Disney Dreamlight Valley - Beginner Tips

Here are some starting tips for Disney Dreamlight Valley (as of 2023-Mar-1). We won't do a hand-holding walkthrough here, but instead consider approaches that might be unusual or overlooked.

• Character Roles
• General Tips
• Digging
• Fishing
• Foraging
• Gardening
• Mining
• Energy
• Storage
• Realms

Other Tips

• Make sure to use the Redemption Codes.
• Daily Chests and Reset Times
• Times seem to be synced to your local time (but as of 2023-Mar-5 some players are in a bugged state). You can see a summary of the various reset times here.
• If you are short on time, just grab the daily Blue Chest for moonstones. The green chest and the yellow chest from clearing Night Thorns can often just contain less coin than selling a single Pumpkin.
• If you miss a day or two, you can apparently still collect the missed Blue Chests -- according to some user posts, there is a "buffer" of up to two missed Blue Chests.
• In general the Star Path with the up front 100 tokens is the best deal.
• The excess tokens can be used to redeem Moonstones after you have unlocked everything else. The net loss can be made up with the daily Blue Chest of free Moonstones (used to be just 10 Moonstones, but later improved to 50).
• Consider doing the Star Path and collecting all the tokens before you even unlock Premium.
• It may look to new players that the tasks for the Star Path are random and repeatable just like Dreamlight Duties, but in fact they are not. They are just randomly selected from a fixed list, and eventually you do every task once and in the order they give you.
• If you are short on time, consider that some tasks necessarily take several days, e.g., Having Daily Discussions with specific Characters, which you can only do once per day.
• All Cooking Recipes and Critters (including their schedules).
• DreamlightValleyWiki is also a good site to find out if the material you are about to sell is used for anything you might want to craft.
• Night Thorns and other obstacles respawn slowly or sometimes not at all, and around a 24-hour schedule.
• Be cautious about clearing out all the Night Thorns because of this slow respawn. Some duties, like the Star Path, require you to clear a lot.
• Clearing Night Thorns also shows up as an easy Dreamlight Duty, so it's nice to be able to grab that without too much running around.
• There is probably enough somewhere each day for your daily golden chest, however.
• Once a day when you clear  Night Thorns, they will throw out a burst of coins glowing red. Grab them all quickly and you will get a gold chest.
• Grey boulders also seem to respawn but in even more limited quantities. Since they basically contain only rock that you can get from mining black rock veins, it's not really important.
• Other obstacles like tree stumps typically respawn only in their signature biomes. So even though there are some in the Plaza, they will probably not respawn there but instead somewhere in the Forest of Valor.
• Arrange your teleporters
• I like to put one near a transition between two biomes, and also put Goofy's Stalls for both biomes nearby. This way, one teleporter puts me close to both and I can use the other teleporter to access a blocked biome location.
• Some biome locations are initially blocked by terrain you cannot move or remove.
• But you can still place a teleporter behind it and teleport there.
• If a gathering activity drops materials on the ground, that item is thrown all the way to a location you can normally walk to. You'll have to go there and look around for it and pick it up, but it's not lost.
• Carry one stack of Vegetables and one stack of Fruits.
• The Dreamlight Duty to sell a small quantity of them comes up quite often so you can quickly do that.
• The Dreamlight Duty to get some coins also comes up quite often, and you can quickly fulfill that by selling a few of your vegetables or fruits.
• Or just snack on them to recover Stamina.
• DON'T have Discussions with Characters or give them Favourite Gifts -- check your Star Path first
• In the very early game when you don't have many Characters, be choosy when you do this and preferably do it to fulfill your Star Path requirements.
• Daily Discussions are exactly that -- only ONCE Daily. And it's not uncommon for the Star Path to ask you to talk to a specific Character five times. If you already talked to that character today, you have just set back your Star Path Duty by one day. 
• Each Character has a selection of three gifts per day that count as their Favourite, and you might not be able to fulfill some of them.
• Even if you are not working on the Star Path, because there's only so many times you can do it per day (depending on how much you play and how many Characters you've accumulated, that may or may not be a real limitation), you might want to do Discussions or Gifting only when you have a Dreamlight Duty related to them.
• Or if the day is ending soon, you might as well do it if you don't have any outstanding quests or Star Path tasks requiring Discussions or Gifts.
• When you do have Discussions or give Gifts, prioritize those who cannot Hang Out with you, like Ariel and Ursula, who are stuck in watery spaces only.
• You still need to level them up for their quests but there are fewer opportunities, and Discussions and Favourite Gifts are two major ways.
• Pressing "E" to Enter or Exit a location is often unnecessary -- Just keep walking into the doorway and you will automatically transition.
• The Favourite Food of Sunlit Plateau Sunbird Critters is basically flowers that have one or more of their feather colours.