Seasons mod (op updated re: bug reports)

[Rahkiin]

Guys, not sure where to post this, so here I will. Would it be possible for you guys to put in the UI the number of animals you have in your pen (unless I miss something). Keeping the count of the number of animals we have within a pen is a serious headache. If the info is already there please let me know where

Aye, we made a new screen for the animals in the next update with a ton more info and lists that are not as long.

[BiggoB]

hi,

i'm using beta build 28 at the moment. still getting used to the new screen but way better then scrolling and i see very quick which animal needs attention.

thanks a lot for the new screen!

[JohnDeere77]

Now my suffolk (sheep), female gender, has reached a weight of 120kg. Thats much! And in addition, some of them are giving birth on the last day of winter.

(No beta-versions, no script-mods except GC, playing sp at County Line)

[Frag]

Wow, just saw on github that you added snow contract! This is actually something I wanted to jump in soon and start implementing based on your mod and Giant API. The fact you have this built in is really good news. Winters are tough on money in that game and quite "long" since there is nothing to do. Snow contract is the solution to this. Nice move.

It brings me few questions:

1. Any words on how the new snow contract system works? I am really curious!

2. I am currently playing on "Old Stream Farm" map, which support season. I noticed that even though it snows many days in a row, the snow never accumulate more than I would say 10 cm. Is there a constant that I can set in a LUA or XML file somewhere to raise that snow cover height limit? Any documentation to set this up, did not really figured it out while looking at the manual.

3. Talking about contracts, could you guys make those a bit more lucrative? I actually saw that complaint a lot on the different forums. Bailing a huge field for 6k is really not worth it considering the effort needed. I commonly notice that the contract rewards are not worth the effort (compared to the money you generate when you do it for yourself).

Thanks, again great mod.

[Rahkiin]

Wow, just saw on github that you added snow contract! This is actually something I wanted to jump in soon and start implementing based on your mod and Giant API. The fact you have this built in is really good news. Winters are tough on money in that game and quite "long" since there is nothing to do. Snow contract is the solution to this. Nice move.

It brings me few questions:

1. Any words on how the new snow contract system works? I am really curious!

2. I am currently playing on "Old Stream Farm" map, which support season. I noticed that even though it snows many days in a row, the snow never accumulate more than I would say 10 cm. Is there a constant that I can set in a LUA or XML file somewhere to raise that snow cover height limit? Any documentation to set this up, did not really figured it out while looking at the manual.

3. Talking about contracts, could you guys make those a bit more lucrative? I actually saw that complaint a lot on the different forums. Bailing a huge field for 6k is really not worth it considering the effort needed. I commonly notice that the contract rewards are not worth the effort (compared to the money you generate when you do it for yourself).

Thanks, again great mod.

This is WIP. But it will need a map update.

We already increase income for baling missions with Seasons. Anyways, if contracts earn the same or more as doing it yourself but without the risk and cost of vehicles... then what's the point of ever doing something other than contracts? I initially based all contract income on real life numbers per area, and those were far lower. (think 5x lower)

[cwattyeso]

Downloaded and installed the Beta Build of Seasons today. The new Animal Menu is very welcome, although it did take me a while to find it, as I kept going into the main game menu and to the animal screen and not seeing any difference. Had no idea it had been added into the Seasons Menu, until I went in there to check the weather forecast.



One thing however that is a bit of concern since switching to this Beta Build is how drastically the amount of food the animals are saying they require for the year has increased. The Cows for example are now saying they require over a million litres. Also all the animals seem to drastically drain their food and water in this build to the point we're having to spend time every single day in game going round filling them up. In the current Release Build when you fill the animals food and water it lasts a couple of game days before you need to interact with them again, however in this Beta Build they require way more attention, to the point we're spending more times in a session dealing with the animals then we are now doing fieldwork. So that may need a bit of a tweak and balancing before going full ModHub Release with this update.

[Frag]

Nice, I like that new screen! Cannot wait to use it.

[Rahkiin]

... having to spend time every single day in game going round filling them up ...

Welcome to farming

[cwattyeso]

... having to spend time every single day in game going round filling them up ...

Welcome to farming

Yeah but there needs to be a balance, the animals should not be consuming 100,000 litres of food and water every single day. They certainly don't in the Current ModHub version of Seasons. The Beta seems to really ramp up how fast they are consuming stuff, and sadly not with the bonus that their 'Production' is increased. Chickens still only lay a handful of eggs a year, Sheep still produce only a pallet of wool, Cows still not producing a single litre of milk after 4 years in game. So the cost of animals and maintaining them is drastically skyrocketed in the beta, and the return for selling products is not offsetting those costs, because we're not getting the products to sell.

If animal food/water/straw consumption has been jacked up in the Beta, perhaps you also need to jack up the storage capacity of the troughs and stuff so we can provide them with enough material to satisfy them for a few days, so we can go back and focus on the important stuff which is getting the fieldwork done, crops planted, fertilised, harvested etc, which let's face it if we don't do that then the animals won't have the food and stuff they need anyway.

[Rahkiin]

1) This is beta
2) We will look into it
3) You have too many animals for a single farmer to handle.
4) Wool production is actually higher than real life

The number 1 complain about Seasons has always been 'there is not enough to do in the game'. We limited the trough capacity to 2 days of food to be closer to real life. This will also give more to do every day. If your cows need 1mio liters of food but 100k per day I think you're running on a 3 day season setup? That will be hard as you'll be pressured for time. Try changing it to 6 or 9 days. Start every day feeding the animals (less than 100k liters, so less trailers needed), and then do field work.

You can't compare Seasons to vanilla, its quite a different game. Different set up, different constraints, different way of playing it. We don't balance our mod towards vanilla, but we do try to keep it playable and fun. We do think that having a hard time managing 1255 animals on your own is not unbalanced.

[cwattyeso]

I'm playing Multiplayer, 6 Day Seasons and the consensus is with the Beta, the animals are taking too much of the players' time and becoming too much of a distraction away from the important field work, which on a 4x Map requires a great deal of time as well, especially as we're now up to 16 fields on the County Lines Map. The fact as well that in 3 Full Years the Chickens have only produced 2 Pallets of Eggs, compared to how much Food and Water they have consumed means we're losing money hand over fist on them. The Sheep only making one pallet of wool so far, again with the amount of Grass/Hay and Water they are consuming each year is making them unsustainable. The Cows we've actually decided today to get rid of, they require way to much food/water and the fact as I say in 4 years we haven't got a single drop of milk from thems, means we have had zero return from them.

I like the new Seasons Animal Menu and a lot of the big fixes that have been done, however certainly for playing with animals the beta actually makes animals more of a nuisance, so for that reason players have asked me today if I'd remove the Beta from the server and go back to the original version where the animals were something nice to distract you if you were bored and hadn't got much to do, as opposed to now where they are taking over the whole gameplay aspect and all your time.

I had added mods like Animal Pen Extension to help with the Water side of things, and save players having to make many journeys to fill the very low capacity tankers in the game when animals now require nearly 200K Lites of water a day, to try and help out.

In single player it's a different story and I'd say I hadn't noticed the animals excessive demands as much as having been playing 9 Day Seasons in Single Player, but also use other quality of life mods life Animal Worker alongside Animal Pen Extension to take care of some of the animals' other daily chores, so the only aspect I have to do is give them food, the straw/cleaning etc is all taken care of for me for a cost each day in hiring the worker. I have however started a Career on Lone Oak, where I'm playing 3 day Seasons as I'm streaming it, so would be tempted as an experiment to switch that to the Beta to see what impact the different seasons length does have.

The other option of course for me and my server could be to open up the Animals.xml file in the Beta Version and reset all the animals input values to that of the release version. That way we keep all the good stuff from the beta like the bug fixes and the new menu and lose some of the negative aspects implemented in the Beta.

[Rahkiin]

You can place a waterpump next to the trough to auto-fill the water.

As I said, we'll look into the balancing.

EDIT: the eggs, wool and milk is very likely a conflict because this is not what our numbers say or what we have observed.

A sheep produces 90-240 liters of wool per year. (Depending on breed). For 80 sheep that is 7200-19200 liters, or about 7 to 19 pallets.
Chicken produce 25-30 liters of eggs per year. For 400 chicken thats 10000-12000 liter, or 100-120 boxes. (15000-18000$)

Your Holstein produce 40 liters per real life day, so 12000 liters per animal per year (2 months dry). with 175 cows thats 2.1 million liters. If they all give milk, of course. Milk is around 70c per liter. That is 1.47 million $ income per year. Without selling any cows.

I don't know why you're not seeing these numbers, but in other cases where these were going wrong, there was a mod conflict. Do you have a GEO or a map that has an animals.xml?

[cwattyeso]

Map I'm playing is the County Lines 4x Map located here: http://americaneaglesmodding.com/index. ... ;down=1788 and I've checked that maps zip file with a fine tooth comb, there is no animals.xml in there that could be conflicting with seasons.

The Geo we are using is the US Midwest one made by yourselves and downloaded from here: https://www.farming-simulator.com/mod.p ... tle=fs2019
So again don't see anything in that that should effect the animals over the main Season's Mod's animal.xml

The only other thing I can think of, is that we did in Year 2 of the game, suffer that bug where Season's wouldn't advance from the last day of Autumn to Winter, and would completely lockup and crash the game and server when trying to advance. To fix that at that time I briefly removed Seasons and the GEO we were using then which was the Warm Lands one, and then started the server, went in game, saved and exited. Then I re-added Seasons and this time your US Midwest Geo, started the server again and loading in. Obviously it jumped us from Autumn to Day 1 of Spring, but we were at least able to continue then. We've then not had any issues since, and as say have now played through years 3 and 4, now in Late Winter Year 4. So not sure if that bug had maybe broken or effected the animals. However I have tried selling off all the animals, advancing a day in game, and then buying them again to see if new animals would jump start the production, but that's not fixed things it seems.

I did wonder if the low Sheep and Cow Production was because they are modded animal pens built into the map, but the Chicken Pen is a 100% Giants Default Large Pen so not sure why they would output so few pallets of eggs. Although their production does seem a little higher after I sold off the old stock of Chickens following the game crash bug and have bought new ones.

[Rahkiin]

Saving the game without Seasons active makes animals behave odd because they all become as-if newly bought. I've seen weird output on that before.

[Frag]

About the animals, for sure they need to bring back money in the end. If not, then nobody would breed them. Even in the original game, (and season 1.0.1) I got rid of all my chicken since there is mostly no revenue out of them if you buy the food. So or the food is too expensive, or the chicken/eggs are not popping out quick enough. I do agree with both of you that we need:

1. Realism, as long as it keeps the game interesting.
2. Money, as long as it is not completely killing the realism and fun.

Unfortunately, keeping this balanced is not that obvious so you are both right.

See it that way. If someone would like to have animals and only buy food (do not want to grow it), they should still do money. I am no farmer, but I have two in my family and both raised Holstein without growing hay. Both farms were very profitable. Briefly, a player who only like to breed animals should be able to live well from it. And a player who decide to grow the animal's food as well should benefit from it a lot more from the monetary point of view.

So to test it out. Put a pen full of cow and just buy all the necessary hay, silage, straws ...and in the end ... you should see profit out of it, even though you are not cultivating the food.

Just food for thought ... I am not expert in any way. Just my vision of things. Also ... about realism ... real life is not that fun and tons of people are in debt, which is far from cool. The real economy is very tough, it does not mean that we want this in a game. Also the price of the machinery is extremely high. It would be fun for someone who is interested in breeding animal only to be able to afford it at some point.