The extremely popular game Stardew Valley gets a multiplayer mode. Development is already in full swing and a test phase is planned for the end of 2017 and the patch will be released in early 2018.
Stardew Valley - your friends the farm workers
In Stardew Valley, you inherit your grandfather's land and farm. In the construction simulation with role-playing elements you run the farm, plant your fields and try to build a new life.
With the planned multiplayer update, shortly after the start of the game, you will have the opportunity to build up to 3 cabins for farm workers. These farm workers can then be controlled by your friends and have all the skills that the player can also perform, such as fishing, searching for ore, fighting, getting married and of course partying. Each player has his own inventory. If the player is currently offline, you can access his inventory through a box in his cabin.
Some decisions are still up to the main player, for example sleeping, starting and ending festivals or whether one takes Joja's side.
An extra multiplayer server is not necessary, friends can simply be invited to the farm via Steam. There will be similar functions for the game versions that do not run on Steam.
Players have long wanted the opportunity to marry other players. This feature is in the works and will work a little differently than a wedding to an NPC.
The developers rejected some other ideas from the community such as local multiplayer mode, split-screen and PvP - player versus player battles.
For the integration of the multiplayer option, the programmers had to revise and update almost every line of the program code, more than 15,000 lines had to be rewritten.
The next goals of the developers
- Implementation of farm workers' cabins
- Ui and menus
- Events and festivals
- Multiplayer NPC relationships
- Testing and optimizing
The Stardew Valley Patch 1.3 should be available for Steam users for testing at the end of the year. The release for PC, Mac and Linux will follow in early 2018. Consoles will of course also get the update, but due to the immense size it can take a while. In terms of consoles, the Nintendo Switch version will be the first focus.
