Welcome to my farm blog. As I try to document my game anyhow, I thought I could just as well do it publicly where there's a theoretical chance someone would be interested to look at it
I'm a fairly new farm sim player, having started mid January 2020. Used a couple of week to try it out a bit, and thought I'd start a new farm on harder difficulty and do a bit of write up to try and get more into it
Feel free to comment in here if you want to.
I'll try to put technical details in spoiler mode so I can try to make it easier to get an overview without showing all the details.
Game Setup
To make it a bit more interesting and force myself to start using cheap tools, I'll start from scratch with "only" $500.000 in my bank account.
I've chosen to start in Ravenport. I'm a new players so all maps are new anyhow, so I picked Ravenport because:
- As the first map in the game, I'm guessing it leaves me best chance of not running into any map related quirks or bugs. (Only other map I tested was Greenwich Valley, but I had issues getting a harvester around the map and due to lack of field boundaries few fields had contracts)
- It looks like it has content so I can eventually try out both fields, animals and foresting.
- It has fields from small and cheap to fairly large ones.
- The map starts without farm buildings so I get to build my own.
The economic difficulty was set to hard immediately and will stay there. I turned dirt off as I think it has no game impact and I'd rather look at a clean than a dirty machine and if I had it on I would not prioritize cleaning it. I also turned on Stop & Go breaking. I have no gear shift to put it in reverse anyhow, and having to let go of the break to push it again to reverse felt quirky.
Temporarily I have turned weeds off. Doesn't matter initially when I only do contracts, but when I start with my own fields I want to be able to record yield and try to document profit margins, and it'll be simpler without weeds interfering. Will turn it on once I've gotten my yield measurements.
Self imposed rules
- It's too easy to exploit land sell and buy prices being the same with state of the property irrelevant. One can only get harvester gear, and buy land ready to be harvested and sell it after the harvest. Self imposed rule #1: Never sell land I have bought.
- There's lots of mods making available great gear for a measly purchase price which just feels like cheating the game. We will stay away from these. For gear and equipment we'll mostly be using the built in ones. We will definitively not be adding solar cell mod for instance, which generates better return of our investments without even lifting a finger.
Mods
I'll be trying to limit the amount of mods I use. These are the ones I'm currently using. Will update if I add any. See spoiler section for some more details:
Game changing mods
Seasons: Seems to be a noticeable improvement on the game. Actually having a year with seasons seems a huge improvement on the base game time management. I started of running a 3 day season (1 day = 1 month) with default GEO, though I've heard that short season may create weather issues. I ended up changing to 9 day season in year 2 to manage to create hay by drying grass in the sun.
Farm Forward: With seasons, there might be more downtime than otherwise, especially when running long season, and waiting 15 min real time to fast forward to next day using x120 time mode doesn't sound fun. I'll be playing in Real Time mode (though as 3 days = 1 month, I think of it as x10 mode), and use the farm forward mode to skip ahead when I'm just waiting for more contracts, next grow stage or whatever. (Or to skip nights if I don't have a sleeping trigger available)
Workshop Tabber: Nice small utility allowing you to tab through gear in the maintenance shop (of the gear you have in the target square), so you don't have to detach gear from tractor to repair tractor, or to detach and drive away from gear to repair gear. Very nice.
Vehicle Explorer: Allows parking a vehicle so it disappears from tab vehicle switch, and alter the order you tab through. Thus you can avoid having to change through your harvester outside of harvesting season and move vehicles operating together close to each other in the list. This mod gets better the more vehicles you have.
Place Anywhere: This mod allows you to place buildings in a lot more locations. I've heard this can potentially cause issues and may break the savegame, but I'll give it a go. It also allows landscaping to landscape bits otherwise not allowed. For instance, with this mod I can bury the junkyard in the landscaping tool. There are too many strange objects in the way of placing buildings otherwise. Objects that are invisible that you have no idea what is. Without this mod or something similar it's very hard to create a decent farm yourself. At least on the maps I've tested. (Global Company mod says it conflicts with it, but I have yet to see a problem as long as GC's own similar but inferior functionality is turned off)
Courseplay: Don't know yet how much I'll be using this or not. Testing it a bit for now. It's a way to automize driving, and also enables you to have workers that does just about anything, like driving across the map to sell your stuff at some sell point and drive back, without you even having to have the vehicle active. It makes the game more about administrating what to do than actually doing it, so I'm not sure yet what I'd prefer. Testing it out to automize some repetative tasks to start with. (Like driving from farm to shop and back)
Other nice to have mods
Wild Grass 0.9.0.0: Gives an option to seed wild grass outside of fields, which allows growing back grass in terraformed areas and has the side effect of destroying bushes. To begin with I'll just use them to destroy bushes in the parts of my yard I want to use for something. This may allow me to use free land to grow some grass. The bushes aren't technically in the way of anything. You can drive through and place buildings on top, but the farm looks cleaner without all the bushes, and it's easier to see elevation details, which could be useful to plan the future farm. With this mod, I've been able to get grass/hay for animals early on without needing to use a field to grow it. You can get quite a bit of grass from the areas in between everything else. Once I've got more land I'll get a grass field though, and then I guess I will try to remove growing grass from farmyard as it gets high, and make it hard to see if I drop a pallet fork in it for instance.
Multiple Contracts: Seem an unrealistic limitation that you cannot take on two contracts at the same time. Nice to be able to pick up multiple contracts to possibly due some bits in parallel to be more efficient. I have never seen a contract disappear after accepting it, so this might help me a bit to not lose any. New contracts doesn't seem to come that often during regular play, but a game load seems to trigger new ones, so if you play mostly short sessions you get a lot of chances to get more contracts in during the day regardless of this mod. Playing with this mod it was easier to collect multiple missions to cut down on travel and changing of equipment. Early on contracting is way easy income. Probably gonna limit how many contracts I'm allowing myself to do in later games, so not so sure I'll use this mod next time around.
Egg Pallet: A cage on a pallet that you can put in chicken coop to collect eggs in it. Thus you can use a forklift to move 2400 liters of eggs at a time, instead of manually having to load 16 boxes instead. Makes selling eggs quite a bit less tedious. (Found another egg pallet mod called refillable egg pallet or something in version 1.0.5, but that seemed to bug graphic vice, and was way cheap to buy)
Tajfun EGV 80 AHK: This is a winch that you can use to haul trees around. Awesome alternative for low budget forestry. You no longer need to cut trees into pieces you can carry. Just get away with the small branches and leafs, cut it into decent lengths and drag them to sell point.
Placeable mods Sadly there are very limited building choices in game. Want to use some mods mostly to make the farm look more like a real farm.
Farmhouse v1.1: I don't like the rundown default farmhouse full of stuff inside, as there's no game functionality for painting the house and I can't clean it inside either. Getting a mod just to be able to get a decent farmhouse I can walk into. This is the only alternative I've found for a house you can actually move into. It's way too cheap though. Decided to fake the price to $200.000 by editing savegame, to at least match the in game house. It doesn't cost $250 upkeep per day, but the 20k extra means I've payed that for many years into the future. Likely more years than I will play, and even if not, the rest are payed by interest of the extra sum.
Modding Welt Farmcomplex US Edition: Many nice buildings here. Got it first to use the old style 2 story barn, with cows in first floor and some available parking space on top. Also used some sheds from this mod. They look nice, apart from the Modding Welt commercial bits. I wanted a red barn that made the farm look like a farm to me.. The default in game ones looked a bit too strange and modern to me. The old barn has same capacity and same daily upkeep but is slightly cheaper to buy. The sheds looks like around the price of other sheds I've seen. Cheap, as the ing ame ones are too.
Bale Storage Barns: I store bales to ferment grass and to keep hay and straw for cows. The bale barn makes it possible to stack bales without a ton of manual handling.
MF Shed Pack: Various sheds and buildings here. Some looks like cheating. For instance a cheap silo with underground storage taking up virtually no space but has tons of space in it. I got it to get a repair shed looking a bit better than the default, and I may use the washing station there later. Both are at least as expensive as the base game variants.
Big Chicken Coop: The base game chicken coop is easy to work with and works just as well, but having chickens live outside in winter in GEO where it snows felt wrong. Got this mod to get a good looking chicken coop with indoor space for chickens. It's a bit large to place (Maybe twice the size of the in game one), but it has only one entrance and all interaction points are within it, so only need access to one corner of it. It's got space for 500 instead of 400 chickens for same daily upkeep, but it's a lot more expensive and take up a lot more space, so I'd say the base game one is technically better.
Manure Storage 1.1: (from CJFarming) The manure pit in the cow barn I use has a max capacity of less manure than I need to fertilize a single field. It stored more elsewhere, but it takes so long to get it into pit after emptying. This separate pit has a simple area to offload manure, and a built in system to fill it in a trailer fast. Now I can ferry between pits with a large trailer when the cow barn is full and use the secondary pit when actually fertilizing. A minor bonus is that the new pit only gets new manure when I dump stuff there, thus I can track how much manure barn generate, regardless of whether I have used manure from the other pit in the meantime. Would be nice if the graphics showed different amount of manure in it depending on fill rate, but other than that it works great.
Other minor mods
Locomotive Stop: To avoid train running rampage all the time. Railway crossings sadly start blinking and lowering barrier at the same time just a few seconds before the train is there. I want to be able to drive with a wheel without having to use a mouse to look sideways before crossing as there's so many crossings on this map. I'd not use this if the light could start blinking in reasonable time before lowering barrier so one could have time to break. (I later also added vehicle explorer, which I think might also stop train, so I may not need this anymore)
Ursus T127: Round bales just seems so incredibly handicapped in base game. This small bale trailer has an animated pickup of bales you drive by, has half the capacity of the square bale one and isn't overly cheap. Square bales is still better, but round bales are now a workable cheaper option. Used this early on in game before I could afford square baling gear which is still better.
1976 VW Golf GTI: The car I drove into Ravenport to start my farm. Cheap, but have no use in game anyhow.
Placeable Camper V1 Cheap trailer with sleep trigger. Can't afford the farm house early but it isn't really needed for anything either. But felt better roleplace wise to have an option of a sleep crappy accommodation, so I figured I'd use this one. (And I don't really feel I break self-imposed rule #2 above as the house isn't really needed for anything)
2020 Superduty F-Series: Just to get a nicer looking pickup than the default one. The default one is cheaper and probably works the same for what I'm using it for.
Heizomat HM 4-300: A small, cheap handfed woodchipper. Tried chipping some wood and this was a cheap entrypoint. But it was hard to find sellprice for chips to compete with selling it unchipped, and the process of feeding it was tedious, so not gonna do it anymore.
NMC 320H Pro Snow Blower: When there's snow it's really slippery to drive. Hard to drive water tank out of pond. Slides around so need to drive slowly. Thought it was fun to have something to clear snow with, and I found no plow or other alternative so I got this one. It's tedious to use though. It looks like snow in game is implemented as grains with another look, and the blower is implemented as a special sort of harvester using harvester mechanics. Thus you have normal grain limitations of not being able to dump it on the ground without specific ctrl-i usage, not being able to dump it on property you don't own, and as something that blows the "grain" away, it prefer to do it inside something, so as I drove by I started filling my front loader bucket laying around. If you are careful of storing away properly all your gear so there's no container in sight though, it kind of works. But to be honest, I mostly added this to show my 3 year old son