[FS19] Are plowing and growing certain crops a waste of time?

[mat2190]

(FS19, Game version 1.5.2.0, no mods)

EDIT: An updated version of the charts below including straw and animals can be found on page 5 of this thread.

While digging into the game files in order to determine how to achieve maximum profits, I made some quite surprising discoveries that rendered certain aspects of the game somewhat obsolete:

Growing crops like sugarcane, maize, potato and especially poplar are nowhere as (time-)efficient as canola or soybean.
And much more to my surprise, plowing does not positively effect your profits. It's actually making things worse.



These statements might sound a little bold, so let me explain how I got there:

At first I had a look at the game files maps_fruittypes.xml and maps_filltypes.xml and extracted the liters per m2 and price per liter to work out the profit per m2. Using the game files eliminates the fluctuations in prices that would occur, if one tried to determine the profits through in game experiments. Expenses for fertilizing were left out, because they are the same for every crop. This lead to the following table and diagram:




All similar attempts I could find on the internet stopped here and simply stated things like "potato and sugarbeet are much more profitable than soybean or canola". But I went one important step further and also took into account how much real time is necessary in order to grow and harvest each crop. To find out the maximum working speeds for each crop I searched the in game shop for the best available machinery and their stats which lead to the following table:




For the final step I only needed to combine the so far gathered data. This would put the profit per m2 into perspective, adding the important factor of necessary real time effort. I added up the time taken for each task that is required in order to grow and harvest the different crops. This gave me the overall working speeds in hours per m2. Converting this value into m2 per hour and finally multiplying it with the profit per m2 lead to the profit per real time hour for every crop as shown in the following table and diagram:



EDIT: poplar can be regrown just like sugarcane. This doubles the profit per hour for poplar to 5212.

The diagram shows, that there are huge profit differences between crops, especially with poplar, maize and potato generating comparably trivial profits. But much to my surprise it also clearly states, that apart from a minimal benefit when growing potatoes, there is no situation in which plowing your fields would actually lead to more profit per invested time. Although not plowing fields after harvesting maize, potato, sugarbeet or sugarcane leads to a 15% loss in yield, it simply takes so much time to plow, that you are better off not investing in a plow at all.

This is very unfortunate, because if you play the game the same way I do, for the majority of you all the fun lies in starting with a small farm and working one’s way up in order to one day be able to grow and harvest all the different crops and use every kind of expensive and extraordinary machinery. Yet looking at my findings, the game's goal basically changes to "Working hard to earn a lot of money, then investing that lot of money in expensive specialized machinery, just to then earn a lot less money than before."


For me these findings took away a lot of motivation to keep playing the game and made me work on a mod to fix it. While it is easy to alter the selling prices for the disadvantaged crops, I am currently waiting for a response from Giants Support on how to alter the yield penalty for not plowing a field since there is not enough documentation on how the penalty is implemented.


Now did you know about these problems? What are your thoughts on them? And would you be interested in a finished version of a mod that fixes them? Let me know


Cheers!

mat2190



_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
A few annotations:
These are theoretical calculations that of course can not be applied exactly to the real game experience, especially since the widest machinery is sometimes too big, to work on certain fields. Also narrow machines need to turn around a lot more often because they need more lines to finish the same field. This takes a lot of additional time that unfortunately can only be calculated without estimation, if one determines the average field length on the map of choice. Since the calculations would then not be universal anymore but specific for a certain map, I decided not to include this factor for now.

I did not comment on silage because it takes additional work to fill the silo and compress the silage which can not be done by helpers. The time taken would have to be estimated, which makes a clear statement difficult.

Also I am aware that a lot of you are using the Seasons mod, which requires crop-rotation. Yet because there are still certain crops, that generate the most profit, Seasons just makes you switch from just growing the best crop to repeatedly using the best crop-rotation with e.g. the best three crops. It is an improvement, but still does not make all crops equally profitable.

[Alagos]

Ok, the first paragraph is interesting, now I need to find the motivation to read the rest

[Noraf]

Interesting summary.
I can't see your calculations for the extra time spent due to more carting from silage, and the fermenting process. And then filling up the feeder on the biogas plant with it.
And as for investments go, how mutch more needs to be invested to get a full blown silage operation going?
Investments in mascinery is something to consider aswell, + for silage, add in the bga.

[humbe]

Good effort. I'll steal the source for ingame prices PersonallyI optimize for profit per game time unit and that changes the picture.

[mat2190]

@Alagos
The really interesting findings come up in the later paragraphs

@Noraf
I adressed the problem of silage production in a short sentence in my annotations. As you said it takes extra time to produce the silage however this time can only be estimated. All other working speeds are clearly defined and that's why I left out silage for the moment. It seems way too strong but determining a nearly exact value would take a lot of in game experimenting.

However I would be willing to add proper calculations for silage and even all the animals, if this thread gets popular enough.

Edit: To answer your second question: I would not take investments into account, as they are just a one time expense. They are basically a hurdle you have to take in advance. Integrating them into profits per hour would distort the data, since they are going to be paid off after a while.

@humbe
My plan was indeed to alter the selling prices so that every crop creates about the same amount of profit. This would be quite easy to do. The more difficult part is to fix the necessity to plow. To get some help there I reached out to Giants Support.

[Illinois Farmer]

I haven't read it all, but certain maps have different prices for crops. For example medicine creek the best money maker is dry corn and soybeans.

[Mwal]

This is why I run a modded disk that gives you plowing stage and is quite a bit larger to work in my corn stalks. If anything the whole plowing stage thing needs to be thrown out and replaced with something that keeps track of passes and what kinda of machinery you use on the field and base deep tillage off of that.

[mat2190]

@Illinois Farmer
These must be special cases then as the yield and selling prices in maps_fruittypes.xml and maps_filltypes.xml apply to both vanilla maps. And if not programmed differently, the prices should also be the same for mod maps, if I'm not mistaken.

@Mwal
Yeah that might also be a possibility. However I would like to find a way to fix the game mechanic itself so that it works with standard machinery.

[Illinois Farmer]

Yeah most likely. I mean it makes sense for a map to have better corn/ beans and good wheat prices because that's what is grown the most irl.

[humbe]

Seasons calendar should really be part of game. When you have seasons in the year you feel you are wasting years if you are just fast forwarding time to get the most harvests per real time unit. Especially with immersion in mind that makes it more interesting to optimize per game year which kind of solves your problem if you buy into it.

If you in real life had a job where you earned $200 per hour but you could only work one hour per day you might still be interested in a sidejob even if it paid less per hour..

[hun3]

Interesting find. Have you looked at the mod Real life Numbers? I didnt look into it deeper but I believe it changes crop yield etc you have been analyzing in your research,,,its also reflecting actual prices of the crops.

[mat2190]

Seasons calendar should really be part of game. When you have seasons in the year you feel you are wasting years if you are just fast forwarding time to get the most harvests per real time unit. Especially with immersion in mind that makes it more interesting to optimize per game year which kind of solves your problem if you buy into it.

If you in real life had a job where you earned $200 per hour but you could only work one hour per day you might still be interested in a sidejob even if it paid less per hour..

I definitely see your point. In fact I am planning to use Seasons myself. Yet also with the seasons calendar the problems kind of persist, don't they?

I mean we all only have a certain amount of time to spend for playing FS. And I don't think that it is possible for anybody with a real life day job, to play the game in real time and get some noticeable progress on their farm and machinery. So time will remain a factor no matter how you play the game, right? And to stick with your analogy, there is no game mechanic that prevents me from "only working one hour per day". I could simply grow a second field of canola instead of wasting my time with potatoes, especially when considering, that the machinery for the "slower" crops tends to be as expensive as buying another field.

Would there be any harm in making all the crops equally profitable for any playstyle?

And to be honest, even with realism in mind, as soon as I know that it's more profitable to not even own a plow I would not really have fun plowing just for the sake of realism, would you?

@hun3
Thanks for the suggestion, I will have a look at the mod.

[garyst]

This is why I run a modded disk that gives you plowing stage and is quite a bit larger to work in my corn stalks. If anything the whole plowing stage thing needs to be thrown out and replaced with something that keeps track of passes and what kinda of machinery you use on the field and base deep tillage off of that.

I agree. There needs to be alot more dirt field textures than just two for all the different types of tillage tools there are.

[Doc3d]

I was also about to suggest Real Life Numbers, but it’s emphasis is somewhat opposite of yours. You seem to only want to make as much cash as possible, while RLN is all about adjusting the prices to be more realistic. That is just a small part of what the mod does though, and for me it is almost as essential as seasons.
IRL nobody would use a plow if they didn’t have to, but the game simulates farming, and plowing is a part of it. I guess the same could be said about anything really. If you could buy wheat and sell it for a higher price, that would be the most time saving and money-making thing you could do, but there wouldn’t be any game left to play. Sure, you’d be able to afford whichever machine you want, but why...?

You also have to consider that not all crops are grown everywhere, so growing say for example cotton on a German map would rub a lot of people the wrong way, and it shouldn’t matter if it makes more money..

But people tend to play in different ways, myself I don’t really care about the money, I just want to try to farm realistically. Both with crops I grow and machinery I use, while others might be mostly about owning and using the largest monsters available or own every field, etc etc.

[hun3]

Lets not forget how often real life farmers say farming is not a money making business...so if you think about that..maybe FS DOES reflect reality.?