Seasons and animal care repetitivity

[george.earlslight]

I'm feeling that while Seasons does an excellent job bringing realism and variety to the game, animal care is too frequent and becomes repetitive in gameplay terms.
Since the troughs have 2 days' capacity, it means that animals will start starving if you don't top up their food every day or at exactly one minute before hitting 48 hours the latest.
I've got the biggest Anderson mixer with 40k litres capacity and need to prepare a new mix for 60 Holsteins every two days on a 6-day season game.
Same goes for the Kuhn straw blower which I fill with 3 square bales every two days.
I think I wouldn't mind so much if I had to prepare a full season of 120k litres TMR and bed 36k litres of straw if the trough capacity allowed it and just tend to their frequent cleaning. I'm planning to set up a TMR storage, so I can premix and just do some trailer runs.

This is obviously a personal point of view. In reality, animals do require daily care and Seasons does deliver this option.
That being said I wonder what other people think about it and how they deal with animals.

[bojanh66]

I agree with you.
I am taking care of 150 holstein cows and their offsprings which are growing and eating more and more until i sell them.
What i do for straw is using bale capacity mod 20k litres straw bales, i put 4 those bales in straw blower, thats 80k straw which is really great (but not realistic )
For TMR Mixer , i use this mod from GTX:
https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... _id=146546

But i have increased its capacity to 120k litres.
Then i have recorded feeding course with Courseplay, start point at tmr mixer pipe, drive through cow's feeding through, then back to tmr mixer pipe, so i dont have to do feeding.
I pretty much try to automate my farm as much as possible.
Now some people will say, then whats the point of playing if you just watch how workers do.
Well, thats my style of playing and idc for other opinions, just sharing what do i do, to make cow care easier.
And for automatic milk sale, i have installed Milk Addon from GTX modder through the Giants Editor

[Lygge]

Yes I like that the seasons are more realistic than the base version. If there are only few animals, particularly hens and sheeps, their feeding can forgotten for many days. Hens doesn´t need water, according to the game, and sheep and hens doesn´t produce manure. That´s what I don´t understand this logic, why we have lost the different colors of animals. Missing the black and brown sheeps, the male and female all of these animals are quite poorly presented. That is my think or rate about animals of seasons.

The positive is that the harvesting is not always every three days.

[norfolk farmer]

Personally I much prefer it this way and i tend to do it more often only giving enough feed so it needs doing twice a day.

[BulletBill]

I think it's always hard to find that balance of realism and enjoyable gameplay without to much realism destroying the enjoyment or vice versa not enough realism that also takes away your enjoyment.

Personally I found with Seasons I prefer to run it at a much slower rate so that those jobs can be done easily around other jobs. Then when I need to I'll speed time up a bit until the next busy period.

For me the game has to be done in a relaxed way otherwise I don't enjoy it.

Frantic Farming is not my cup of tea.

[bossmanslim]

Welcome to livestock farming.

Seasons makes the game more boring unless you like repetitive tasks like working on livestock and spraying/fertilizing.

[redglasses]

Personally I much prefer it this way and i tend to do it more often only giving enough feed so it needs doing twice a day.

Same, I like to have something to do. And generally cows lead to a ton more work which is nice, it's not just feeding but transporting milk, spreading manure, stuff like that I enjoy.

[aklein]

Maybe realism isnt your cup of tea if you find needing to keep up with the animals as a daily choir which is fine folks can play the game how ever you want. But in real life farmers with animals much balance the time it takes to care for them which they must do on a daily or even multiple times a day basis with other farm work. Get up early in the game morning tend to the animals topping off water, food and straw (if you supply it) then its off for a day of field work or other farm tasks. Real farmers with Holsteins typically milk twice a day so one should be grateful we dont have to perform some sort of milking function or work might never get done.

But in all seriousness if you find it hard to keep up with the animals and do the field work then either 1 do longer seasons so you have more days to do the work you need to do. 2 have a smaller number of animals to balance out care needs/time with what you have available.

If you properly size your animals to the pen with seasons you dont need to feed cows or sheep from about late spring thru late autumn on most GEO's as there would be grass to graze on. Then its just top them up with water daily. If you have to many that the grass in the pen does not support your herd then use multiple pens, lessen the herd size or accept you need to *** feed year round.

[chedly_farms]

Console player here, so I have not had seasons until lately. Still not using it as I don't want to start over with a new game save.

That being said. I only give my dairy cows enough food to last 12 hours. So I feed them twice a day. I try to play as real life as I can. I wake up around 5, feed the cows by 6. Then take care of sheep, horses, run eggs to sale point. Do my arable farming (whatever is on tap for the day) feed cows again around 17:30, finish any arable/chores for the day, repeat. It's farming. It's all repetitive.

[blue_painted]

Everything that Aklein said!

One thing I like about Seasons19 is, just like where I am in the world, you can't get up at 4am and start combining, you have to wait for the dew to lift first, and that's the time I tend to the livestock.

[george.earlslight]

I think I've pinpointed my main issue by reading everyone's thoughts on this.
It's probably not the daily chore that's bugging but the lack of doing anything else for long periods of time.
I only have one big arable and two grass fields at the moment, so not much to do apart from animal care most days.

Then i have recorded feeding course with Courseplay, start point at tmr mixer pipe, drive through cow's feeding through, then back to tmr mixer pipe, so i dont have to do feeding.

While I am using Courseplay (you might recognize me from github, I do remember some of your posts) I never thought to automate some of the trips.
I'll try that and see how it goes.

I think it's always hard to find that balance of realism and enjoyable gameplay without to much realism destroying the enjoyment or vice versa not enough realism that also takes away your enjoyment.
For me the game has to be done in a relaxed way otherwise I don't enjoy it.

That's the way I also like to play. Real life is frantic enough for me.

Maybe realism isnt your cup of tea if you find needing to keep up with the animals as a daily choir which is fine folks can play the game how ever you want. But in real life farmers with animals much balance the time it takes to care for them which they must do on a daily or even multiple times a day basis with other farm work. Get up early in the game morning tend to the animals topping off water, food and straw (if you supply it) then its off for a day of field work or other farm tasks.

And that's what bugged me. I generally like realism, supposed simulators that play like an arcade are no go for me.
The thing that I'm probably missing is the fieldwork and other farm tasks, as you helped me figure out.

I try to play as real life as I can. I wake up around 5, feed the cows by 6. Then take care of sheep, horses, run eggs to sale point. Do my arable farming (whatever is on tap for the day) feed cows again around 17:30, finish any arable/chores for the day, repeat. It's farming. It's all repetitive.

Also, this kind of schedule made me rethink what I'm missing.
I think I just need to fill my farming days with more stuff and close the game when I feel fed up.

[chedly_farms]

Also, get yourself the Amazone Profihopper. You can cut grass around houses, and along roadways for a change of pace. I make sure I’m not doing the same things for too long. If I mow on one day, I’ll bale the next. Apply slurry another day, run grain to the sale point the next. I run a simulated season. I turn on growth stages when I’m ready to. I’m probably doing about 20 days at a time in between growth stages. I work at my own pace, so I can do whatever I want with the pressure of finishing a job before the next growth stage. I find a lot of freedom and enjoyment in that.

[bossmanslim]

I think the main issue people are bringing up here is that the game is very limited on what tasks can be turned over to the helper. IRL, if a farm is big enough, they have employees who can handle certain tasks. The real world also lacks the fast forward and logout buttons, so there are a lot of tasks IRL that are done because the person has nothing else to do and doesn't want to be destitute, so they take the good with the bad.

[aklein]

With profit margins near non existant for farmers I would say these emplyees are usually family and not so much true employees like one might think of with other businesses.

As far as filling your days you could either speed up the clock to something like 15X so a game day goes by in about an hour and/or do contract work to fill in some of the time. But yes a farm with animals and grass pastures would have a fair bit of down time unless you had alot of grass pastures and thus had a sort of grass work rotation going on where by the time you get through all the grass work the first fields you started on where ready again.

There is no wrong way to play so if your not enjoying it tweak your strategy.

[bossmanslim]

With profit margins near non existant for farmers I would say these emplyees are usually family and not so much true employees like one might think of with other businesses.

The IRS requires requires that all employer compensation is considered reasonable, which just means that it should match the amount you’d make if you were working in the same role at another company. This means even if you are the owner, you have to pay yourself like an employee. While business owners play with that number, paying themselves as a non-skilled laborer for instance, they still have to pay themselves. For successful farms, it's a much an accounting game as it is an agriculture game. Just look in the background of all the videos that are posted on youtube and you'll see that while they're poor on paper, their quality of life isn't exactly at the poverty line.

Most farms have family labor because those people grew up on the farm, are therefore skilled/trained labor and benefit from the connection of being the farmer's kid. A large portion of jobs for small business is based on social connections more than anything. I worked on my neighbors farm because I lived right beside him and had a relationship based on being neighbors, not because of qualifications or a job application; just a social connection.