Has anybody houred out a tractor or implement? Most of the vehicle and equipment .xml files I've dug through list 600 hours as the "life" of the machine. What happens at the end of this life? Does it stop working, go to a value of zero, have an outlandish operating cost, explode, something else exciting?
600 in-game hours is almost an unachievable number as it would take probably some thousands of hours on a map to get one machine up to 600 hours itself. Likewise there is no real consequence in-game for running really old machinery other than a slowly-and-slightly increasing daily operating cost (noticeably even less so with Seasons). I've been pondering some sort of mod to implement a meaningful running life for equipment (a lot fewer than 600 hours...) where drastic things start to have a chance of happening with old equipment and you have to make some meaningful decisions about maintenance and risk of downtime vs. cost of new.
Anyway first step is figuring out what happens currently when stuff is houred out. Instead of setting a tractor off running flat out against a tree for several weeks to verify this on my own I thought I'd ask if anyone has discovered it by a more interesting means
Hmmm well that was anti-climactic. I edited the operating time to 599.9 hours then set the tractor off running until it rolled over 600. Nothing happened that I could observe. The resale value did not change, the daily upkeep did not change, the performance did not change, the tractor kept on running and doing its thing just as before. In fact the resale and daily upkeep of the one with now 600 hours was only marginally worse than the similar one beside it with 140 hours.
This is all fine I suppose but really at some point stuff should either wear out or need an expensive rebuild, and/or start to have a legitimate risk of an expensive or catastrophic breakdown. Otherwise you can just buy one tractor and literally use it forever with no substantial ongoing cost or risk.
Yes, that is a fun and realistic mechanic that Seasons implements. However, unless the equipment sometime eventually wears out after all that use and maintenance, it's still the same effect as the base game where it will just run forever. Seasons shifts the vanilla daily upkeep cost to an annual maintenance cost, but the net effect over the machine's (endless) life is the same.
Seasons has it so that once the repair cost exceeds the value of the machine (iirc) it is impossible to repair.
This wasn't very well received when it was announced, although I've only encountered it once. Tried to repair my Amazone Pantera after 25 hours in a year, only to find the option greyed out, and the value showing as £7000 ish. I assume it's a bug with the sprayer, since it has some other little niggles I've noticed.
Well that is one way to implement that mechanic but I think I would be amongst those protesting if I encountered it. Perhaps it is a bug just with that sprayer. I don't remember reading that in the Seasons manual but there's a lot in there and I might have missed it.
If not though, the trick is that in reality an owner has the option of choosing to implement as expensive a repair as he can presently afford and wants to risk. Owners are not insurance companies and just because a necessary repair is more than the current value of a machine, it doesn't mean the machine is written off. The replacement value of that old machine might be 2-5-20x its actual sale value, because it is often not an option to replace an old machine with something exactly the same age and value. Often the only replacement options are newer and more expensive, and a close match in age and value might take a lot of digging to turn up. Therefore to the owner it might have an effective value of 2-5-20x what he could get for it at auction, and he might well choose to pay its full current value in repairs to keep it running. The tradeoff when fixing old machines though, is that no matter how much you fix, there is always a chance of another big breakdown soon after which might cost just as much or more. Or it might go for years again with no problem. So game-wise it would be a fun gamble. In real life it's a less-fun gamble but still one that many of us make.
It would also be neat if maybe repairs could be implemented so that you could "do them yourself" at maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the cost but with a longer time commitment; i.e. it costs less but the tractor has to sit at your farm shop for a full game day, compared to paying more and having an instantaneous repair like it works now.
hpmc13 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 10, 2018 1:39 am
That is anti-climactic. Thanks for doing the legwork on it. I agree that something should happen, too. The wheels falling off would be a nice touch.
Hahaha this comment just reminded me.... many years ago I was finishing up swathing in an old and very tired swather that I had been fixing steadily all fall. With maybe 10 acres to go one of the front axles broke and the wheel fell off. In that case I decided there was nothing left worth fixing on that machine
