Focus on having fun and doing what you’re interested in. Money will happen and trying to min max really ruins the experience

Just have fun and go in blind. Failure isn’t punished and learning is more fun than being told.

Give Linus all the love he deserves

Don’t turn in the dinosaur egg to the museum. Use an incubator to hatch the egg into a dinosaur. Once the dinosaur begins laying eggs, turn one of those eggs to the museum.

Take your time. Days may seem short, but you don’t need to do everything every day. You’ll need to do a little bit of everything to complete things, but you don’t have to master everything. If you decide you hate fishing, just do the bare minimum to complete the goal and don’t touch it passed that.

If you decide to be a big planner, pay attention to weather forecasts. At the very least, rainy days means you don’t have to water crops, so go fishing, mining, or whatever else you want to do!

There are ways to get copious amounts of even the rarest resources, so don’t hold onto something thinking you’ll never see it again. You will. You will get sick of seeing it.

If you’re on PC and find yourself having a good time, there’s mods. There are so many fucking mods. New machines, new animals, new towns, villagers, and storylines… Don’t feel like you need them, the vanilla game is absolutely fantastic, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you hit a point of “I want Stardew, but EVEN MORE!” Modding is also stupid easy, drag and drop.

Oh, and just a fun bit of future knowledge, if you decide you don’t like your spouse and your children with them, get divorced and then turn those kids into doves. Just let those little fuckers fly free. And make sure to answer the phone when the time comes.

Build everything with the goal of harvesting truffle oil. You will be rich beyond belief.

Don’t check the wiki for your first play though.

Fishing initially feels like it sucks ass but buy the training rod from Willie and practice, it will eventually just click.

Upgrade your hoe and watering can, it makes the early farming way less tedious.

Don’t pick the seaside farm if you want to automate your crop watering

You can’t put sprinklers in sand

I remember amaranth being really good because you can harvest it with a scythe and it’s worth a lot

There is no ‘game-over’ state in Stardew Valley. You can do anything you want, and it is always going to be fine. You can take thirty in-game years to finish everything and that’s totally cool.

Just go dig some dirt, meet some people, and grow some plants. And maybe, in the end, discover that you’re gay as hell for Abigail. She rocks.

Since everyone else gave good advice, here is my bad advice. I dunno, it’s not the best advice.

Do a No-Pierre run. Selling to him is ok,just no buying anything from him. You can beat the game without buying anything from his shop. It will take longer, but it’s kinda funny becoming best friends with his wife for her tea plants, and then selling the tea leaves at a huge markup.

There are tons of ways to get seeds and fruit trees without Pierre or jojomart.

If you don’t like fishing as a concept, wait a season and willy will come to your farm and teach you how to fish. Buy trout soup from him and try again. Your only goal is treasure chests when fishing. I got lucky a couple years ago and got 6 dinosaur eggs from fishing in the first year. I have never been able to get a single dino egg since,so it’s hard and rare. Because face it, your gonna have to fish eventually. At least you can get treasure from it.

Give trash to people you don’t like, it’s funny.

My wife searches the trash cans for stuff, and gave an ice cream cone to a kid for his birthday. So I placed a sound block by the library trash can to catch her in the act.

Gather all the items for Willy asap. Once you have completed the community center, he will ask for help. You need hardwood, batteries, and iridium ingots. Just collect them as you go. If you do well enough your ghost grampa will give you a device that generates iridium ore.

Linus gives a special mission to clean the lakes and rivers. Just find the pond in your farm and fish out of that. Use a low ranked pole like your bamboo rod. You can also collect trash from crab pots.

You have all the tools and equipment you need. It’s a fun easy game with a simple gameplay loop. Don’t take it seriously, and have fun. Make your own challenges and mistakes. Find a reason why your character gives Pam the perfect ale. Enable her drinking problems. Or don’t.

There are tons of mods for this game. Make sure to check them out on your second playthrough (automation mod highly recommended).

There’s no true time limit on this game. Enjoy it at your own pace, you won’t be punished for it. Because of the seasons, there are certain things that might be delayed for a little while, but you can literally just sleep away as many days as you need to if you reach a point that you’re waiting for a specific date. There’s no loss condition.

Chests are your best friend. Always save a copy of most crops/gems, as these are often loved gifts for the villagers. Dinosaur Egg should be saved until you know what to do with it, while Ancient Seed should be donated immediately to the museum.

The sooner you invest in tappers for Oak resin, the happier you’ll be.

Fishing is actually really good. It seems hard, but as you level it and get better equipment, it’ll be easier. Once you have the right lures, fishing becomes fairly simple (aside from the really rare or Legendary fish). Don’t be discouraged!

Use the TV to know which days will have rain. Very important to plan out your days you head to the mines or wherever else you desire.

Invest in the Community Center/Joja Repairs (two different routes in the game). They come with very useful rewards.

For skills, you can go down any branch you want. But I highly suggest for Farmer: Tiller, then Artisan. Definitely the most friendly to a newbie.

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One thing I would note is that Stardew Valley is either a management game or a cozy game depending on how you want to play it. There’s no wrong answer, but it can change your perception of the gameplay.

When I first played it, I saw it as a management game where I needed to optimize things to a certain degree. Needed to save enough cash to buy the right seeds at the start of each season, to make sure I got the right number of crop turnovers in a season, to collect all the seasonal stuff for the community center asap so I didn’t have to wait a year for that season to come back around, etc. If you like that sort of thing, it’s pretty well-balanced for it.

However, only much later did I realize, or have pointed out to me, that Stardew Valley doesn’t force you to do anything in any specific order or pace. It can be played at whatever speed you want, with no real failure state except in context of your own goals. If you aren’t concerned about optimizing progression, you can play it like a cozy game. You can let the seasons come and go, plant whatever crops you feel like, raise animals or don’t, hand out gifts to the townsfolk and see what happens, and so on. Some things are rare, and some events only trigger on certain days or under specific conditions, but nothing is permanently missable on any given playthrough. If you miss something, you’ll get another chance the same time next game year, if not sooner.

Point being, it’s fun to play for min/maxing or finding interesting ways to put points on the board, but you can also just screw around. I think it’s good to keep that in mind even if you like the pressure of optimization. A “mistake” isn’t going to ruin your run, it’ll just be a setback that you can come back from. If the game gets frustrating, it’s likely because you’re putting pressure on yourself to achieve a specific goal.

The wiki is great, and very useful for when you’re stuck on something, but I’d just jump in and start playing before you go to deep into the wiki.

Stardew is great, you’ll enjoy it.

What others have said, play the game the way you want. There’s no “wrong answers” and any online guides for the game will mostly be about optimising all the fun out of the game, so I wouldn’t recommend looking things up and just experimenting instead, only look things up if you’re really stuck.

I will say though that the fishing minigame is actually fun. It’s just presented initially in a poor way. Go to the fishing shop and buy the training rod, it removes all the frustration from having a low fishing skill, and swap away from it once you’re ready. Of course, if you still don’t enjoy the fishing minigame, you don’t have to play it, it’s just that I find a lot of people hate it because it leaves a bad first impression, but is actually quite fun later in the game.