Stardew Valley's multiplayer update "should be ready in about a month"

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has offered a new update on the farming sim's long-awaited multiplayer mode, revealing that it "should be ready in about a month".

The news comes via a tweet posted earlier today, in which Barone noted that the team is "still making good progress on fixing bugs", and that next month's expected finish date would be hit provided that "all goes well". Barone later clarified that the tweet was specifically in reference to Stardew Valley's PC, Mac, and Linux versions.

Back in February, when Barone last spoke of Stardew Valley's next major update, work on all planned features - that is, the new single-player story content, and as well as the highly anticipated co-operative multiplayer mode - was said to be "done".

At the time, Barone explained that the next step was to "begin a serious QA phase involving thorough testing of all new features".

Once this process had been completed, said Barone, the update would then enter public beta prior to its final release. Stardew Valley's beta was originally expected to begin at the end of 2017, but was delayed to the first quarter of 2018 mid-way through December.

When Barone speaks of the update being "ready in about a month", it seems likely that he's referring to it being in a sufficient state to move into public beta, but we won't know for sure until either he or publisher Chucklefish shares more details.

Barone has also reiterated release plans for Stardew Valley's multiplayer mode, confirming that it will arrive first on PC, followed by Switch, then Xbox One and PS4. "Not exactly sure on the timetable for those", he noted of the console versions.

Although there's still much we don't know about Stardew Valley's long-awaited new update, Chucklefish did offer a few details on how co-op farming would unfold in August last year.