Stardew Valley multiplayer launches in beta
Farm with friends!
Lovely farm 'em up Stardew Valley's multiplayer is alllmost ready, close enough to finished that today it launched an opt-in open beta. Stardew's multiplayer will let players host up to three other players in their farm, chipping in to work the land, adventure, fish, and probably drink a whole lot. Heck, you can even get married to other players.
The beta branch is now live on Steam, will hit Stardew's GOG version "in a few days", and will officially launch in the main game... when it's done.
"After several months of internal testing and QA, we've decided to open the beta up to a wider audience," Chucklefish's Tom Coxon said in the announcement. The publishers have stepped in to handle adding multiplayer, seeing as they have more experience and resources, while Stardew creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has focused on making new singleplayer content - which is also in this new beta build.
If you want to invite another player to your existing farm, you'll need to put in a little preparation first, building them a cabin to live in - though they only cost 100 gold and 10 stone. For new farms, you'll have the option to invite people and have cabins for them from the start.
And yup, it does support LAN play as well as online co-op.
See the blog post for full details on how to join the beta and start multiplaying. That also details exactly who has control of what and what's communal and so on.
Many mods have not yet been updated to work with the 1.3 beta, so do disable those or they might cause problems.