Spoiler alert!
I am not even going to try to avoid spoilers. So be forewarned.
This walkthrough is for the iPad version of the game which has quite a few differences from the desktop version.
Stardew Valley is very flexible, so as you play the game your experiences will not be the same as mine. Once I am past the game basics, I will not be going step by step, but only recapping the action.
If you are looking just to get a particular question about the game answered. You can find just about every thing you need to know in the Wiki.
Having gathered enough copper to make five more copper bars, I was ready to go over to the blacksmith to have him upgrade my pickax. It was the 20th day of spring. On the way I stopped at the bulletin board and saw that George was willing to pay someone a fee to bring him some green algae . I figured it would be a lot faster to drop my hook in the river to get him some, than to go back to the farm and get some out of storage.

Of course, since I was looking for algae, I caught fish after fish. Even with the delay, when I finally got the algae and took it back to George, I still had plenty of time to run my errands. I had Clint break my geodes, before going to see if the museum wanted any of my loot.


Then it was back to the blacksmith. You need to finish all your business with Clint before upgrading tool. Once he has your tool, he won’t do business with you until it is finished. It cost 2,000 guilder and five bars of copper. A problem with doing a tool upgrade, is that while Clint is working on a tool you don’t have it. So I wouldn’t be able to go to the mine for a few days. I planned to take this time to work on cutting down trees and fishing.


When a tool upgrade is finished, you get a popup notification in the corner of the screen, while you are still in bed in the morning. I don’t know why the notice doesn’t come in the mail. After leaving the blacksmith’s I spent the quite some time fishing and foraging.


The next day, I decided that it was time to stop using the training fishing rod and start using the fiberglass pole I bought from Willy. The benefit of the fiberglass pole is that you can load it with bait. Bait is made from bug meat. Now you know why I was eager to kill bugs in the mine.

It took me quite a long time in my first lifetime to realize that to load the bate onto the pole, you have to open up your backpack, click on the bait and drag it onto the pole. You can’t do this in the side bar menu for the backpack. This armed, I headed out for a day of fishing. When I was first playing SDV, I hated the fishing game. After I got the hang of it, I enjoy it as a nice change of pace from the farming, mining, and combat.

I was going from place to place fishing for particular fish I need for the Fish Tank at the community center. I am not sure when it was triggered, but I now had the fish tank challenge opened up, and I need to seek out certain fish to fulfill it.





Though I knew it was an unlucky day, I just couldn’t help myself. I wanted to try out my improved pickax, so I headed to the mine anyway. Starting at level 20 I worked my way down to 24 where I saw a whole bunch of crates and barrels. It was still early afternoon, and I only needed one level down to lock in another button on the elevator, so I went for it. As it turned out I was able to make it all the way to 30 where I was disappointed that there was no treasure chest before heading home for the night.




The next day I took another five bars of copper over to Clint’s to get my ax upgraded. Then I went fishing for a while.

I got myself into trouble with a full backpack again. In the above situation, I have opened a fished up treasure chest to find three items in it. I was able to drag the copper ore down to joining the first six ores, but that left me the bait and coal. I finally had to drag the broken eye glasses down into the trash to make room for the bate, which I was then able to drag onto the fishing rod. That left room for the coal. Belatedly I went over to my storage chest on the beach to unload before heading back to fish.


Finally the next day was a lucky one! It was a good thing, because starting at level 31 things start to get really hard. For several levels the mine is very dark. I should have remembered and taken some torches with me, but I blundered along and didn’t do too badly.

I managed to make it all the way down to level 40 where the light is bright. On level 41 I will start finding abundant iron ore.


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