Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

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Spunky_Dogg
Posts: 249
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2020 11:55 pm
Location: Illinois

Re: Spunky Dogg Farms

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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After a winter in storage, the machines are getting ready for the new construction season on our Oak Hollow Caves Resort project.

Hello Spunky fans!

We have made it through the winter, which was generally mild with only one measurable snowfall. That snowfall, however, was enough to supply our bottled water operation through the cold season.

Bottled water isn't a bad choice as a side hustle during the slower time of year, as a load of 21 pallets generally gets you between $7,000 and $8,000 per load. I've found I can fill a trailer in about a day and a half, so a winter of doing this gets you a decent amount of spending money.

Bottled water also gets you a couple hundred dollars of an environment score bonus, so there is a slight incentive to undertaking that production.

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This is what 21 tons of water looks like.

In other Chainsaw Valley news, we have a new concrete company - Imperial Concrete Products. The plant produces lime from limestone and grinds stone into sand and gravel.

All three elements are then combined to make concrete, which comes in 4,000-liter pallets. We're expecting a construction boom in the Valley now that Miller's Sawmill is firmly established and the concrete plant is in place.

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Chainsaw Valley's Imperial Concrete Products facility.

We're in March now and we'll start planting our corn next month before turning our attention back to the Oak Hollow Caves Resort. We've purchased the remaining ground we need and all that's left is some site clearing before the cabins can be installed.

As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!
- Spunky
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
SimulatedFarmer
Posts: 442
Joined: Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:40 am

Re: Spunky Dogg Farms

Post by SimulatedFarmer »

Oh, for the imagination AND the writing skills! Your updates are such a great way to start the day. Keep well.
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Spunky_Dogg
Posts: 249
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Location: Illinois

Re: Spunky Dogg Farms

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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A load of lumber with telehandler leaving the sawmill headed for the market.

Hello Spunky fans!

We are back with another update after blowing through Spring (cliff notes: we got our crops planted), have got our logging equipment prepped for the new DLC on Tuesday (really looking forward to that yarder on these switchback roads) and we are now into the summer months of Year 3.

And we are also into a new enterprise...drumroll please...dirt farming!

So, the obvious question is what is dirt farming? Well, pull up a chair and I'll tell you. With the new concrete plant, the challenge becomes keeping it fed with both lime and stones.

With no quarry in Chainsaw Valley, the challenge became creating our own. To do it right, you need a lot of ground, a strong tractor and a wide plow in that order.

Then it becomes plowing that same patch of dirt over and over again to get the fieldstone that you'll need for the concrete plant or any other production facility that requires a hefty amount of stone.

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With the right tractor and the right plow, the grind of dirt farming isn't that bad. The door on the tractor is open due to a forecast high of 88 degrees.

In Chainsaw Valley, there's two reasonably-sized plots side-by-side that we purchased last winter (Field 9 and Field 10). We purchased a rock crusher and named it Slate Rock and Gravel Company, in honor of Fred Flintstone's employer.

We've been able to generate slightly over 5,100 liters of stone per plowing of Field 9. Field 10 is currently growing soybeans, so after we harvest that, it will be added to the quarry next door.

We're hoping to double our production by this fall. The plan is to build up a stockpile during the winter and then have a steady flow of concrete bags as a side production to the bottling plant and sawmill.

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Concrete and lumber, the literal building blocks of life.

Speaking of the bottling plant, we've finally run out of snow after having more than 247,000 liters of the powdery stuff at the start of winter. We still have more than 90,000 liters of woodchips as the ratio of snow to woodchips to make water favors the woodchips. So, we're shut down until it snows again.

That leaves us with the concrete plant and the sawmill as our main sources of income, with farming thrown in the mix as well. We're also considering venturing into maple syrup, but that's another decision for a later time.

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A load of stone bound for the concrete plant.

As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
Posts: 249
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2020 11:55 pm
Location: Illinois

Re: Spunky Dogg Farms

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Sunrise on Mammoth Mountain. Strong coffee recommended.

Welcome back, Spunky fans!

As you can tell, the Platinum Expansion has come out and we've got some new toys to play with here at Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry as we continue working on our Oak Hollow Caves Resort atop Mammoth Mountain.

Does the yarder change our operations a bit? Short answer, yes it does. The old way was to fell trees and then transport them to the landing with our crawler loader, which would then load them onto the waiting flatbed for transport down the mountain.

The yarder cuts down on the back-and-forth trips and allows us to keep the crawler loader on the landing and exclusively load trucks. Meanwhile, our little logging dozer, Hank, is in the rigging piling logs for the carriage to hoist to the landing.

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We love our little logging dozer, Hank.

In other Spunky Dogg news, we finally saved up enough money to buy a processor. The Volvo EC250D, which we've nicknamed "Tommy," has been a welcome additional to our arsenal. For those of you wondering how the gender of machinery is determined, if the model name ends in a consonant (a non-vowel letter) it is male.

Machinery with a model name that ends in a vowel (A, E, I, O and U) is female. Don't ask us how this got started, but it's something that's been passed down over time.

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Our new processor, "Tommy," arrives at the landing.

**PLATINUM EXPANSION THOUGHTS**

I was asked by a reader of the blog to share my thoughts on the DLC expansion. I'm enjoying it, but to be honest, I haven't fully explored what it all has to offer yet.

Everybody's on Silverrun Forest right now and figuring that out, while I've remained on Chainsaw Valley and continue to develop that.

One thing that hasn't been talked much about are the placeables that come as part of the expansion. Located under the production tab, you get a shingle mill, barrel mill, paper mill, furniture factory, iron foundry and a few others.

From what I've seen, the placeables have been designed to fit in aesthetically with frontier-leaning maps, which is good for maps like Chainsaw Valley.

For me - and not to use a bad logging pun here - I see the forest through the trees. The DLC moves the needle quite a bit in it obviously introduces winch technology for all platforms.

Once the modding community is able to crack that code and add it to new machines and new mods, I think the future could be very exciting. How about a tracked, self-propelled yarder for all platforms just like in real life? It might be possible.

My guess is by Christmas the first wave of cool mods with the new stuff introduced by the DLC will be out. I'm excited to see what that will be.

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The logs start piling up on the landing.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Dairydeere
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Dairydeere »

Great to hear from you Spunky! I figured the Platinum DLC might bring some new flair to your operation haha.

A little note on the modding side of things: cracking DLC is technically illegal, so everything that modders can do with the DLC is based on what Giants shares with us. I'd love to see them release everything they can to help modders make compatible equipment, but they aren't obligated to release anything, and I'm pretty sure they still haven't released anything for Pumps and Hoses either, which brought a lot of new functionality
Dairy farmer, college student, part-time modder, always looking to drive a tractor

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Happy farming!
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

Dairydeere wrote: Sun Nov 20, 2022 10:26 pm Great to hear from you Spunky! I figured the Platinum DLC might bring some new flair to your operation haha.

A little note on the modding side of things: cracking DLC is technically illegal, so everything that modders can do with the DLC is based on what Giants shares with us. I'd love to see them release everything they can to help modders make compatible equipment, but they aren't obligated to release anything, and I'm pretty sure they still haven't released anything for Pumps and Hoses either, which brought a lot of new functionality
Understood. Thanks for sharing that with me, I'm not a modder, so I don't have much knowledge/insight into that side of things.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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A late-September sunrise in Chainsaw Valley. The start to another day atop Mammoth Mountain. If you look closely to the left, you can see the tower of the concrete plant poking above the trees.

Hello Spunky fans!

It's harvest time in Chainsaw Valley as we approach the end of Year 3 in our adventures. We focused mainly on corn (and a corn cousin) this year and turned in a fairly decent harvest in the valley.

With our three corn fields combined, we managed to come away with 25,144 liters that we sent to the mill to make flour. Our fourth field of sorghum, our smallest among the properties we work, turned in 2,728 liters.

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Chainsaw Valley is beautiful at harvest time.

Elsewhere, we continue to log Mammoth Mountain with the goal of turning it into a tourist destination that we refer to as the Oak Hollow Caves Resort. We made over $112,000 in sold wood alone last month and combined with our concrete sales we've got a good thing going in the valley.

However, a lot of our profit goes to developing the rest of the valley. What started as just a gas station, a sawmill, a farmer's market and an tractor dealership has now grown to include a diner, a concrete plant, a flour mill and now, McCullum Paper Company has begun operations in the valley (more on that in the next update).

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Windshield time during harvest is oddly satisfying.

Stepping away from the virtual reality of the blog for a moment, I've been watching a lot of YouTube streams of people playing on Silverrun Forest. On one hand, it's one of the best maps GIANTS has ever produced, but at the same time I've been enjoying developing Chainsaw Valley, so I'm a bit torn.

I haven't tried the map out personally, but I could see having fun on it. Chainsaw Valley, however, is just such a visually impressive map. Yes, it's primarily a logging map (hence the name), but the way it looks during fall when the trees turn is stunning in the right light.

Are there things I wish were on Chainsaw that are on Silverrun? Of course. Perhaps with future placeables, I can create a sort of Frankenstein of the two maps together. We'll see. I have a feeling the modders might have something to do with that.

That's all for now. As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Lunch break on Mammoth Mountain. We have since traded in that processor for a smaller machine that's better able to navigate the smaller decks and switchback roads on the mountain.

Hello again, Spunky fans!

Time for another update as we are now in the winter months of Year 3 in Chainsaw Valley. Things are going well, we're still logging Mammoth Mountain and will probably be here for a while. The deck, albeit small, is in a pretty good place next to road access and we can get our logs off the mountain fairly easily.

The Valley's newest company, McCallum Paper Company, is now operational and churning out pallets of rolls of paper worth 2,800 individual pieces each. Miller's Sawmill is making planks and Riverview Milling Co. just finished converting our fall harvest into 5,000-liter pallets of flour.

All-in-all, the industry portion of Chainsaw Valley is humming along.

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The first pallet of paper ever produced in Chainsaw Valley.

Sorry for the short update, but we're here and we're still working. As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!

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A cool part of the Platinum Expansion is its production buildings now produce smoke when active.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Another load of logs southbound off Mammoth Mountain.

Hello Spunky Fans,

We are working our way through winter, which has been the snowiest thus far since we've been in Chainsaw Valley. By our estimation, we've collected more than 760,000 liters of snow and we're only halfway through February.

As you can imagine, this has slowed progress considerably on Mammoth Mountain. We've been able to get logs off the mountain when we can, but the days are short and the trip to and from the mill is long.

Elsewhere in the valley, industries continue to pump out paper, kitchen products and planks from the sawmill. We made nearly $200,000 on one load alone at Johnson's Market.

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Loaded up and ready for the market.

Sorry for these shorter updates, but things are relatively quiet during the winter here in the Valley. Spring, however, is right around the corner and that means planting season!

Thanks, as always, for reading and see you up the road!

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Heavy snow has struck Chainsaw Valley, clogging roads and shutting down our logging operations.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
SimulatedFarmer
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by SimulatedFarmer »

Wow! That’s sure a load. It does look like a lot of snow. It’s mu understanding that, along with worse storm activity here in Florida for the next few years, there will, also, be higher than normal snowfall in the north. That, somehow, seems paradoxical.
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Getting the band together to log the Watch Tower Site.

Welcome back Spunky fans!

We just rocketed right on through planting season, didn't we? Oh well, you can yell at me later.

It's actually May of Season 4 in Chainsaw Valley and we've been logging the backside of the Watch Tower Site. There's actually a nice meadow beyond the ridge on the right side of the above screenshot, we just haven't been able to decide what to do with it.

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The noonday sun shines on the wheel loader between trips.

Elsewhere on the farm, our wheat will be ready for harvest in the next month or two. Corn is in the ground and everything has been rolled and fertilized. The yearly cycle begins again.

A new business has also joined the Valley: Northwest Fine Furnishings, a high-end table-and-chairs manufacturer. Northwest has set up shop in a corner of Miller's Sawmill lot, which makes it a short trip taking planks from the mill.

So for all our customers who get their favorite products at Johnson's Market, we'll see you soon!

And for all our readers, we'll see you up the road!
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
Posts: 249
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Finishing up the wheat harvest in Year 4.

Welcome back, Spunky fans!

It's been a hot minute since my last update, but things continue to be rolling along through Year 4 on Chainsaw Valley. Our wheat harvest in July came in at 12,101 liters, which we sent to Riverside Mills to make flour.

Industrial development continues in the Valley as an iron ore seam was discovered down the road from the gravel quarry and a shaft was opened by Carnegie Steel, which has since constructed a steel plant (screenshots of that will come in the next update).

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Drone shot of our combine harvesting wheat.

In other news, we have recently finished our corn harvest that yielded 25,493 liters. That is an increase of 349 liters from last year's harvest, so things are trending up for us despite not a lot of rainfall this year.

As we are now in mid-October, we will start prepping our fields for winter and after that, turn our attention to other projects during the colder months.

As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!

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A view from the cab during wheat harvest.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
SimulatedFarmer
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by SimulatedFarmer »

Great news, Spunky! My husband, in particular, was pleased to see Carnegie taking an interest in the Chainsaw area. I’m sure great strides have been made in the steel industry since the murky, smoky days of his home town’s steel days. Who knows, perhaps there is a chance of a rail industry in Chainsaw Valley one day.
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Fall plowing went smoothly this year.

Welcome back, Spunky fans!

We are now in early winter, despite what the screenshots say. Fall mulching of the leftover stalks in our cornfields was accomplished without incident and all fields have been limed in preparation for planting in the spring.

We continue to keep ourselves busy in other areas, particularly the iron ore mine and the furniture factory. We're averaging one big truckload of products to the market every month.

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Taking a load of products to market.

Steel has become one of the big money makers in the valley, with an average profit of $5,300 per roll.

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The Carnegie Steel plant in Chainsaw Valley.

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One of my favorite shots of the fall season on the farm.
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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Spunky_Dogg
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Re: Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry

Post by Spunky_Dogg »

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Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry in winter.

Hello Spunky fans!

We're back with another update that carries us through winter and the early part of spring. After a nearly-snowless cold season, we have planted our crops (corn, soybeans and barley) for the year with a fourth (wheat) already progressing nicely in our southern fields away from the main farm.

The offseason also saw Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry add another side to the business with the inclusion of produce. Strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, watermelons and melons are now being grown in three separate greenhouses on the main farm.

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The new "produce section" at Spunky Dogg Farms & Forestry.

In other news, we've bought another forest tract just off the highway that will be our project for the year now that the crops are off and running. The landing has been cleared, all the equipment is on-site and the yarder has been set up.

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The ground has been cleared for the landing on our new forest tract.

That's all for now. A short update, I know, but we'll have more soon! As always, thanks for reading and see you up the road!
See you up the road!

- Spunky Dogg Logging
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