Village Notes #4: The first real multiplayer playtest

Hello everyone.

Today I did the first real multiplayer playtest of Eldervik with my kids.

We ended up playing for two and a half hours.

In game time, we made it through 24 days of spring. So this was not a full playthrough, or even close to one, but it was long enough to see some real patterns.

My oldest son has seen and played Eldervik before. He has already given a lot of input over the last couple of months and has a pretty good sense of what the game is trying to become. He first saw Eldervik in November 2025 where it was stil very rough around the edges.

My youngest son has heard about Eldervik but this was the first time he actually played it.

So we set up three different PCs on LAN, gave my youngest the PS4 controller because that is how he prefers to play, and started a shared farm.

While we played, I wrote down feedback, bugs, missing features, and small annoyances on GitHub. I am now the proud owner of about 35 new issues.

Overall, it went quite well.

The network code held up. Saving worked. The game was pretty stable. We did have a couple of crashes that needed quick hotfixes. One of them was very specific: hovering a certain NPC could crash the game because some data was missing.

For a first real family multiplayer session it felt much less fragile than I had feared.

More importantly, it showed what is already working.

My youngest picked up fishing immediately, which was a very good sign after the recent fishing work. He also planted a few crops, went mining, and smoked a fish.

My oldest went straight into building. He built a coop and a barn, and ended up with chickens, cows, and pigs.

Right now the trade and barter system is not balanced at all, but before this playtest I tried to tune wood, stone, coal, and salt enough that the basic loop would survive a real session. I have already added more trees and more stone to the farm as we almost ran out.

That is one of the useful things about a playtest like this. It does not tell you whether the game is finished. It tells you whether the game can keep you entertained for a afternoon session.

This one mostly could :)

The main things I came away with were not crashes or network bugs.

They were balance and discoverability.

The biggest balance issue was energy.

It feels bad to keep running out of energy while collecting wood and stone. That is already a problem in single-player, but multiplayer makes it more visible. If one player takes the day casually while another player farms resources hard, the resource-focused player can run out of energy early and end up mostly waiting for the other player to go to sleep.

It also points toward something Eldervik probably needs anyway. Some kind of long-term progression that makes repeated work feel better over time. If you spend a lot of days chopping wood or mining stone, the game should recognise that in some way.

There is also a tricky design question here. I need a way to replenish energy in multiplayer and co-op, because waiting for someone else to finish their day is not very fun. But I do not necessarily want the same solution in solo play, where the pressure of limited energy is part of the game.

I have some rough ideas here. Maybe multiplayer has a small shared experience pool, and each player can then pick different skills or talents from that. But that is still just an idea, not a system yet.

The other big issue was discoverability.

Even in those 24 days of spring, it was clear that Eldervik needs more reasons to visit the town and the neighbours.

The farm, the mine, fishing, animals, and basic production are starting to form a real shape. But the story-driven part of Eldervik is still very thin. There are not enough events that introduce concepts, enough village moments that pull you away from the farm, or enough reasons for a player to say: I want to go see what is happening over there.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!