The problem is that the game is so open to different paths. Here’s a basic basic basic basic list:

• Talk to everyone all the time; give people gifts (random fruit is fine mostly) twice a week
• Buy seeds and plant them. Harvest and buy better seeds. Make sure to water them!
• Be on the lookout for forage-able fruits and flowers. Chop down trees so you have wood to build. Learn where stuff is and where gates to future progress are. Mostly they’ll tell you what you need to proceed.
• On rainy days when you don’t have to water, fight monsters in the mine.
• Talking to folks gives you quests. Following the quests gives you stuff and teaches you the game.
• Exploring the world and checking the achievement list teaches you, too.
• The wiki is fantastic, but so are the game interface and menus.

Work towards your long term goals from the very beginning. It's happened plenty of times where I get so absorbed in expanding my crop field that I neglect resource collection. Then all of a sudden I want to produce wine and I need 25k wood and a million oak resin...

Save 1 of each crop, and some of the things you forage as you go. It will make the community center easier and villager requests easier if you have some things on hand.

Get as much money as you can before the Egg Festival (13/Spring). Invest it in strawberry seeds. It's fine to plant them in the following day, you'll still get two harvests out of them.

First summer and fall cash crops are blueberries and cranberries respectively.

Silo before chicken coop. Otherwise you'll need to buy fodder. And you just need one silo, as long as there's space for more fodder on the feeding troughs. (If there isn't enough space, a cherry bomb does the trick.)

If you're going the CC route, with the standard bundles:

• check the travelling merchant every Friday and Sunday, for either red cabbages or their seeds. Otherwise you aren't completing it until Summer y2.
• the bus repair just needs money, and grants you access to the Desert that helps you to complete other bundles. Do it ASAP.
• another bundle to prioritise is the one that grants you the greenhouse. Plant all fruit trees there, around the arable plot (not in it).

Mushrooms vs. bats: mushrooms are a reliable source of income. Bats are really unreliable (specially in comparison with trees in the greenhouse), and they don't even help that much with the CC.

Tip for early game money making:

befriend Caroline (Pierre, the store owner’s wife) ASAP, when she’s at 2 hearts enter her sunroom through the back door in their kitchen. The next day you’ll get a recipe in the mail for Tea Saplings.

I didn’t get this tip when I first tried it because tea only grows the last week of every season and doesn’t sell for that much. But you don’t plant them, chuck them straight into the shipping bin (or sell to Pierre if you need the $ that day.)

They sell for 500g each - use this tip sparingly if you don’t want to break the game. I typically use it for emergency cash like “Oh no, I forgot the egg festival was tomorrow and have no money” or “I need to upgrade my watering can while it’s raining but I forgot and bought a backpack upgrade instead”

Other tips:

• get a coop and some chickens as soon as is feasible (and after building a silo)

  • selling mayonnaise is a lot of money in early game
  • farm animals are a consistent source of Farming Exp (with crops you get Exp when harvesting, but with chickens you get Exp daily from petting them)

• parsnips don’t sell for much, they might be better used to befriend an NPC ::: spoiler spoiler

  • Pam because she sends items in the mail that are really useful :::

• if you randomly get mail from an NPC you’ve befriended (e.g., not after a quest) you can restart the day to get the item you want (out of the small selection of items that each NPC can send you- a few examples below hidden in spoiler tag - some of these are useful for completing the Community Center) ::: spoiler spoiler

  • Pam sends batteries and energy drinks
  • Demetrius sends pufferfish, rainbow shell
  • Emily sends wool :::

I’ve played multiple play throughs, yet every time I seem to scramble in the beginning. I’ve learned to chill. Plant, water, forage, say hey to some people, and FISH. Like others said I mine on rainy days.

In other news, how do you like stardew on steam deck or just steam deck in general? I imagine it would be similar to switch which is how I’ve always played.

• You can lay down in your bed without sleeping to slowly regain energy
• Plant tree seeds in the dirt patch areas of the forest to have a larger supply of wood without sacrificing farm space
• Chests in strategic locations (e.g. in the mines, by the bus stop, etc.) with area specific items (e.g. food for mining, gifts for villagers, etc.) to save time traveling back to the farm
• Invest as much as you can in seeds. Cauliflower, melon, and pumpkin will have the best return on investment your first year, so plant as many of those after you have minimum required of the other crops. Plant crops with multiple harvests per season (blueberries, hops, etc.) ASAP, ideally day 1. Sell crops directly to Pierre on harvest day so you can buy seeds to replant the same day
• Don't waste an inventory space on staircases. Bring 99+ stone and craft if/as needed
• Sashimi is a low effort/low opportunity cost food. I recommend using crab pots on the farm to supply the low effort fish. The recipe is from Linus, if I recall correctly.