Antimatter said:
Picked up Lumines Remastered. Man i'm rusty, but it's a solid port thusfar.
As for stardew, I think I need someone to guide me though the early days, till I get the hang of it.
It's not particularly difficult actually. You really can't "fail" at Stardew Valley. There is no game over condition and you can take your time. It is an extremely chill game, and you can even be the town heel if you want.
If something isn't going well, you can scrap it and start over. Like say, you decided to start farming animals too soon and keeping them fed is costing you money. You can just sell the animals and refill your barn and coop once you have things more stable.
If you run out of money, you can always fish and forage for more, and there's always some way to get more money to fund a new effort.
The only real "ending" it has is when the ghost of grandpa comes back and judges your progress after three years, but it's open ended otherwise and you can play for years after that event. There's far more than three in game years worth of content in it.
There are lots of videos on Youtube that will explain things, but I actually don't recommend watching many of them. They kind of spoil the experience.
The game does a pretty good job of teaching you things as you go. You'll unlock stuff as you go.
It's also not a game you really sit down and play for hours on end, though you can do so if you desire. Generally speaking, I'll play a few in game days at a time, and then play other things.
Here are some general tips that will help you get started in the vein of a "stuff I wish I knew before I started playing" style list:
Fishing is frustrating at first, but not that hard to get the hang of. It gets easier as you unlock new gear.
Explore. Foraging the land is important in your first year. You do want to grow a little of everything available on the farm each season, but should spend most of your first year learning where everything is, unlocking things, and planning out your future upgrades.
Watch TV every day. You'll learn recipes, the upcoming weather, and daily luck. Luck matters when you're mining especially. Do other things on days with poor luck.
Don't try and clear your entire plot of land and make a huge farm in your first year. You don't need to. Focus on a small area of land and build up your farm gradually. You also want to keep a few trees for tapping, grass for helping to fill your silos once you have them, and space to put buildings and animals.
Choose Mushrooms over Bats.
Build a silo before buying any animals. Have at least two before upgrading your barns and coops and filling them up with animals. In fact, I recommend not buying any animals until you have a fully upgraded coop and barn with silos.
Pigs are the biggest money makers as far as animals go, but you want a few of each just to have items available for quests and such.
You can hatch -any- egg you find in an incubator, assuming you have room in your coop for another animal. Also, be careful placing incubators. You can't remove or move them once they've been placed, so put them out of the way in the coops.
Put a fence post over grass starters to create a constant supply of grass. Animals can only eat grass on spaces they can physically occupy. Several of these will keep them fed from spring through fall. Grass doesn't grow in winter, so you'll need a stocked silo to feed your animals through the winter.
If you aren't letting the animals out to graze every day, you have to manually feed animals until you get the higher tier upgrades for the barn and coop. Letting them graze also keeps them happier. Happier animals produce more yield.
Keep the barn and coop doors shut in the winter or when it is raining, or animals become less happy. Also, invest in a heater for each farm building before winter arrives. You only need one per barn or coop.
There's an overflow error that sometimes occurs in keeping animals fed and happy. So don't panic if they sometimes have messages that say they are underfed and unhappy even though you're keeping up with them.
Invest in scarecrows, and scale up the size of your farming as you upgrade your equipment.
Hold down the use button when using your watering can or hoe to cover a larger area with a single swing. This doesn't work on the base equipment, but each upgrade covers a larger and larger area.
Put walkway tiles under scarecrows and sprinklers to keep from uprooting them when you till your soil.
Build new fences on top of broken fences. You don't need to tear the old ones down as you won't get any resources from doing so. Just slap a new fence post on top of it.
Save a few of everything. You'll need these items for bundles for the community center, or to fill up the museum at least. Both are things you want to do as soon as you can.
Don't hoard. Set aside a few of each item for job board quests, bundles, and gifts, but sell the rest. This can be a hard habit for RPG players to break, but you don't need massive stocks of anything in this game.
Manufactured goods are not always worth more than high quality crops. Check the prices of both before making artisan goods in bulk. Generally artisan goods are indeed worth more, so you'll want to turn most of your crops into those before selling them.
Plant seasonal flowers near beehives and leave them for the entire season for more valuable honey. This is worth far more than harvesting the flowers. Don't make mead with expensive honey, just use the wild honey you'll get before the flowers mature for that.
Do put aside a few gold level items for the festivals that require you to add or bring an item. The quality of the item has an impact on the outcome. Try to put aside gold items from each aspect of the game, mining, farming, ranching, fishing, artisan goods, etc.
Grow and make at least a few of everything every season. Save your plain crops for gifts and quests. Sell the Gold crops, and use the silver to make other goods.
You can't walk between crops that are on posts like grapes and hops, so don't put them side by side more than two rows wide you won't be able to get to them to harvest them.
Use fertilizer when it's available. Fast grow is more profitable for crops you're uisng to make artisan goods, as quality has no impact on that. Use quality boosting fertilizer otherwise.
Crop quality has no impact on the quality of manufactured goods. Don't waste gold crops making wine and artisan goods. Use plain and silver crops first, and then fill it out with gold crops if the gold crop is worth less than the manufactured goods. Sell the remaining gold crops either way for immediate cash flow.
Make Wine. Starfruit is the biggest cash crop for wine, but it will probably be a couple of seasons before you can make a full crop of it.
When you upgrade to a cellar, fill it with as many casks as you can and age wine for maximum profits. It takes a very long time to reach maximum quality, but a cellar full of aged starfruit or ancient fruit wine is worth several hundred thousand in gold.
The greenhouse grows crops from any season year round. Fill it with ancient fruit as soon as you are able, this will take a while. You don't have to replant them, and it will produce yield on a regular basis providing you with a regular constant cash flow.
In the meantime, use whatever the most profitable crop available to you at the time is. Pick something that produces yield constantly rather than something you have to replant after each harvest. Blueberries and strawberries are probably the best bet in the early game. The only exception might be starfruit, which are worth the effort due to the price you can get for the wine.
Once you have ancient fruit seeds, there's no need to put anything else in there. It's worth slightly less than starfruit as wine, but still nets you six figures of income every two months with a full cellar of aged product and is much less effort.
Replace sprinklers as you upgrade them. Once you have Iridium sprinklers, there's no reason to keep your old iron ones around. Rarecrows don't have any advantage over scarecrows. You don't need any of them unless you just want to collect everything.
Don't worry about getting married right away. None of the in game relationships change and none of the marriage options become unavailable later. Get things stable and then worry about finding a companion.
Residents have specific likes and dislikes. Gifts are the best way to boost friendship ratings, as is doing job board missions for them, but you won't be able to woo the entire town from the start. You don't have to make friends with the entire town, but you'll get several unique cutscenes for each character depending on your friendship level.
Buy a Statue of Endless Fortune as soon as you are able. You can get one from an NPC in the casino [which you won't be able to access right away], but it costs 1,000,000 gold. The benefit of this is that it produces a random valuable item every day. However, the real reason to get one is that it produces a favorite item of a resident on their birthday. This will tell you what items work well in boosting friendship points for specific residents.
Finally, quality of life mods are totally worth it. The seed bag and tractor in particular are worth installing. You'll have to buy both, so they won't break progression. One will be available via the shop you buy seeds in, and the other through the carpenter's shop you buy upgrades at.
If you absolutely hate the fishing mini game, you can also get mods that automate it.
There is also a mod that ties chests to any manufacturing equipment connected to each other and the chest. Meaning you can literally fill a room with equipment, put a single chest in the doorway, and load all the machines by putting items in the chest, and any yield from that is also placed in the chest.
You can essentially create factories this way, and it is the best way to make the most out of your cellar. Particularly if you're using mods that make the cellar bigger, which can yield multi-million dollar harvests eventually.