberries in jars. You'll also need a Deluxe Barn by now, and hopefully a deluxe Coop as well if you haven't found a rabbit's foot yet.

                    How you set up your Greenhouse depends on how micro-intensive you want it to be. The 'easy' way is just to fill it with 116 ancient fruit. Every week, you get a batch of fruit to brew. Job's done. The 'intermediate' way is to plant 30x of Peach and/or Pomegranate trees, and 104 Ancient Fruit (12 of those trees will be on dirt tiles). Pomegranate trees are more profitable than ancient fruit, even just with using preserves. It'll take approximately 3 days to process preserves in preserves jars, so those 90 jars you made earlier to process your blueberries and cranberries will be the ideal amount to take care of these as well. You only need to harvest trees every third day. The 'min/max' way involves 74 Hops, 30 Ancient Fruit, and 30 Pomegranate/Peach trees. This involves needing 148 kegs for your hops and another 30 kegs for your ancient fruit, for a total of 178 kegs, or roughly two big sheds. It also involves daily harvesting of all the hops, which may be more daily chores than you want to bother with.

                    Hope this helps
                     
                      WilliamZ, GreenOaks and squigglyruth like this.
                    • GreenOaks

                      GreenOaks Orbital Explorer

                      @ShneekeyTheLost Thanks very much. That's incredible comprehensive and I appreciate it being your way but does give me some good ideas for going forward so thanks a lot.

                      With the training rod available in 1.4 that I just got on mobile I'm finding fishing a lot easier and although it's only common fish, I am catching nearly all of them and managing to get a few of the treasure chests, so fishing isn't the bad experience it was previously, so it is an option for making some money quickly to perhaps get slightly more on track but I am way behind what you have suggested, that's for sure now I'm in the first days of summer! I don't have any buildings, jars or anything and not that much crops planted. No sprinklers at all. Not much copper mined (I have about 5-6 bars) and not down to iron yet.

                      Looks like I need to get some hops on the go!
                       

                      Share This Page