Stardew Valley multiplayer plan includes option to marry your friends

Fans of top-notch indie farming and life sim Stardew Valley have been waiting a while for word on the game's upcoming multiplayer update. Today, word came including the news many had been waiting for:

Yes, the plan is that you'll be able to marry your real-life pals in-game.

The option has yet to be formally confirmed, but publisher Chucklefish has said it is on the cards:

"A lot of players have requested player-to-player marriage," Chucklefish wrote in a new blog post. "It's an idea we like a lot, and want to make available as a feature. Player-to-player marriage won't use the mermaid pendant, but rather an alternative method that requires a similar amount of effort to wooing an NPC. We're still working out what that will be."

Stardew Valley's multiplayer mode will allow up to four people to play together online (but you can only marry the one of them). No split-screen or local multiplayer will be available.

One person will still be given the game's main role, with the other three players available as farmhands.

Farmhands will live in cabins on your farm, be able to farm and mine, fish and forage, and marry your town's NPCs.

Farmhands will not be able to skip time by sleeping, start or end festivals or pick whether to side with evil corporation Joja.

As for player-farmhand marriage, the method for how you'll propose and how this will work is still being worked out.

Multiplayer is still a way off - there will be a beta via Steam at the end of the year, before it rolls out in early 2018 for PC, Mac and Linux, and after that on consoles.

"Effort so far has been focused on overcoming the biggest technical hurdle: synchronising multiple games over the internet," Chucklefish concluded. "Almost every source file has been touched, and 15,000 lines of code have been rewritten. Retrofitting multiplayer into a game that didn't have it originally is notoriously hard."

Maybe keep that ring in your pocket a little longer.