23 Tips for New (and Old!) Stardew Valley Players

So often I see the phrase “Oh my god, you can do that?! I’ve been playing this game for x hours already!” When it comes to Stardew Valley - I’ve experienced this myself on several occasions. This prompted me to want to create a nice little list of tips for Stardew Valley players - new and old - of things you might not know you can do in this wonderful little game.

1. You can charge the watering can and hoe by holding down the mouse for a few seconds to water/dig multiple squares once the tool has been upgraded. (the longer you hold down the mouse, the larger the space it will work: 1x3, 1x5, 3x3 and 3x6.)

2. When fishing, hold down the mouse key to make the bar go up and release to go down; you don't need to keep quickly clicking it.

3. You can pick up and smelt Quartz into refined Quartz (1 Quartz & 1 coal into the furnace)

4. You can collect 12 hardwood per day in the hidden forest.

5. When buying or crafting items, you can hold the shift key while clicking to buy/craft 5 of that item at a time. You can also hold down the right mouse button to continually purchase, instead of furiously clicking.

6. When casting your line out to fish, you can sway your cast left or right with the WASD keys. This can help you hit those special fishing spots that look inaccessible any other way. 

7. Technically, you never have to feed your animals. Feeding animals does make them happy however, and their production of materials will slow to a crawl if they are underfed. All animals are feed hay, which is automatically collected and placed inside silos once you have at least one built (as opposed to other items, it does not go into your inventory.) Hay is collected by clearing out wild grass from your farm. To feed your animals, go inside the building, collect the hay from the chute (located on the top left of the barn/coop) and lay it out on the bench.

8. The dirt floors in the mines can be hoed for items. 

9. The little wiggly things that look like worms seen around Stardew Valley are spots that you can dig into with your hoe to find buried treasure.

10. The TV in your home shows several different programs: weather, which shows the forecast for the next day; fortune teller, which tells you what luck modifier you have for the day; livin' off the land, which gives you tips on various things throughout the game; and queen of sauce, which teaches you recipes to cook.

11. The various shops can house different items and purchasable crafting/cooking recipes that change daily/weekly/monthly. Make sure to check back every now and then!

12. The fridge inside your house is a storage space. When you cook, the menu pulls items from your inventory AND the fridge.

13. When growing fruit trees, every adjacent space has to be clear of ANYTHING. This means that you can't have fruit trees overlapping (the game generally won't let you anyway), no weeds, grass or flooring, or even tilled soil. Once the tree is grown however, those 8 spaces surrounding the trunk are free game.

14. You can un-till soil by using the pick axe.

15. When harvesting crops, you can hold down the right mouse button as you move over the tiles to harvest much quicker than physically clicking on every one - just make sure you don't have anything edible selected while you do so! I personally have one of the tools selected while I do this - that said, also make sure you don't left click while having them selected as that will clear away the crops instead of harvesting them!

16. It might seem obvious to some, but the box to the right of your house is used to sell your produce and other items. You don't need to find a store to sell to.

17. Grass will spread on its own each day. The item "grass starter" that you buy from Pierre is exactly that - a starting point for grass to grow. Plant a few several spaces apart and in a week you will have a field of grass.

18. You can chop down the palms near Oasis.

19. You can check your community center progress from the main pause menu - just click on the little icon on the right.

20. You can rotate furniture in your house by left clicking it to pick it up, then right clicking to rotate.

21. You can change your animals' names later on by clicking on them to bring up their information menu and clicking inside the large portion of the box.

22. You can shake trees by right clicking on them, which will sometimes give you seeds. Good for those field snacks if you need energy ;)

23. If your inventory is full and you don't want to trash any of your items, you can drop them on the ground by dragging them to other parts of the screen instead.

Have any other non-spoiler tips for Stardew Valley aficionados? Leave them in the comments!