Handsome author? Oh boy, I’ve gotta find that one.
How do you befriend them though? Just give them stuff?
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
Yup. You can give each person two gifts a week, and they’ll hate it, dislike it, not give a shit about it, like it, or love it. Get a “like” or “love” reaction to a gift, and your hearts go up with them. Get hearts high enough, and they’ll start opening up to you. (Oh, and birthday gifts are magnified in their power).
Meet Elliott, the handsome author. Lives on the beach. Likes parsnips well enough. (Pam loves them, though, so if you want a quick and easy friend, feed her parsnips).
I recommend the wiki, rationalize it as not cheating by saying it’s my record of gossip around town. “Hey, Elliott, do you like parsnips?” the wiki represents me asking before shoving one in his face. Anyway, playing with it saves the frustration of spending five minutes wandering all over town looking for someone and then giving them a gift they mock.
Handsome author, oh, that’s Fabio…I mean Elliot. Yeah, he always seemed happy enough when I gave him fishy things or seashells. But, as I said, my doc loved pickles, and I had loads of those, so we had the quickest…rapport.
But damn, try to maintain relationships with people after you are married…I gave Sebastien (? the goth guy) a freaking eggplant or something after I got married, and when I got home, Doc Harvey’s all “I heard you snuck a gift to your other friend today. Do I need to watch you more closely?” LMAO
Leah tried that nonsense on me, and I was all like, “Kiss my ass. Have some goat cheese.” We’re cool now.
15-month-ago Johnny Bravo was a smart guy. That mod really takes the pressure off.
The gifts system is so complicated, there’s no shame in checking the wiki. Some basic gifts are almost always liked – fruits, vegetables, flowers, artisan goods – but there are many exceptions, and there are even exceptions to the exceptions. :smack:
For example, most NPCs like flowers (except Clint, George & Sebastian, which kind of makes sense.) However, everyone hates poppies for some unfathomable reason – except Penny, who loves 'em. However, Penny hates rabbit’s feet, whereas everyone else loves them. And so on and so forth. Occasionally an NPC will tell you what another NPC loves or hates, but the information’s rarely useful.
Shane always acts like a jerk until you get to know him better. His heart events will reveal more insight into why he acts like a jerk. Just remember that your relationship score will always go up when you talk to someone, no matter how curt they are with you.
All right, I didn’t want to cheat, but I’m checking the wiki. I’m in my first summer and feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I don’t even have a coop yet. But I like that the game is endless, it makes me feel like I’m not rushing for anything. Even if I have limited hours in one day, I have limitless days, so it’s okay.
I’m probably going to use the friend mod though. I want to be besties with everyone forever.
Don’t worry about building a coop until Fall or even Winter; basically whenever you can afford it. The main advantage of an early coop is to get eggs for the C.C. bundles, and making money with mayonnaise. But I generally don’t even start on animals until my tools are upgraded to at least iron, plus maybe a gold pickaxe.
Oh, and make sure to build at least one silo first before getting any animals. You’ll want that free hay from scything grass.
So happy this game is back on the radar of others.
Loved the game, played a couple of in game years and had a huge farm going on. I played most of the update they added, but did not complete it.
My kiddos and I even started a garden out in the backyard because of this game.
Definitely hold off on the coop. Silo first: buddha david is absolutely right on this.
But I don’t think the friend mod is necessary. After awhile, getting gifts for everyone goes from fairly difficult to super-easy. My path was to make about two dozen preservers, pick a crapload of salmonberries and plant a crapload of blueberries, and make jam constantly. I’d walk around town a couple of times a weeks with jam, which nearly everybody likes, and pass that out, and sell the rest. If you do that (or find some other reliable gift), and you make sure to chat with people before giving them jam, you can be besties with everybody pretty easily.
oh and an important note everyone single is courtable so be careful if you’re used ot harvest moon because you can give girls a gift thinking you’ll just be friends and all of a sudden you have scenes with 3 different girls … … when I looked it up everyone was big on "you can finally have same sex relationships " why doesn’t harvest moon do this …
Turns out Shane is an asshole because he’s clinically depressed. I found out when I started feeding him red peppers.
Summer is almost over. I’ve upgraded my axe and pickaxe, and gotten to level 25 of the mines. I also completed my first community center bundle.
This game is sure full of surprises.
I just started this game and I’m finding energy to be a huge, huge stumbling block. I tried reading online guides, googling for “tips” or “surviving your first year” or “how to get started” and other things like that, and nobody seems to even mention how to deal with running out of energy by 10AM given the massive amount of energy performing any physical work seems to cost. People online are talking about doing all this foraging, farming, mining, acting like it’s no big deal to have upgraded all your tools to copper and built the first expansion on your house by the end of your first spring, and have the greenhouse for your first winter. Meanwhile, I didn’t even make it to the mines for the first time until summer. Some sources say to use fish for energy early on, but eating 1 raw fish replenishes so little energy that you barely break even given the energy you use casting. There’s no way one day’s catch worth of fish gets me through one day in the mine. As for eating my own crops, well, they take half a season to grow, and if I grew enough to be useful for energy, I’d be spending all day every day water (blowing all my energy on that every day, too.) There’s food you can buy at the pub that replenishes energy, but how to make enough money to buy enough to be useful, given what I just noted about farming and fishing?
The best thing I can make right now that replenishes a useful amount of energy is the field snack, but chopping down enough trees to obtain enough ingredients to make a few uses up so much energy. So what I did a few times is chop down trees until my energy was depleted, go to bed at literally 10-11AM, do that a few days in a row, then I’d have enough ingredients for enough field snacks to make it through 1 day in the mines. Since I discovered the sauna, I no longer have to go to bed at 10AM; I can go back and forth between chopping down trees and the sauna all day, but it still takes several chopping-down-tree runs to make enough field snacks to last 1 day in the mines. And I’m not even at the levels where I’m beginning to find iron yet.
Is there something blindingly obvious about replenishing energy early in the game that I’m missing?
Have you been to Spring Onion Island? Directly south of your farm, there’s an island where spring onions spawn every day. They restore +13 energy, not much but there’s usually lots of them. Also, as the name suggests, they only grow in spring.
Field snacks are okay, but like you said it takes lots of energy to collect seeds, so I normally save them for mining. Occasionally you can get seeds just by shaking trees. They can also be found in trash cans (as can seeds, and sometimes better food) so check those often, who cares if the neighbors get grossed out.
Those slimy bits of algae and seaweed provide a great snack while fishing. 
Energy really is a major limitation in the early game, especially the first month. If you run low on energy early in the day, don’t go to sleep, just focus on stuff that doesn’t require any energy, such as foraging for onions or chatting up townies. Walking around town or swinging your sword/scythe doesn’t consume energy. Also make sure you get to bed by at least midnight every night; going to bed later risks waking up with less than 100% energy, which is a major bummer.
Breathe! There’s no need to do so much stuff so quickly. Energy is a deliberate brake on your activities, and if you don’t finish your first house expansion until the first fall or winter, nobody’s gonna judge you :).
Some suggestions:
-Limit your beginning farm. If you’re using up half your energy just watering it, it may be too big; once you harvest your next crop, consider letting some of it lie fallow.
-Focus your days. Fishing and watering and tree-chopping and mining are all exhausting activities. You may want to do one or two, instead of all four, in a day: maybe water your crops in the morning and then spend the afternoon fishing. In between, like Buddha_David says, relax and chat with the locals.
-Foraging is a fantastic source of nutrition, especially when the berries kick in. If you spend a couple of days gathering salmonberries, it’s easy to get 50 or 60 or even more. Each one isn’t all that great, but a stack of them can easily get you through several days in the mines.
But the game is very forgiving, if you allow yourself to relax into it. The UberGuides to Finishing Stardew Valley in a Single Year kind of miss the point, in my opinion.
Yeah when I run out of energy then I do stuff that doesn’t cost energy, like running around and chatting with people. I rarely feel like it limits me that much.