I've been interested in seeing how fast the Community Center can be completed, and have started brainstorming a plan. A lot of this category will need to be approached as with a hope for the best, plan for the worst mindset as the cart is helpful but unreliable.

My thoughts on seasonal goals are currently: Spring 1

• Storage box of course.
• Copper Watering Can
• Mines to at least 40 (though will need to get to 80 for fire quartz, so might as well push if we can.) Collect Copper for upgrades as well as Cherry Bombs.
• Both Spring bundles
• All Spring fish caught
• Tide Pools opened (or would this be better left to Summer when I have an upgraded axe?)
• End with 4,000 G for seeds in Summer (will need to make more than this for Cart purchases)
• Friend with Linus
• Take a look at Artisinal Bundle - if you're not having good luck at the Cart, may be wise to buy a fruit tree or two for summer. Honey and Jelly will come to you; fruit is less certain.

Summer 1

• Both Summer bundles completed
• Plant Apple Tree by Summer 15. If you haven't seen a Pomegranate yet, consider planting that tree as well.
• Harvest 5 Quality Melons and Corn (Would be ideal to have a couple of Quality Corns at least)
• Steel Axe for Secret Forest
• All relevant Mine items collected (including Ghost Fish and Aquamarine)
• All Summer fish caught (note: try to finish Specialty Fish for Dish o the Sea, as the Sturgeon is a real PITA. Can leave Sturgeon until Winter if needed)
• Have a Tapper (level 3 foraging; should provide plenty of wood for building in the process)

Fall 1

• Get enough money to finish the Vault.
• Fall Bundles.
• Build and upgrade to a deluxe coop.
• Fall fish.

Winter 1

• Nautilus Shell
• If animals haven't produced the goods yet, keep up with them.
• Clean up any unfinished bundles.

¤at this point, is it worth continuing to check the Cart for Red Cabbage and any fish you haven't caught, or is it best to just sleep through to Summer 2?

Summer 2

• If not found at the Cart grow a red cabbage.

I've got a couple questions/to dos kicking around in my head. Apologies if this is a bit scatterbrained - I've done one aborted run and a lot of thinking without testing.

• One thing that absolutely needs doing is building a list of what needs to bought and built and an associated accounting of what is needed to attain them, as well as determin when they need to be built. So how much gold/materials do we need to amass by certain dates?
• Is using coffee to speed up travel worth the cost, inventory space and time to consume?
• What is the fastest route to the Center? Probably an easy one to check; does the mine cart save any time?
• What goals should be set for Spring Y1? Unless we find a Red Cabbage at the cart we'll need to go to Summer Y2, so perhaps it's not worth spending much time in Spring 1 as it's a low-income month and running around should perhaps be avoided until we can afford to buy coffee (assuming we want to). On the other hand, it's an ideal time to do things like start the mines, get a copper watering can and get your fishing skill up a bit in preparation for Summer. In any event we will need to earn some amount of money to buy Blueberries with. Unsure if the best plan is to frontload a lot of mining and fishing in spring or just get enough money to set up Summer.
• In my first run it looked quite likely that I might get away without building a barn for the Animal Bundle - had good luck with Large Milks etc. I think a coop will still be needed (as the chance of getting all your eggs, duck feather, AND a rabbit's foot at the cart are low), though a Silo will not be since you'll probably only want two or three animals and can get rid of them once you get what you need.
• I know from a previous playthrough that Linus will send you Maki Rolls once you befriend him. Is there a similar way to get a Fried Egg (Saloon perhaps?) that will allow us to skip a house upgrade? Or will a house upgrade + cooking be necessary?

Has anyone else been doing any work on this category? Any insights to add or corrections to make?

honestly, theres not much more we can learn without actually attempting. Red cabbage, duck feather, and rabbit foot are all huge RNG factors that will impact the run.

Building a kitchen for maki/fried egg isnt too bad, but that will put you 10k in the hole.... I'd build the upgrade around winter y1 if you havent gotten the items by then. by that point, you should have money to spare after all the other bundles

Your only other option for the fried egg would be at the cart lady, but that of coarse is very reliant on rng, so i would agree with CCNeverender that if you haven't manged to get it by winter then you should do the house upgrade.

I keep telling myself Im going to try this run one weekend but it so daunting I haven't committed to it yet. Please someone else do it so we have a base time to go off of. Its going to be a long run but I think once routed it wont be as bad as everyone thinks its going to be.

I've started another run, but I'm being rather casual about it and just playing in 2 hour chunks against the ingame timer. The biggest thing I'm learning is I need to be more patient with things - might as well wait until berries are growing everwhere before I hit the mines; might as well wait until I've got an upgraded axe before I start trying to amass lumber.

The biggest time sink is going to be the mine - you pull maybe 2 bundle items for every ~30 minutes of hard work. The Fire Quartz is 80 levels down and is not really otherwise available outside of a really lucky omni geode. Even if we find another way to get one then we'd have to hope we find a Frozen Tear and Aquamarine without going too deep. Much as I love mining in casual play, it's the most frustrating part of this run so far.

I really want to run this as well... but as mentioned above by Torpid... its really daunting. I honestly would be surprised if the first submitted run of this was anything less than 10 hours since the top times on all of the other bundles combine for close to 9 hours without bulletin even having a time yet. I've looked at making a route a little and it's just so much to process. I've considered so many different ways to do spring 1 (farm heavy vs fish heavy vs mine heavy vs do them all a little)

Before even trying to make a route I really NEED to know how much money I will need for the whole run (figuring in extra for the Traveling Merchant of course) Without having done that, there's no way to route a lot of the stuff since money grows so exponentially in this game and if you spend too much too early, you might cripple your income too much for the next season.

The mines essentially cost you money in the form of eating food and because the ores will be used for things rather than for money. Traveling to the mines takes a decent amount of time, so going there without planning to eat food seems like a waste of time. However, completing the boiler room will potentially save time every day forward by having the mine carts repaired, but I'm not actually sure that the mine carts will be used much after being done in the mine. I guess for fishing in the mine lake and maybe for other fishing... needs to be timed.

Fishing is mostly pure profit, -1800 for the lvl 2 pole and 10 per bait. Prior to getting the lvl 2 pole though it is extremely slow without bait, so need to figure out the xp it takes to reach the 2nd pole and stop fishing for the day once you reach that xp. From what I've read its 3xp per trash, 5xp per crab pot (which wont be possible early) and low difficulty fish being 13-20xp, varying greatly depending on difficulty, quality, and how well you caught them ("Perfect"). Be sure to save glasses and CDs for the trash machine for refined quartz at fishing 4.

The biggest farming question to me is if its better to upgrade the watering can a bunch (Gold Watering Can waters 3x3 but costs 17k Gold not counting ores/coal) or try to get to quality sprinklers asap. Obviously we will upgrade the watering can at least once before ever getting anywhere near quality sprinklers. (Farming 6 Req - is farming 6 even reachable with still needing significant gold to go considering the fishing gold you will get? This is just 1 reason why needing to know how much gold we need is so important for routing)

Sorry for the long ranting wall of text post. There's just so much for this category that I couldn't help but go on a rant. I think I will do each individual bundle run before trying to route and do the all bundles run. That way I can basically just combine each route together, with some minor changes to accommodate doing all of them. Off what I know right now, I think I would lean toward fishing heavily in spring 1 while growing Cauliflower, and maybe keep an eye on the fortune teller to do the mines on best luck days instead of fishing. And of course always checking traveling merchant every Friday/Sunday once you have enough gold to afford things.

Again, I haven't put tons of time/effort into routing this yet. These are just my initial thoughts on the run. I'm sure once I actually sit down and route it out I will find half of what I said here to be just plain wrong.

I don't think getting under 10 hours is a high hurdle - I'm sure you can get through Spring with level 80 in the mines in under 3 hours, and I imagine things go a little more smoothly after that. If I had to make an estimate, 7 hours might be possible with good luck.

For reference, the save file I've just started is at level 60 in the mines, both Spring bundles completed, copper pickaxe, all Spring fish caught (sans the Eel, at day 20) and >2k in the bank. There's a few issues I see on the horizon - the cart has been unkind with fruit and animal products so far, except a rabbit's foot I couldn't afford - but there's no reason to expect those to be run enders. I could see this run coming in under 10 hours, and that's before any real optimization work or outstanding luck.

My thoughts right now are that Spring will be the mining month, Summer will be the month to make money with blueberries and Fall will be the month for getting your animals in order - unless cranberries are so good that it's worth replacing heavy harvesting in Summer for Fall. Obviously each season will have harvesting and foraging and fishing thrown in, but I expect the mining to be the most time-consuming part.

As for the Fried Egg, someone on the Steam forums was able to dive in the xml file and confirm that the Saloon does sell it, but the order is random:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/413150/discussions/0/365163686056561559/

At some point someone will have to do some analysis about whether it's worth running to the Saloon to check up to ~45 times to check for it (and waiting for noon!) vs the time it takes to chop 450 pieces of wood and find 10k gold. Right now I'm going to assume it's worth checking the Saloon any day I'm not planning to jump immediately back into bed.

EDIT: I suspect sprinklers won't be worth the effort as there will maybe be one season of real farming, but would be interesting to see how much time could be saved by sprinklers once we know roughly how much we need to harvest.

I don't think the Lv. 2 fishing pole will be necessary either - everything should be catchable with the default pole. No need to spend 1.8k if we don't need to.

OK, killed my second run near the end - realized I would need to amass an extra 40k+materials to build a DX barn just for a truffle and decided there was nothing more to learn anyway... game timer was at 9:59, which is obviously shorter than real time but my plan is still quite rough. Some things I took away this time:

• My first game, the cart lady was fairly generous. This time she was stingy - though if I wanted a puffer fish, she often had several to choose from. It made things a bit tense, especially when she started selling things I could have used just after I'd obtained them elsewhere (Sturgeon :/). Starting to wonder if it's worth exiting and reloading rather than running back to the farm after a bum cart visit - shame there's no return to main menu option.
• I'm also disappointed that there's no way to advance a day without saving. Would be interesting to see if that could be used to cheese the cart, or if the RNG is seeded at the file creation.
• Definitely want to get a Silo - it's not as expensive as I remembered; it pays for itself very very quickly. Wasted several thousand G on hay before I decided this, then wasted time gathering materials which I'd had before deciding I was done building and tossing them. Oops.
• On that note, the more I play the more I realize I should stop throwing stuff away. Clay, Fiber Sap are things I always drop immediately, but I was kicking myself when I decided I could use things that require them.
• Want to get a barn over a coop - I went into this run thinking I could get a truffle from the cart, but turns out she doesn't sell it. She does however sell everything you need from the coop - not to say you're likely to get it all, but the cost of having to build a Deluxe Coop, a rabbit, and the time you spend coddling it for a foot are so great that any run without a rabbit's foot at the cart is probably going to fail. The same will probably be true of a duck feather - if you can get both, you could very likely skip building a coop of any kind. (EDIT: Comments on reddit indicate that you can indeed get a truffle from the cart. The wiki doesn't list it, though - in any case, I think it might be good practice to kill a run if one or the other DX animal item hasn't shown up during Spring. Seems a little extreme, but getting to the end of your bundles without finding at least one of them at the cart is a run ender - after more than half a dozen hours)
• I've been choosing fruit bats for my cave, but I've decided mushrooms are a better bet - there's plenty of items to fill the artisan bundle, I plan on planting apple and pomegranate trees regardless, tree fruit is really uncommon in the cave anyway, mushrooms produces items FAR more reliably (and in greater numbers) and the purple mushroom is just one more thing the mine can screw you out of and it'd be nice to have a backup.
• I don't know why I forgot about Quality Fertilizer in the Vault - this run saw me end up with 4 Quality melons in >30 fertilized and harvested which never would have happened if I had Quality. Should definitely try to get this early in Summer.
• It occurred to me, to late, that I should spend as much of my cash as possible on blueberries/cranberries at the beginning of each season, and use the proceeds from that to plant what's needed for the bundles later. It's maybe a bit risky from a Quality Bundle perspective, but with better fertilizer and enough plants it should work out. Gives me more of the most valuable plants.
• The amount of money we need is probably more than I was anticipating - in this run I was probably a little short and was having fairly poor luck finding stuff at the cart (so wasn't spending as much). Harvesting more is probably the right solution, which makes me think sprinklers may very well be useful in the run - I'd shoot for 40 cranberry plants next time, and five sprinklers would be just peachy for that purpose. If I stockpile a bit of gold and quartz I should be able to make the sprinklers in time for Fall. The exception to this plan will be if I stumble across some fire quartz in a fishing chest - then I'll skip the deeper levels of the mine, miss out on easy gold and will probably just manually water as needed.
• It seems Linus needs 5 hearts to start handing out Maki Rolls. I'm not sure what the effect of skipping his first event is - IIRC there's a choice in it which probably impacts the relationship and I'm not sure how the game assumes the answer if you skip. I was at zero hearts after skipping it though, which may be a bad sign.
• Heavy fishing should probably wait until summer and fall; by the end of summer you should have the Specialty Bundle complete for Dish o the Sea (the fish in it show up pretty often in the cart, and the final fish is easy to catch in the secret forest) which is absolutely necessary for the Sturgeon if you have to catch it at a low level, and you'll have to wait until later in the year to finish off the bundles anyway. All of the fish that come out in the rain are available in Fall, so I wasted a chunk of time chasing individual ones down during Spring.
• The Tide Pool seems unnecessary - unless urchins are really rare on the default side (I was a little surprised to find one, but I don't really pay that much attention to the beach), there's probably no need to waste 300 wood fixing the bridge.
• Aside from the Boiler Room, I think I'll leave one item in each room unsubmitted until I'm ready to wrap up the run. This will let me skip the nighttime scenes - not long in the scope of the run but there's no excuse not to.

Sorry for the length, was just brain dumping. Some day I'll actually finish a run, and time it properly. But it's such a long run that setting aside a whole day isn't going to happen until I'm happy with my plan. In the meantime, I've started putting together a spreadsheet to track how much of certain things I need so I know when I can stop chopping trees, start making stairs and cherry bombs, etc.

"Starting to wonder if it's worth exiting and reloading rather than running back to the farm after a bum cart visit"

I actually tested this very slightly the other day and all 3 times I did it, on that day she had a sandfish. I didn't look closely at the other items, but sandfish are fairly rare, so I assumed exiting didn't actually refresh her list.

On a side note, I also did a 2 year test of just visiting her cart and found well over half of the fish for the fish tank bundles (pufferfish being there almost every week)... Probably not quick and dependable enough to skip fishing all together, but an interesting idea to try. Also saw every animal product you would need... rabbit foot, duck feather, truffle, large milk, etc. The quickest run might end up being focused heavily on cart farming RNG, which is always rather sad to think about.

"by the end of summer you should have the Specialty Bundle complete for Dish o the Sea (the fish in it show up pretty often in the cart, and the final fish is easy to catch in the secret forest) which is absolutely necessary for the Sturgeon"

In my 2 year test I saw 3-4 Woodskips and 0 Sturgeon and 0 Ghostfish... really depressing because the whole reason i did the test was due to failing hard at a fish tank run. I had every fish 1:30 into the run except Sturgeon and Ghostfish and spent half a year searching the cart with no luck before trying to fish them up... and i made the mistake of trying the sturgeon before the ghostfish, so I got frustrated after 30 min of failing and dropped the run. I will definitely get dish of the sea before attempting sturgeon again in a run.

EDIT: After looking at the wiki I am now questioning if it was a truffle or truffle oil that I saw at the cart... i feel 75% sure it was an actual truffle, but since its not listed there I have serious doubts. I also don't see Eel on that list but swear i saw one of those too... wish i had recorded my test now.

EDIT 2: Confirmed Eel from Cart Lady. Still never seen a Ghostfish from her though. Surely just RNG. Really thinking for All Bundles (and Fish Tank) you will want to farm the cart lady well into year 2 before trying to catch any of the difficult fish. And of course use dish of the sea if she isn't cooperating on the last few once you complete the specialty fish bundle.

On the point of restarting with a bad cart, I was thinking more along the lines of whether it's faster to run back home or just restart in bed. A quick test had running back take ~29 seconds (probably lost a second or so to grass) and restarting take about 21 seconds (this is probably going to be very dependent on your computer - my SSD is helpful here. I went through the menu but maybe Alt+F4 would be a second faster). I'm not sure how the rules look on this kind of thing, though, and I don't know if I'd care to keep killing the process for less than 10 second saves in a run that's several hours long.

The cart's offerings seem to be fixed - maybe from file creation. I found an item in the save file called uniqueIDForThisGame which seems to be the seed for the cart's RNG - incrementing it by 1 changed the cart completely, and changing it back put the stock back to what it was. It SEEMS to be a permanent value; I fooled around a bit in game and it didn't change. Assuming this is the only variable that impacts the cart (not confirmed), we may be able to work out some early game indications of how good cart luck will be.

(also interesting but not relevant - there's a flag for "ShippingTax". I'm tempted to flip it.)

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4dvkvx/traveling_cart_datamined_list_of_items_and_chance/

Redditor confirms cart stock is determined by UniqueID and DaysPlayed, neither of which is open for manipulation. Post includes a link to the code that generates the cart's inventory if anyone wants to peek.

But it would be very disappointing if this run came down to grinding entire rooms through the cart. If that became the case, I might propose a no-cart sub-category.

The race yesterday was brutal. I would definitely say that any great time is going to need around 12 specific items from the Cart at times you can afford them. 10 hours without using the Cart is probably not too hard to replicate, but a great run might be in the 5 to 6 hour range.

I think I need to do another race/run before I can really try making a specific approach to the route. I agree with most of Asiago's observations from a few posts above. A few notes:

Asiago suggested blueberries before melons in summer - I would do 1 melon (and pepper and tomato) early for the bundle, maybe 6 corn, but the rest blueberries. A couple blueberry harvests will help increase farming skill to get more gold star melons at the end.

Amount of money needed is about 200k if you dont get saved by an early Truffle, Rabbit's Foot, or Egg + Maki Roll from the cart. Those are some of the big potential saves.

In regards to the Maki Roll recipe, it can be learned from the TV show on Summer 21 in the 1st year (but not 2nd year). So no need to buy it or befriend Linus.

I started off my run with about an hour of fishing. I'm not sure if I would do that again, but I need to level up fishing skill at some point to catch the Catfish, Tiger Trout and Sturgeon (and Pufferfish in the rare case I dont see it in a cart). The advantage to doing it early is for a chance at finding a Fire Quartz and getting to skip some of the Mines. And that possibility is very appealing to me.

I got 1 watering can upgrade, and 2 axe upgrades. I would also consider doing 1 pick upgrade in the future.

To me, befriending Linus is more about removing some RNG from the run while avoiding the house upgrade. He's on the way to the mines, mountain lake and carpenter's house and not far from the farm, and likes free stuff. With the exception of his heart scenes (one of which can be skipped, but I'm not sure if that damages your relationship as there's a choice of response hidden in the scene) it takes little time and costs nothing. Of course, the luckiest would be to find one in the cart or saloon.

Agree about planting one melon, I agree that's a good idea. Also need to remind myself to put down a scarecrow or two as I always lose a melon or two during summer, and my luck with gold star melons seems bad.