I would very much like to see a smart pause feature, where if all players are doing an activity that Stardew pauses the clock while in single player (i.e. in the menu, in a cutscene, conversation, fishing-game(?), etc) then the clock becomes paused until any one player leaves that menu. A good example of a game that does this is Dying Light, for what it's worth.
I don't know why they didn't do that to start with... the pause function is quite mandatory for Stardew Valley, yet they dropped it totally for MP. If course, a "smart pause" is still suboptimal as people have different reading speeds, start conversations at different times etc. So it'll only save a fraction of time SP would. Yet it's still better than nothing. Given proper communication, it could be used quite efficiently. (and allow an easy way to pause by everyone just opening their inventory etc.) One could also add some sort of "ready" option for different kinds of "events" to dismiss. Though that'll be limited to those that everyone receives at the same time. I have do admit that I haven't yet looked into a mod that might do this... it might work server side as long as the server is already aware of players opening their inventory etc. So maybe there's already one edit: there doesn't seem to be a mod like that yet.
