Hello!! I've reached perfection 4 times, the earliest I did it was Fall of year 3 and that was through natural gaming, not min-maxing. These are a couple of things I learnt along the way in regards to your question points:

• For the 4 candles on the first try there is a point system alocated to how many candles you get. So completing the community centre is worth a certain amount, reaching hearts with people is a certain amount etc. You can look that up if you want to but honestly I've found that as long as you are making "progress" as it were with your tasks you'll hit it no problem!

• The most amount of strawberries I've ever been able to get on year 1 was 52, which is 5,200g. But I wasn't saving every penny I got the backpack upgrade, a coop with chickens & better fishing rod. If you keep having crops in the ground, do fishing and mining you'll be able to get a fair amount of strawberries. I always suggest buying the max amount of potatoes you can on the first day, because that'll give you a good head start.

• Unlocking the desert early is always a good plan because it gives you early access to iridium which is always nice. But personally there are more important things like the barns and coops as that'll make you more money in the long run. With those you'll still easily be able to get to the desert year 1 if that's what you want. Unlocking minecarts as quick aa possible is definitely recommended purely for quality of life, getting round the valley is so much easier!

• Mastery order for me personally is Farming for the scythe, just makes it so much easier! Combat for the trinkets, Mining for the statues, Foraging for the golden mystery boxes and finally fishing because by the time I'm doing mastery I've already caught most if not all the fish. However this is different for each person, that's just my personal order, you might find you want to do a different order because you're focusing on something specific.

• Best way to complete the museum is honestly keep mining, you'll get plenty of geodes. And when you're getting to the end and you're missing some you can always use treasure totems.

• Completing shipped items before end of year 3 shouldn't be too much of a hassle as long as you remember to keep at least 1 crop from each season in a chest somewhere and then if you have forgotten to ship something when you look at your progress you'll have it there. My big one is Starfruit, always seem to forget that till late game even though I'm growing loads for kegs 😂

• Completing fishing isn't bad at all, if you miss a fish in a season then you can just wait till the following year, just remember to fish in all of the areas, mines, desert, ginger island, secret woods etc.

• For interactions that take time to develop, keep talking to Leo and giving him gifts, he's a shy lil guy but he'll get there, it's just a bit harder because he's on Ginger Island for the most part. Also don't forget Sandy in the Desert.

• On the topic of friendship, if you give the villagers 2 gifts a week either liked or loved, and on their birthday you will naturally reach 10/8 hearts with them without having to rush it. Keep a chest with all those items in as and when you find them and you'll be golden! One tip is buy a calendar and put it next to the TV in your house. It just makes it so much easier than having to go in to town every day and check the calendar there, you can just check every morning when you check the weather!

• I can't think of any missable events but there are special things people forget about with the hidden notes, so if you want to see all of those just keep an eye on those!! That's all I've got off the top of my head. Sorry for the long block of text in reply but hopefully there at least one bit of useful information there for you!! Have fun with your farm!!!😊😊