When talking to the townspeople, do I have to finish the conversation to earn full friendship points?

Question

In Stardew Valley, one of the main objectives is to make friends with as many of the villagers as possible. One way to do this is by talking to them every day. As per the wiki, speaking with other villagers earns you 20 friendship points per person per day.

Usually, once you've talked to a villager for the day, you will be unable to talk to them again for the rest of the day (the speech bubble icon will not appear when mousing over them). However, some villagers will occasionally have multi-part dialogs, where you can talk to them a few times in a row as they elaborate on things they just said (for example, Penny explaining how it's difficult to keep her house clean without help from her drunken mother, a conversation which consists of 4 distinct dialogs, each of which you have to re-click on Penny for). My question is, do you get the full 20 points immediately after the first dialog, or do you have to finish the full conversation to get the points?

Answer 1

It looks like simply talking to them will give all 20 Friendship points, even if you don't finish the conversation.

See this thread:

1. If a villager has a conversation that lasts multiple clicks, do you need to go through the whole thing, or just the first one?

Just the first thing. As long as you interact with them to get the dialogue box up, you get the points.

In this wiki chat log, it looks like someone had been wondering the same thing as you:

So it's apparently either +10 or +20. Any info on why? Any speculations? Any chance it could have something to do with whether or not you "finish" their dialogue for the day (for example, talking to them once when they have multiple dialogues gives +10, but talking to them and finishing the dialogues gives +20)?

It appears that this has been figured out as the wiki now explains the reasoning behind differing Friendship point gains:

talking to villagers (+10 if the villager is in the middle of a special animation, like exercising or using a camera, otherwise +20; can only score once per day);

Thus, as long as you converse with a villager at least once a day and they're not in the middle of something special, you'll get +20 Friendship points, even if the conversation could have kept going.