Why can't workers be fulltime employees?

[cwattyeso]

Tried Contractor Mod today on an old save game file, it replaced my original character right off the bat with some generic Alex person, then added three other people, Barbara, Chris and David. Found out straight away and annoyingly the mod disables the ability to tab to vehicles, you can only tab between the workers now. On a large map, with a large farm, with vehicles spread all over, having to walk/run across the map with the workers to get to the vehicles I wanted was incredibly annoying. If I opened the map and tried to select a vehicle on the map the option to 'Enter Vehicle' no longer comes up so you can't use that method to access vehicles. When I finally got in a vehicle, I then started doing some work around the farm, was using one of the workers I think Barbara to transport slurry from the BGA back to my farm's storage point. Think when I reached the 15 minute mark for the game to autosave, it completely locked up the game and my PC, which caused me to have to hit the reset button on the PC as couldn't even bring up the task manager to force close the game. So I'm guessing it doesn't play nicely with another mod I am using, as this type of crash is usually mod incompatibility related.

Also if you use any non in-game vehicles or equipment or non-dlc vehicles or equipment, the mod doesn't function quite right, unless you go through quite a few steps and modifications to make the modded vehicles or equipment work with the worker system. So that could possibly be why it's getting low ratings It might be beyond the ability of a lot of people to modify modfiles to add in scripts and code needed to make modded vehicles work with the contractor mod.

I know I won't be enabling it again. I'd sooner have the ability to tab through my vehicles in game then a bunch of gormless looking people all standing around the map spawn point.

[FarmerJimbob]

Thanks for the info. I saw that it replaced tabbing through vehicles and I was ok with that as if I had enough of a workforce I could just put them in the vehicles I was going to use for the current activity - a bit like the park vehicle mod but more dynamic. And I'm guessing you could resurrect your own character by editing the file? But I don't like the sound of game crashes and not playing nicely with other mods. Shame.

[Farming Girl]

Too much like real life !! I think my dad owes me back pay for all the school holidays and then the weekend work once I had my own non-farming job !!.

That being said, wouldn't you owe your mom 9 months back rent?

HA HA HA - nice one !

I would owe over 9 months i was very late, Which as been the story of my life , as far as unpaid labour, i am just glad i didn't pay room and board for all those years at home, a few chores was a small price to pay!

[dapals51]

Just wondering how it works in real life?
Do people have employees in farms or they use paid random people for seasonal work?

How it works in FS19, you can hire people to do some of the work, random noname NPC-s. Also you can take job offers to work for named NPC-s yourself. Only funny part here is that
you can lease or bring your own equipment and getting over paid for the job. But for workers, you just pay as little you can and they cannot bring they own equipment.

Now the contractor mod puts the name on npc-s, so you do not have randbom noname npc-s anymore.

In the USA, there are a couple of ways this is done. This carries depending in farm size and other factors

*****(please note this is from a Midwest producer I cannot speak for the southern regions of the US that grow different crops)****

Family: a family runs the farm and everyone helps run equipment wife and husband, brothers, father and sons, uncle's or grandparents.

Seasonal: (most common) help is hired either in the spring &/or fall. Usually a retired friend or someone with a flexible job. But usually someone you trust. Bigger operations will just hire people on, smaller will be more people the farmer knows as help isn't needed full time

Full time. Some operations have full time help, usually cattle chicken and hog farms that have a need for extra help in addition to there crop ground.

Hope this helps

[cwattyeso]

Another thing I would have liked with this mod would be a refence sheet or something when editing the xml to customise the appearance of the works. It's alright the xml saying pick a hat value between 1-109, but nowhere does it tell me what number relates to what hat on the character screen. Player Appearance and Hairstyles are pretty easy to workout as they are also numbered on the character screen. However the hats are named, so which hat would be 1 and which would be 109?

[Gimli54]

The farm I’ve grown up around (the only land my family farms ourselves is about 70 acres around my grandparents house and the guy who owns the farm they work for let’s ya borrow his equipment to farm it) always had 6-8 full time guys part of the reason this system works is that in the spring when they’re working ground if there’s plenty of sun they can work it fast they don’t usually need help if they do than they’ll call in people they know to work until planting is done so that’s usually when I work with them when they get behind, during the summer they have to water rice which is labor intensive so the full time guys are kept fairly busy during the summer and the fall is occupied with the harvest and sometimes they work some ground in the fall once the fields have been harvested they sometimes bring in extra guys then to run trucks from the fields to the silos and then during the winter the full time guys service equipment to get it ready for next year so in rice country that system works but might now work in other areas

[asyvan]

I like the play style the Contractor Mod brings. It's excellent... if you abolsutely must tab through vehicles then I guess the mod is not for you. For me personally, I love the idea.
I use it with Player Speed and have my walk speed at 3x.

Also, the config section for non-standard vehicles is for passenger riding along only (as far as I can tell).
And the config section for hats etc... just count. No hat is = 0, then FS hat is 1, LS hat is 2, etc... John Deere hat is 46.

[FarmerJimbob]

I really like the idea of the mod but I’ve tried it twice now and had the game crash both times - first time after about 2 hours, second time a bit over an hour. Possibly not inherently this mod but conflict with another but all the other ones play nicely together without ContractorMod so I’ve reverted to that and making use of ParkVehicle mod to limit the amount of tabbing required.

[asyvan]

You could help the developer if you log an issue on his GitHub page.

[cwattyeso]

No hat is = 0, then FS hat is 1, LS hat is 2, etc... John Deere hat is 46.

That's nice but I'd like the mod to come with a simple txt document listing all the hats from 1-109, so that when I'm not in game editing the xml file to configure the mod I can see quickly what hat relates to what number. I don't fancy sitting in game and trying to count the hats myself.

[asyvan]

You are looking for mods served on a silver platter? You can help the developer by actually creating this yourself. Mods are free of charge and developers do this on spare time for all of us to enjoy.

[cwattyeso]

I was contacted by the Mod Author today in response to my first comments on the mod and relating to the crash I suffered yesterday trying to use it. I sadly didn't have access to the log file due to how the game crashed so was unable to send him the log. I did go into game again today however and load the exact same save up and this time the game pretty much crashed instantly. When I loaded in there were only 3 workers plus an Invisible one. I couldn't enter any vehicles. When I opened the developer console in the log the mod was generating loads of Lua Errors. And of course when I tried to exit the game is locked up on saving. Thankfully I was able to Alt+F4 out of the game this time and get back to desktop, I also had a log file for this issue, so was able to send the Mod Author a pastebin of the log.

Once I had restored my Savegame Folder from the Backup Directory as the crash deleted the entire contents of my Savegame5, I restarted the game, loaded into the same save file and map again and this time was able to play with four workers quite fine for a couple of hours. I was able to save and exit the game normally. So I don't know what to say. It does seem to be a bit hit and miss on if and when it wants to works, or maybe as the Author suggested to me it may not be playing nicely with some other mods, which they are currently working to fix. He quoted Vehicle Inspector to me, although I had it downloaded in my mod folder (I download every modhub mod released each day) I have never enabled it on a game or save, so not sure how that would conflict.

[cwattyeso]

You are looking for mods served on a silver platter? You can help the developer by actually creating this yourself. Mods are free of charge and developers do this on spare time for all of us to enjoy.

Mods are free of charge to download, however Mod Authors with mods on the ModHub get paid by Giants based on how many downloads the mod receives. So technically the author does get paid for their work, so I don't think its too much trouble to ask that the mod includes the reference to the hats in the xml.

[yumi]

No hat is = 0, then FS hat is 1, LS hat is 2, etc... John Deere hat is 46.

That's nice but I'd like the mod to come with a simple txt document listing all the hats from 1-109, so that when I'm not in game editing the xml file to configure the mod I can see quickly what hat relates to what number. I don't fancy sitting in game and trying to count the hats myself.

Hello,
The goal is to be able to launch the player customization dialog for each character so it will be easier. It will be part of a future update. I will first fix the crash you encountered.