Well, your here because you want to get the most out of your time. Wise choice. This will be a guide which shows you how to get minerals quickly, and plentiful (including coal), and how to prepare for what could be seen as the most important part of year 1: The spring festival.
 
 

Coal and Other Minerals

Coal is a hard thing to get (or is it). Lets say that the spring festival is fast approaching, and you want 30 sprinklers for your strawberries, but you don’t have enough coal.
 
 
Here are 2 ways to get more (early game):
 
 
Firstly, when you first unlock the mine, you can find mine-cart levels. In these levels you want to follow the tracks until you see the mine-cart itself. Then you want to right click it, and you can get 6 easy coal. Though they don’t replenish.
 
 
Secondly, you can get them by killing dust sprites in floors below 40. They are quite plentiful, and sometimes coal can drop from them.
 
Bonus: If you kill 500, you can get a burglary ring, which you can equip to get better chances of drops from monsters.
 
 
Thirdly, you can try to get them from breaking rocks, though this is energy consuming, and it doesn’t give much coal.
 
 
Iron and Copper:
 
 
My main farming method to get these items are to use the elevator to get to floor 40, then go down a level, mine all of the ores there, kill all of the dust sprites, then retry. If you need sprinklers for strawberries (or just in general), I’d say this is the way to go.
 
 
 

Spring festival

The spring festival is a very important part of the first year, you can aim to get strawberries, which are replenishing fruit (meaning that once you break them, they grow more). Though these take 8 days to mature, and 4 days after the first harvest to supply you with more. This can take alot of your energy everyday, so if you use sprinklers, then your problems will be solved. So i’d say to make 30 basic sprinklers set them up in a good pattern, and start making money. If you use my guide from the first section, then you will get this easily.
 
 
Items for 30 sprinklers:
 
150 Copper Ore (30 Copper Bars)
 
150 Iron Ore (30 Iron Bars)
 
60 Coal for making the ore into bars.
 
 
I would just get one furnace and smelt the ores while I get them, though If I’m not getting enough coal in time, I would get two
 
 
The formula for the time to smelt:
 
Advanced: 30 x 0.5h + 30 x 2h / n
 
Simplified: 75h / n
 
 
N = Number of Furnaces:
 
 
1 Furnace: 75h
 
2 Furnaces: 37.5h
 
etc
 
 
Copper Bar Smelting Time: 0.5h
 
Iron Bar: 2h
 
 
If you have more than 150 copper ore, then you can make more furnaces, it would help late game, and it would take less time to get the bars.
 
 

 
 
Hope you enjoy the Guide about Stardew Valley – Guide for Farming Coal and Minerals in Game, if you think we should add extra information or forget something, please let us know via comment below, and we will do our best to fix or update as soon as possible!