Getting started at Westbridge Hills

[Griphos]

I'm new to farming.

I've found a lot of helpful guides out there, what to consider in terms of equipment and how to develop the farm in productive ways. I can't really find anything on Westbridge with the same sort of advice, such as what equipment to sell and what to buy when starting out to do a better job and be more efficient (except for FarmerJeff's Westbridge Diaries on this forum).

For instance, I'm harvesting the wheat, but there's all this straw left on the field and no way I can see with current equipment to turn it into something useful.

Anyone know of any such guide about getting started in this farming business tuned to Westbridge? I'd prefer to use the American machinery that comes in the Titanium pack rather than the European machinery (I suppose for realism's sake), but I'm not averse to using appropriate mods with the right sort of equipment.

Thanks.

[tater salad]

Since you are just starting out, the cheapest way to collect the straw would be a small forage wagon. Going the baling route requires more equipment and investment.

http://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.ph ... mod_id=211

http://fs-uk.com/mods/view/28189

http://fs-uk.com/mods/view/30392


The basic strategies when starting out are pretty much the same on any map. What is the "best" way to proceed could be debated ad nauseum. It really comes down to personal preference.

How much acreage do you own? What equipment to you absolutely need to work that acreage? What are the daily costs of your starting tractors? Can you sell off all but one tractor when starting out?

I would advise not relying too heavily on guides/strategies written by others. If you look at them as suggestions, that is fine. If you follow them to the letter, you are playing someone else's game.

Since this is a sandbox game with no set goals to accomplish, success is really determined by the individual. Set your own goals and trust your own judgement. Every accomplishment you achieve based on your own decisions will be much more rewarding.

One way to evaluate your strategies is a good ol' pencil and paper log book. Track your expenditures, income, harvest quantities, etc.. A few placeable beehives can offset your daily vehicle costs and loan interest.

Unlike real world farming, it is pretty hard to go bust in this game. Equipment never breaks down. Planted crops always grow, harvest rates are always the same. The bottom never drops out on market prices, so you can't lose money on a harvest. Loan interest rates are very manageable. You get the idea.

There are mods available for tractors and harvesters by IH, Case, Deere, etc.. The most reliable mods are available on the mod hub on the official site and on fs-uk. Modhoster is also a good source, but the mods are not tested. Some are very good, some are not. I would recommend adding one mod at a time. If you put a bunch of mods in all at once, mod conflicts can be hard to track down.

[BULIGO]

Westbridge hills is a locked map, so I never played it, because I love to change things to my liking in the maps I play. Westbridge can't be edited, so i passed on that one.
Straw from wheat and barley is useless to you right now. Just ignore it for now. It will come very useful later on for feeding cows. One of the easier starts is to sell everything, rise more credits in the bank and buy the agrovector tele-loader with a pallet fork and do the pallet transport missions for easy money. No idea if there are missions in Westbridge. With the money you make, you can start buyimg sheep, and feeding them with the mowed grass you mow with the small profi hopper mower. Sheep need just a bunch of grass, nothing else. So they produce wool, and when you see in your PDA that the wool pallet is full (should have 2000 units of wool to be 100% full), then grab it with your teleloader and transport/sell the wool to the spinnery. Every wool pallet wil earn you about 5000$. Hope this helps.

[Griphos]

Thanks guys. Good advice, tater, about making it my own game. Your assessment of the game is reassuring. I bought some chickens, since I have about 3 dozen or so on my place IRL and like to watch them. I'll look into the beehives. Always liked the idea of having some hives. I have sheep IRL as well, but they are hairless breeds raised for meat. I think I'll look into sheep in the sim too. But it's crop growing that interests me, since I have no real experience of that.

Thanks for the sources for trusted mods.

Thanks for the recommendations on equipment, Buligo. I don't understand most of the equipment yet, but I did sell off the two identical tractors and bought one from the Classics DLC that seemed to be less expensive to run and even a little more powerful. I think I'll keep the little Farmall. Just for the nostalgia factor.

I have been getting messages about pallet missions, so I'll look into that also.

[Bor Sponge]

Of coarse this is entirely your game and you play it how it how you like, but I agree a strategy of some sort is valuable as it'll give you a direction so you won't just play aimlessly.
Personally I sell everything except a tractor fertiliser spreader and a combine. I turn missions off as I find them naggingly boring. Then I max out my loan at the bank buy a bigger trailer and a seeder that drills straight into the stubble.
I then concentrate on producing cranola wheat and barley.
As wheat demand is fairly frequent at Westbridge so it seems, cranola is always a high price as barley seems to be.
Then for a change I'll bale and cart some of the straw to the cow yard for use later on.
I use the john deere 864 round baler found on the fsuk site and the cat flat bed found at modhoster in the cat pack as these are both fairly cheap and good mods.
Also I wouldn't bother with any placeable mods like beehives n green houses as it'll take a while to get that money back and make profit. Placeables like these I think are best left till you've become established and cash flow is regular.
I've just purchased a slightly bigger combine the 2058 of modhoster it's a lot cheaper that the mid to low range Deutz in game.
Also I'm now investing into logging as I've just had a big cranola sale

Naturally you'll find your own way of playing and figure out which strategy works best for you as with the mods you come across.
Good luck and I hope you enjoy your time farming those hills bor!

Cheers
BS

[Griphos]

Does the Weidemann pallet fork work with the Guldner G40 front loader?

First harvest of wheat is in the silo, and first crop of canola is planted and fertilized.

[Farmer Carol]

No, unfortunately each style of loader requires it's own tools. What I mean is the front loaders (tractor type) have a different "fitting" to the telehandlers and the same for the Weidemann which has it's own set of tools.

Another top tip is the fact that most mods have a more realistic daily maintenance cost compared with the default stuff. By that I mean less expensive to run.
There is also a mod on the modhub called Bank of Hagenstadt that will allow you a much larger loan and you can also buy and sell your fields through it. You can't sell fields at all in the vanilla game!

I agree with all the others about forming a strategy of your own as opposed to copying what others have done or just aimlessly harvesting/seeding etc. I think both of these would send me into a very quick spiral of boredom tbh. Ian and I often start the same map afresh over and over trying different styles of farming, ie. one time we might turn our hands to cattle only and then switch (after a while) to, perhaps, sheep or a combination of those and chickens or we might just stick with grains for a while. By "a while" I mean around 50 to 100 hours if the map deserves it or less if we find it boring.
One map we both enjoy is from FS-UK and is called Springhill Farm 2013. It's small with tight gates and narrow roads and it makes you think about which equipment to buy, do you want large machines for quick field work or do you go with the smaller scale stuff for easier movement around the narrow roads etc. The authors (NI-Modding) recently brought out a larger version of this called Springhill valley which you might also enjoy.

I'm pleased to see you are still enjoying the game despite the infuriating problem with your wheel set.

Carol. x

[pigpen]

@ Farmer Carol now that you mention the Springhill valley map I downloaded it but please tell me the roads in the English countryside are not that narrow this drives me nuts. as for the topic start a game in easy mode try some mowing missions collect some grass for the BGA buy some sheep some greenhouses and cows just try a little bit of everything then see what you like. there is a lot more to this game then just farming wheat. barley and canola. if it helps watch inzania's videos at the top of the forum.

[Griphos]

I saw Springhill Valley while browsing around a couple of mod sites. I downloaded it and two others (Central Kansas and Idaho), and thought I'd give one of them a try after learning the ropes at Westbridge. Springhill looked very appealing.

I've switched over to the gamepad and will try that out for a few hours to see if I like it better. Not as immersive (or, dare I say, "realistic") but I got tired of the pedals quitting after 15 minutes or so and not working right in the first place.

I'm going to grow grains for a while so I can learn equipment and process, but it's the animals that call to me. Once I get a bit ahead, I'm pretty sure I'll move in that direction. I've already got my eye on fields 19 and 20 for hay.

So, are the sheep and cow pastures just public grazing? I don't see a way to buy them.

Thanks again to all who have chimed in with advice.

[reider]

I got Springhill Valley about a week ago and am really really enjoying it. The lanes are tight and yes some are like that in the UK, especially in Lincolnshire where I originate from. I felt that it's time for a change of map and this one was right down my street. It ticks every box and then some. Unfortunately it starts with crops in a few fields you do not own and needs bigger machinery to get them all done before they start to rot.

I got a loan and started to do this but then thought I'd much prefer to use a new strategy and none of the get rich quick stuff or usual machinery. Back to the small and old school machines as much as possible. Now today though I think I will finally find out how to put the non owned fields back to cultivated and keep the owned fields as they are. Then start over with a map that will give a lot of enjoyment for quite some time to come. I skim read it before but will read it properly this time.

My older techniques would have been to cultivate the fields manually after purchase then amend the files to disown them again and default the money to $6,000. This is the only fault I find, it should have started with only the owned fields having crops in. Even though they are a potential money earner.

[husher]

I've been playing westbridge since i first got the game, i know it was supposed to be a simple start up but the equipment was really poor and just not up to the task of even that single field- fifteen harvests on and i still hadn't broken half a million bucks and was so frustrated that i abandoned the farm and got some down load maps instead.Then i came across the money mod on FS-uk and went back and sold all the issue stuff and spent three million getting better stuff now i'm much more advanced, sheep and cows are up and running and i've got four large fields to work on. Lately i've been on you tube a lot watching videos by Billstmaxx and Landy kidd all the while learning how they play i reccomend the vid's they are so instructive- now i started West bridge for a second time and have eqiuppted it with all the John Deere stuff that i could find after days of trawlling around, its hard going the Deere stuff needs careful handling and is incredably realistic. www.FS-uk for the money mod $1 per key press, no loan, no interest and no repayments--- wonderful!

[pigpen]

I am not sure where I downloaded it from but I use a no withering mod. this helps with maps like Springhill valley. on this map there is corn, sugar beets and potatoes planted. at startup a person does not have these harvesting machines so they will rot. what bothers me the most about this map is the basic Deutz combine header will not fit between the gates you have to use a header trailer.

[Farmer Carol]

@ Farmer Carol now that you mention the Springhill valley map I downloaded it but please tell me the roads in the English countryside are not that narrow this drives me nuts.

The guys that made this map (NI-Modding) are all farmers from Northern Ireland where, I believe, the landscape is indeed just like this and it also reminds me of where I grew up in rural Nottinghamshire where some of the roads are exactly like this.
I look at this map as an eye opener where you can't just buy the biggest pieces of machinery and set to work, instead you have to think about how well you are going to manage the transportation from field to field to farm etc. and the reality of lots of farmers of today who still deal with these conditions here in the UK. I tend to be like my husband and try to play this game as immersively as possible, (is immersively even a real word? ) I also only drive from inside the cab unless I'm reversing something like a harvester where I can't see behind me due to there being no mirrors. (Oh, how much Ian wants Giants to implement mirrors into the game )
I think the absolute best aspect of this game is the fact that if you're not enjoying playing one particular map or way of farming you can just stop, delete the save and start all over again. I have recently started using the forest mod and adding it to different maps to find out which one I prefer and I have to say there are two clear winners and one is the Springhill Valley map and the other is the map mania winner Smithfield Farm map, both available from FS-UK

Carol.

PS. I must say that I'm enjoying reading other peoples ideas and views of the game and as you can read all over this forum, whatever the player enjoys is the "right" way to play it.

[Griphos]

Yes, this has been quite informative. I am intrigued by the forestmod as well.

My impulse at present is to try to avoid missions and other ways the game has of adding to your bottom line a bit arbitrarily and see how well I can do just farming what I start with, adding livestock as I have enough profit for the added equipment.

It's odd, the feeling of accomplishment one gets from watching that first actual crop sown grow in the field.

TherE are a lot of very nice mods. I don't want to get too carried away with those too soon though, although the NH harvester and Schleuter (sp?) tractor are on my property now as they are much better suited to the work and more economical as well, and selling my other equipment meant I didn't have to increase my loan to get them.

The Ursus and Marshall DLC also look to have a nice set of equipment for the scale and kind of work I am doing at present or in the near future. Are these good?

[Farmer Carol]

Anything you buy from Giants (DLC's) are guaranteed to work fine but they're always lacking in features. The Ursus pack have some decent small scale tractors which are very useful for starting out or for your first "upgrade" if you know what I mean. I have the Marshal DLC but I don't really use any of it as I have mods that are better/bigger/cheaper (take your pick! Lol)

Carol. x