Advice on Time Speed/Seasons Days

[jasonbarron]

Hi everyone. I'm not quite a noob FS22, but pretty close to it. I don't know much about farming (in rl or ingame) or which equipment does what, though I played a bit of FS19 years ago and remember really enjoying it. I bought this game when it released and this is my first time jumping in and trying to figure everything out.

I'm sure a lot of questions will occur to me but the biggest so far is how should I set up my game speed and how many days do I want in a month assuming "seasons" are turned on? I'm not planning on hiring workers or using mods to get AI to work my fields or drive my equipment. I'm all down with experimenting but I really don't have any idea how long it takes to accomplish tasks such as harvesting, plowing, fertilizing etc, and I don't want to gimp myself by having the clock & calendar blaze by too fast and not leave me enough time to take care of my own fields and maybe pull off some contracts.

Assuming I'm playing on a regular sized map and not using AI helpers does "real time" and ten days per month sound like enough time to run a decent sized farm with a lot of either contracts and/or purchased fields and animal pens of my own? I was thinking that would leave me enough time and then if I needed to speed things up I could just sleep when there were no chores left to perform.

Any and all advice appreciated:)

[UncleRico]

I would recommend setting it to three to six days and playing on 1x speed from the sounds of what you’re trying to do. At that point after a year if you need more add more in the winter. If you’re planning on building yourself up from the starter farm that should be more than enough to start. I think you’ll find you want some pressure to complete tasks or the game gets quite dull. If I have too much time just sleep when I’m out of things to do for the day. I think of the sleep function as doing other stuff. Take real life for example if it rains while I’m combining I will fix some stuff and take care of some loose ends but once that’s done I go inside and play with my kids, watch tv, make some food, or any other non farm related task. So in my opinion that’s what the sleep button is, my little farmer person going to take a break. And he earned it too because sometimes I make him stay up like three days in a row haha.

[jasonbarron]

I would recommend setting it to three to six days and playing on 1x speed from the sounds of what you’re trying to do. At that point after a year if you need more add more in the winter. If you’re planning on building yourself up from the starter farm that should be more than enough to start. I think you’ll find you want some pressure to complete tasks or the game gets quite dull. If I have too much time just sleep when I’m out of things to do for the day. I think of the sleep function as doing other stuff. Take real life for example if it rains while I’m combining I will fix some stuff and take care of some loose ends but once that’s done I go inside and play with my kids, watch tv, make some food, or any other non farm related task. So in my opinion that’s what the sleep button is, my little farmer person going to take a break. And he earned it too because sometimes I make him stay up like three days in a row haha.

That's very interesting. I didn't realize that I could change the calendar days once the simulation got rolling. I like that idea, thank you for the advice.

[mydixiewrecked]

Just beware it does not change the days until the next month. Another reason not to get too extreme. If you start on 10 days and realize you only have work for 3, that's 7 days needing wasted until the next month. I start with 3 days at 6x and when I need to slow time down to finish harvest etc, that's when I add a day to the months. There's no perfect combo for all but you'll figure it out. I used to think it was bad if I end up needing to adjust time but like Rico said , the sleeping and speeding up of time is just a way of getting past the aspects of life that would occupy that dead time in game.

[UncleRico]

Just beware it does not change the days until the next month. Another reason not to get too extreme. If you start on 10 days and realize you only have work for 3, that's 7 days needing wasted until the next month. I start with 3 days at 6x and when I need to slow time down to finish harvest etc, that's when I add a day to the months. There's no perfect combo for all but you'll figure it out. I used to think it was bad if I end up needing to adjust time but like Rico said , the sleeping and speeding up of time is just a way of getting past the aspects of life that would occupy that dead time in game.

This is correct. It’s also why I like to do my changes during the part of winter when nothing is growing. That basically negates any negative effects it might have on anything in game.

[Guil]

On single player 1 day per month at 1x is more than enough time for everything. If you think about it, you will have to play a minimum of 15 or 16 hours on the first day and then 24 hours after that to get to the next month. That's a lot of time in FS

[Noraf]

Personally I play with 3x on the timescale and 3 days/month.

And, as for changing days/month. It'll change on season start, not next month, unless it happends to be the season change of season too.

[Reef]

On single player 1 day per month at 1x is more than enough time for everything. If you think about it, you will have to play a minimum of 15 or 16 hours on the first day and then 24 hours after that to get to the next month. That's a lot of time in FS

^ This.

[mydixiewrecked]

Personally I play with 3x on the timescale and 3 days/month.

And, as for changing days/month. It'll change on season start, not next month, unless it happends to be the season change of season too.

3 days hasn't let me down when starting. Still yet to decide if I wanna go up in days and keep time x6 so that the days transition faster with my casual short length play style.

All this time I thought number of days changed each month. Actually just recently had changed and noticed the length didn't change next time I played, but chalked it up to me being groggy when I did it and thought I did something wrong. Now I know it's the game working as intended lol

[jasonbarron]

Thanks for all the input, guys. I played 19 enough a few years back that I kind of had the hang of it at the time, if memory serves I might have even been on a 4x map, but I quit playing due to rl constraints and I'm not a real farmer so I forgot all the details. Thanks again:)

[UncleRico]

On single player 1 day per month at 1x is more than enough time for everything. If you think about it, you will have to play a minimum of 15 or 16 hours on the first day and then 24 hours after that to get to the next month. That's a lot of time in FS

I disagree. I play single player it takes me longer than a day. I’m running 200 acres at the moment. That’s not a very big farm. It also doesn’t allow much room for error if it rains on a day you want to harvest. You can sleep away time but you can’t make extra if things don’t work out.

[Guil]

That's the joys of it. I know people playing on mp servers on 3 day seasons or 12 days over the year and have no trouble doing so. The servers never stop either so it's not like they can play it over a few days like sp

[ValhallSN95]

On my wife and I's game, we run 10x and 28 day months, but when we had the whole family server we run 5x and 4 day months.

We play a lot more when it's cold so in the evenings, we'll clock 5 or 6 hours, and on the weekends it ain't nothing for us to get 15-16 hours a day, once spring hits, it'll drop to 3-4 hours in the evenings (if at all) and 8-10 hours over the whole weekend (if at all).

That's what we like about FS, it's all about how you want to play it.

[NewHollandLegend]

Real time speed and one day months is all you really need, if you’re doing all your tasks yourself i’d suggest doing 2-3 day months on 1x.
If you play religiously and don’t have a job or anything better to do I’d suggest 28 day months on 3x speed.

[LittleWatt]

This is really up to you. How do YOU play the game? I run a 2 day month with Precision Farming. I don’t want to miss a chance to get a full harvest, and I do a lot of the work myself. I also use an adjustable time speed related to weather conditions, time of year, etc.

I suggest playing around with time speed and days. If you do all the work, you might need more days. If you hire out workers, maybe fewer days. Other factors are animals and productions. Horses take time, chickens don’t. Precision Farming has rules to follow, while regular doesn’t have as many. More rules equals more time.

There’s no right or wrong answer here.