Help while farming

[Eiburine]

Idk if this is planned already but what do you all think of having help while farming?
A family friend of mine would invite relatives and other friends every year to help harvest blueberries. They would then be paid in blueberries or money.
In Harvest Moon I always got really bored of farming after a while, and I would leave the job to sprites.
From what I understand, the farms would be private? But maybe some friends could help you harvest things. You could invite them to the farm to help so that random people won't steal crops. After, the player who invited everyone could distribute how much money or produce their friends have.

[Jymaru]

Pretty sure I remember them saying something about this possibly being a thing you can do with the NPCs (I think it was during one of the livestreams). At least, I definitely remember them saying something about this

[CalliopeSoul]

I haven't heard much on this yet from the developers. I know they did say something about some pets may help on the farm.

[Sakura02]

What I can say so far is there will be some sort of help. Given that time never stops in this game we want to at least give people a chance if they are unable to play for awhile so all their crops and animals don't die. Some things in discussion are.

1. An 'NPC' that will 'take care of your farm while you are on vacation or something for a fee/ loan. It keeps your farm maintained but does not harvest things for you.

2. Other players being able to visit your farm and feed and water plants, but we want to do this carefully to avoid grievers as well as disputes with someone who may have been your friend or on your friends list but then suddenly turned around and decided to mess up your farm.

But definitely there would be some sort of help but there would not be an automated way to harvest your crops. For a single player game that would be fine but on a multiple player game that would no different than someone scripting in a bot to cheap and mass produce and sell items that will inflate the market.

The pets however will keep ' things' away from your crops and animals that may kill them.

[Nixem]

This sounds like a great idea ^^ I play an mmo that has housing and farming in it. You can have two different sizes of farms and different types of homes. The housing is all in open-world. On the farms or house, you can set it to Private, Guild, or Family. Private means only you can have access to it. Guild means your guild mates can use it. Family means that people in your "family" (a separate type of friends list with a max of 8 ppl) can use it. Something similar to how they do it would be neat ^^. Maybe a "Best Friends list" and you can set your farm to "Best Friends." Just a suggestion ^^