Some tips for Grimshire after my first playthrough:
1. Meet everyone on the first day. They have your tools.
2. After that, use the first week to grind as hard you can. Chop trees, and especially mine as much as possible.
3. Upgrade the pickaxe and the fishing rod as fast as possible. There's fishes you won't be able to get without upgrading the rod.
4. Befriend Rufus, Lila, Kai, Tano, Percy, Theo and the deer priest and talk to them whenever possible
5. Prioritize donating to Adeline's research, it's very important to complete it as fast as possible to get new methods of preservation.
6. Collect and save tree seeds. Don't bother processing them besides the maple.
7. Buy from the shops every week. Money is easy to get, resources aren't.
9. Mine chests can have preserves
10. Start ranching as early as possible. Even if it's just a bluggy
11. Wheat doesn't need water. Plant a lot of it
12. Check the lost and found box inside the town hall often
13. Some items can be double processed
14. As soon as the trees stop producing fruit or seeds chop them down .
15. Open the extra mines as soon as possible
16. Check the root cellar. Eat or sell the things that are about to expire. The game doesn't let you do separate piles of items so be careful to join fresh ones with older ones, it will lower their lasting time.
17. Make at least 6 drying racks to start
This has actually helped me a lot when I was playing the first time myself! If you don't mind, I'm going to add some of my own observations after a first successful playthrough and in spring of the second:
Alongside upgrading pickaxe and fishing rod, get axe to at least copper so you can get hawthorns on farm.
Open Marsh mine with copper pickaxe, grind out 20 iron, and immediately upgrade the pick to iron before going in again. It will save your ass on stamina.
Farm copper, tin, and iron for iron sprinklers before any other iron tool upgrades. You can reasonably get 6 fully set up iron sprinklers by mid-spring and it's going to save your ass on stamina while allowing you big crop without gatekeeping mining trips for rainy days.
When starting ranching prioritize Alpheep and Bluggies, and try to get as many female animals as possible for milk and eggs to have a steady supply for carnivores (and wool for money). Honey won't be really needed until you can get fermentation barrels, so don't need to rush Chikrees too much, but once they become pertinent also focus on getting mostly/all female animals for produce.
When you get Girtles, focus on fattening them up. They take longest but give most meat.
Rufus sells animal feed, buy it.
Upgrade animal barns whenever you have resources.
In prep for The Winter Event, butcher your animals starting in winter Girtles-first or you might not be able to preserve it all in time.
Smoke the meat before putting it in barrels, it will remove some spoilage-related stress and by that point you should have more than enough wood.
Make at least 6 cooking stations to turn offal into sausages; smoked sausages last longer than dried offal.
Never. Enough. Coal. Don't be afraid to collapse the mines to find more.
As for trees; plums and cherries fruit first, but you can chop down just about everything else before mid-spring for it to comfortably regrow in time. Focus on chopping down birch and juniper trees to process into planks.
Maple is useless for anything but wood, trust.
Plant the fruit trees on your farm. I recommend clearing out a left-side strip of your farm, all of it, and planting them there in rows of 5. Focus on pears and hawthorns (don't be afraid to chop down hawthorns on your farm in spring).
Set aside a plot of land to keep replanting maple/birch/oak for reliable source of wood.
Ask Kai for the animal spawns. If you got money to spare, ask Tano to bring you some.
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cardio literally essential skill. if you're not taking cardio first skillpoint what are you doing.
Save up for Angler skill as soon as you can early game when carnivore food is harder to come by. It will also double secret message bottles you fish up.
Most useful T1 skills: Critter Cuddler
Most useful T2 skills: Naturalist, Prospector (I'm also Blind, if you don't need collectibles to glow to find them disregard these & save points)
Most useful T3 skills (in order of getting): Efficient Crafter, Mole, Arborist, Butcher
