Hello!
After 151 hours I finally hit perfection on my farm (Inaba ). In no way would I consider myself an expert of this game, but I've definitely learned a lot about it when researching the best way to go about this and generally just being a big fan. If anyone is trying to get perfection, just start a farm, or whatever feel free to ask!
Before anyone asks anything, I'd like to share resources that helped me
- Stardew Valley Wiki (highly recommend having this open whenever you play)
- Summerstarfisher's fishing guide (reddit link)
- T4C000's loved gift guide (reddit link, missing Leo who loves oranges)
- Generally speaking, the subreddit has an incredible amount of information
- Salmence's youtube channel (excellent video guides)
For easy early game money, sell tea saplings. They sell for 500 gold each! You'll need to get Caroline to two hearts (gift her daffodils) and you'll need to collect the seasonal foragables as well.
To hit that final 10 mil gold for the golden clock, I used ancient fruit wine. I kept casks aging at max capacity in the basement and had just under 200 kegs to sell regular wine in the meantime. This can definitely be expanded much more, but I cba and was still doing other things at the time so I didn't mind it taking a bit longer. Grow the ancient fruit in the greenhouse and use the seed maker until you have as many seeds as you want.
Along with the standard requirements for perfection, I also forged the infinity weapons, got everything from Mr Qi's shop, got the return scepter from Krobus, and enhanced all my tools / weapons in the forge. At this point I'm going to give this file a break until the 1.6 update drops. Just need to do a Joja run for the last steam achievement.
Anyway, go play Stardew if you haven't already. It's a wonderful game