Best Ways to Gather & Manage Resources When Starting Stardew Valley

Resources are a core part of any farming sim, whether that’s crops, animals, food, or any other items you need. When you first start out, it’s useful to know which tasks to prioritize and what items you should keep. Here are the best ways to gather and manage resources when starting Stardew Valley.

Avoid Over Planting Early

You go through a lot of energy early, and each season only has 28 days. Between these two factors, it’s easy to end up planting more crops than you can reasonably grow. You won’t have sprinklers yet, so you need to plant seeds while keeping in mind that you’ll need a lot of energy to water every individual plant. However, foraging and fishing can give you early food sources to make your energy last a bit longer. Once you unlock it, the fruit bats or mushrooms in your cave help a lot in giving you ways to replenish energy.

Keep Storage Organized

It doesn’t take long to gather a lot of items. Also, your inventory space is incredibly limited when you start Stardew Valley. Because of this, you need multiple chests early on, and it’s easy to create a mess of storage by putting items in chests at random. I recommend color coding your chests and having a system for which item goes where. As an example, I have a red chest for my artisan goods and a black chest for coal and other mining items. This makes it easy to find anything you need when you need it.

Save Wood to Make Coal

You need a lot of coal. Always. There’s never enough of it when you’re mining to make all the metal bars you need. However, once you have a Charcoal Kiln, you can use wood to make coal. Considering how much wood you get when clearing your farm, you should be able to use it to craft a decent stockpile of coal.

Keep at Least One of Each Crop

When you start Stardew Valley, you basically have no choice except to purchase seeds. However, as you level up your Farming, you’ll unlock a Seed Maker. All you need to do is put a crop in it, and it gives you a varying number of seeds for that crop. Because of this, it’s useful to keep at least one of each crop you grow so that you have a steady source of seeds later without needing to spend all your gold on seeds every season.

Fish and Forage

Fish and foraged items are great because you can eat them raw, or you can craft any fish into sashimi when you have the recipe. This restores both a bit of health and energy, meaning you can fight longer or complete more activities in a single day. While fishing costs energy, foraging doesn’t. Between these two tasks, you have an early game food source, or you can sell what you gather for some gold. Both options are great because building up gold at the beginning of Stardew Valley can be tough, and you run out of energy easily until you have sprinklers and tool upgrades.

These are the best ways to gather and manage resources when starting Stardew Valley. I find that a common component of farming games is how valuable organization can be from the start. From here, check out our Stardew Valley guide hub to help you live your life as a farmer to the fullest.