When we first released barnacles, players found a bug whereby multiple people could scrape the same barnacle at the same time (as long as the 2nd, 3rd, etc., person started while the first person was still going). As soon as we saw this we realized "oh! that's not really a bug — we should have thought of that in the first place!"
So: (i) it already works like that and (ii) it was the inspiration for the co-op mining and dirt piles!
Absolutely and I'm a big advocate of the barnacle parties. but there is no "bonus". I was hoping that the bonus feature of helping others for the co-op mining could be added :)
Since barnacles are a one time scrape yielding just one barnacle followed by the lengthy regrowth process simply by allowing more than 1 person to harvest at the same time is already a bonus if every player scraping is awarded their own barnacle. For helping someone else harvest that single barnacle you are rewarded with a bonus barnacle.
The bonus is that you get every barnacle available, while if you weren't cooperating you would only get a fraction of the barnacles while the other people clear out the rest of them before you have a chance to get there.