Rhube's tips for Stardew Valley:
Name yourself, your farm, and your favourite thing something that will make you smile when it's said back to you
On mobile, to move, tap where you want to go; the tutorial says to drag your finger on the screen, but this doesn't work well, just tap where you want to go
Cut wood and build a chest before you do anything else - you are quickly going to run out of inventory space
Buy all the strawberries you can at the Egg Festival - avoid big expenditures before then to save up, feed them with Speedgrow fertiliser*
Except the 2,000 bag upgrade - get that as soon as you can; fishing is a quick way to make money (but difficult as a noob)**
Fences are a waste of time and money - your animals won't leave your farm and weeds are easier to scythe than fences are to replace
You can use bee hives, preserve pots, furnaces etc as fences as you get richer, and they won't decay
When salmonberries and blackberries are in season, treat them like pokemon! You gotta catch them all! You will level in foraging so much more quickly
You always need more wood (until you don't, but that's pretty far into the game)
If you're trying to say hi to everyone, Sebastian, Sam, Elliot, and Hayley are the most tricky - Sebastian will leave the basement at around 7pm, loiter in his house; Sam works in the Jojo Mart or Museum and likes to hang out by the river on the town map; Hayley gets up late and goes to bed early, catch her taking photos in the forest, hanging out on the beach or near the playground, talking to Alex in the summer by the ice cream stand, or in her kitchen around 6pm; Elliot leaves his house at noon to chill on the beach for an hour (you can find him a few other places, but not as easily, and it you get to the beach before noon on the second day you can pounce on him after you talk to Willy)
Make friends with Demetrius and he will devote a cave on your land to a science experiment; choose the fruit bats - you don't have to fight them and it will have much more hard-to-get fruit than exotic mushrooms
don't upgrade your watering can the first year, you get special moves when you upgrade, but even basic watering of a single spot takes longer. It's a lot quicker just to water each spot individually with the starter can
In summer, don't upgrade your axe until after the green rain; you don't want to be without an axe when there are giant fiddleferns to cut down
Make friends with Shane; when he likes you enough he will give you the recipe for jalapeño poppers, which make you go faster
Kill lots of bugs early on to get a really good sword from Gill in the Adventurer's guild, it will make life much easier
Kill lots of dust sprites until one drops a coffee bean. Coffee plants grow in spring and summer and you can brew coffee and espresso to make you go faster
When you have the house upgrade and can cook, buy the espresso recipe from Gus in the pub; it's worth it
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the most helpful tips I have to optimise your experience starting out. I am restraining myself from advice on completing the Community Centre in a single year (I have lots);I had more fun before I started trying to do that, so that's advice for another day.
*if you do the spring foraging bundle and spring crops bundle in the community centre, you get 20 spreedgrow as a reward, so if you plant parsnips, beans, cauliflower, and potato on the first day, you can get this reward the day after you get the strawberry seeds. Speedgrow is better than basic fertiliser as a moneymaker, in this case, but don't spend money buying fertiliser. If you have more than 20 strawberry seeds, use basic fertiliser on the remainder (it is cheap to make from sap, which you will have plenty of if you've been chopping wood). Note that once you put down basic fertiliser you cannot user speedgrow on the same spot, so if you plant the night you get back from the festival, leave 20 unfertilised! The most strawberry plants I have got so far is 60.
**I found the tutorial advice on how to fish confusing, so here's Rhube's advice: you want to keep your fish level with the green bar. Tapping makes the fish move up. It's a good idea to tap rapidly to keep the fish in place when the green bar isn't moving; the fish has inertia and will take longer to get going if you stop. Some fish are MUCH harder to catch than others. If it seems impossible, let that fish go and try another. You can buy a training rod that will only catch easier fish. Trout Soup is a huge help early on, worth the 250g. Catching fish gets much, much easier as you level. Don't even bother trying to catch catfish the first two rainy days; you are extremely unlikely to succeed until you level more.
