A well anticipated update for serene farming and community game Stardew Valley grows closer, as its developer tests out multiplayer features.
Gently-paced game of pottering about, Stardew Valley, has enjoyed considerable success since its first emergence as a 2016 computer game.
With an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating on Steam and average review scores upwards of 85/100 on aggregation sites Metacritic and Opencritic, the unassuming farming town adventure has since planted roots on Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
If there's one thing missing from Stardew Valley, its appreciative fans have been saying, it's the ability to join up with friends in a spirit of mutual benevolence.
A multiplayer update, outlined in an August 2017 news post to StardewValley.net, will allow players to invite up to three friends for some co-operative farming, mining, fishing, foraging and festival participation.
Those friends will join as farmhands, allowing the host player to remain safely in charge of proceedings.
At that time, "Local multiplayer, split-screen, and [player versus player were] not planned" in addition to online multiplayer, but game developer Eric Barone has now confirmed that local multiplayer is not only in the works but is in good shape.
"4-Player Stardew Valley [local multiplayer] party at my house... it's really fun," he wrote in a Jan 15 post to his Twitter account.
"It still needs some work, but the underlying network code is solid."
"Being in the same room and yelling at each other about what to do next, or if anyone has any stone, is great fun. Can't wait to share this," he enthused.
"Also," he noted in a postscript, "[I] have shifted all my attention to getting multiplayer ready!"
The update, which will include a new batch of content for both single-player and multiplayer modes, is expected to arrive by way of a beta test phase during the first three months of 2018, according to an early December advisory.
Multilingual support is being extended from English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and German to include French, Italian, Korean and Turkish at some point in 2018. — AFP Relaxnews