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The multiplayer mode for Stardew Valley is finally here, albeit in beta form, so here are some tips for getting in on the action and mastering the co-op festivities.
Stardew Valley has always been a pretty lonely game. Sure, you can interact with all the citizens of Pelican Town and even get married if you play your cards right, but these NPCs all offer the same routine, providing you with very little help on your quest to do whatever it is you set out to do.
Ever since day one there have been cries of “This would be great fun to play with friends,” which were met with the response from the development team: “we’re working on it”. Well, now the development team can give a more satisfying answer, as the much anticipated multiplayer mode for Stardew Valley is finally in public beta, open to anyone who wants to give it a go and for the most part is pretty much free of game-breaking bugs.
Playing with friends certainly changes a few things, but this is still Stardew Valley as you know it, just with a few friends to join you. If you can get a good group together, which doesn’t feature someone who just wants to destroy everything, then this is the ideal way to play Stardew Valley.
Getting started
We currently have no idea when the multiplayer mode will be added to the public release, which means the only way to play it right now is to get into the beta. Fortunately that is incredibly easy to do, providing you don’t have any awesome mods installed. All you have to do is right click on Stardew Valley in your Steam library and select ‘Properties’. Here navigate to the ‘Betas’ tab and enter the code “jumpingjunimos”, after that hit the check code button and then select the ‘beta – Help test new updates before they go live!’ option from the drop down above. Once you have done all that, the multiplayer beta client will download. If you do have mods installed you will have to remove the startup option that launches the modding API before the main game.
Once the new client is installed you can set up your game. You can load a save or start an entirely new farm. If you do the latter you can select how many cabins you want to have for other players, but if you load a save you will have to build a cabin for each player you want to play with. Fortunately they only cost 100 gold and 10 stone to build so it isn’t difficult to bring players into an already established save. Once your farm is ready it's just a case of inviting your friends through Steam or getting them to join your game via the in game menus. It’s all super simple.
Edit profit margins
This somewhat depends on the kind of experience you want in the multiplayer world of Stardew Valley, but we recommend turning the profit margins down. This reduces the amount of profit you will make from items, and generally makes it more difficult to make some money. You might say this sounds like a terrible idea, but with four players working on the farm you can quickly start to make serious cash and can hit the late game in just a few hours, which would have taken significantly longer in single player. Reducing the profit you make balances out the extra work you can do each day and generally makes the experience more challenging. If you want a long term project that has some challenge then turn these way down.
Communicate with emotes
It goes without saying that you are going to have to work together to make your farm a success, and so communication is key. Obviously the best way to do this is with some third party voice chat software, as there is no in game voice chat, but there is a solid way to communicate in world. The update brings with it 200 emotes to use, and you can get pretty detailed with them at times. So if someone is telling an epic story in voice chat that you don’t want to interrupt, try and get the message across with emotes.
Manage your money collectively
The one area that’s a bit of a bummer is that all your money goes into a shared pot that everyone can dip in to. This means you can’t really do any kind of competitive farming – where each person gets their own corner of the farm and the best farm after a year wins. It also means that you’re going to have to make joint decisions on what to buy. If you go and blow all your money on a barn while everyone else wants to farm up some blueberries then there could be an issue.
Make sure to communicate every major purchase you make, and try to plan ahead with what you’ll need. Sure, that new backpack may look tempting, but if it bankrupts the rest of your farming team then you could be in for a very slow season of foraging, fishing and mining.
Players’ inventories can be found in their cabin
There will inevitably be a time when you end up playing with one of your co-op farmers away from the farm, and that might sound like an issue if they decided to keep a load of seeds in their inventory before logging out. Fortunately Chucklefish thought of this and each players’ inventory can be found in their cabin’s chest of drawers, meaning you can reclaim those seeds and get them planted before the season changes. The items will only be there if the player is not connected to the game, so if they’re just on the other side of the map you’ll have to wait for them to return.
Take it to another level
Playing with others is great fun, but sometimes you want to make a commitment to building this farm together. Fortunately much like the many NPCs in Pelican Town you can marry other players, simply give them a ring and hope they say yes. This of course also means you can divorce other players, which might not be the best move considering they have access to all your money, but you can also destroy their cabins so they can never return.
There is a whole world out there to explore, or at the very least an entire valley, and doing so with a bunch of friends is no doubt the best way to do it. Stardew Valley has always been a very good game, but the multiplayer mode makes it close to perfect. Now just give us a competitive option with split money pots and we will be totally satisfied.
