Some lesser-known facts, tips and tricks. Potential spoilers
I have been playing Stardew Valley for almost five years now and recently decided to start writing down my observations about the game that I haven't seen talked about very often, or ever, by the community. Let's call it part one of an ongoing series. I don't know when part two will be coming out, but it will come out eventually. While I'm sure that the more experienced among you will have known almost everything on this list, I'm also certain that no one will have known everything on it. And that's my goal here: to make a list of tips and tricks that will benefit everybody — at least a tiny bit. These are in no particular order.
…Oh, one more thing. I play on PC, so several of these are related to PC controls. Here we go.
You can press Escape on the ConcernedApe splash screen to be taken to the main menu instantly.
You can press Delete in the inventory window while holding an item with your mouse to immediately put it in your trash bin.
Shipping boxes on the valley farm and the island farm are the same box. Dumping something into one instantly makes the most recent item dumped into the other one unretrievable. Keep that in mind.
You can manipulate on which side of a mini-obelisk you spawn. It will first attempt to spawn you on the tile underneath it. If that tile is blocked, it then tries to spawn you to its left. Then to its right. Then on the tile above it. If all four cardinal direction tiles are blocked, the sister obelisk will fail to teleport you and show the message "The warp point is obstructed."
Many in-game achievements are not required to achieve Perfection and unlock the summit. Somewhat unintuitively, they include Gofer and A Big Help (complete 10 and 40 'Help Wanted' requests) as well as Monoculture (ship 300 of one crop) and Polyculture (ship 15 of each crop). None of the achievements added with 1.6 are mandatory either.
Running/riding to the bus stop minecart from your doorstep will get you to the mine elevator faster than using the Mountain Obelisk, provided the house hasn't been moved from its default spot. Even if you put the obelisk right next to the porch and use the Horse Flute after teleporting. The time loss with the obelisk route gets even greater if you need to take a second to mini-obelisk to the Mountain Obelisk from your porch or if you don't have the Flute yet.
Both Pierre and the JojaMart cashier start the day at their respective counters at 6:00 AM. Pierre does leave his counter at 7:00, but returns to it at 8:30. Even on Wednesdays. So after you buy the Key To The Town, you don't need to wait for either store to open to shop for seeds/anything else, on ANY day.
You can use the pickaxe to safely flatten any leftover tilled ground underneath giant crops if you wish to keep the crop as a decoration. Only your axe can break them up.
The majority of villagers have zero or just one loved gift that can have iridium quality, besides the universally loved (and extremely rare in iridium quality) rabbit's foot. It's just wool in Emily's case, just cactus fruit in Sam's, etc. It's worth keeping an eye out for them for birthday gifts.
You can press Escape to skip the scrolling animation on the prize machine in Lewis' mansion.
If you use the Statue of Uncertainty in the sewer and pick a profession that increases the sell price of certain items (e.g. switch from Fisher and Pirate to Fisher and Angler, i.e. change +25% fish sell price to +50%), and then put some items from this category in the shipping bin, they will be sold at base price. Although the profession selection screen comes up before the income of the day screen, professions only apply the following morning.
The simplest and potentially the most effective way to farm radioactive ore is to repeatedly enter and leave the first floor of dangerous mines on max luck days. You can expect, on average, one radioactive ore node per three floor resets.
Pop-up windows that ask for confirmation of action (eating or drinking something, jumping into a drop shaft in the Skull Cavern, etc.) accept two hidden default inputs: the Y key as confirmation and the N key as rejection. In some scenarios, like the one in the previous tip, this is faster and easier than moving the cursor to the text box each time.
The panning animation does not pause time in single player. Thus, choosing to pan one last spot at 1:00 AM in the mountain lake instead of bolting directly home may bite you in the a.