GIANTS Software - Forum

NateS wrote:

masterplan wrote:

erict43 wrote:Fast = 4-hour growth cycles
Normal = 8-hour cycles
Slow = 24-hour cycles

I have read claims that growth is suspended when doing missions, so time spent in missions may shift the times of the growth cycles, but I have not confirmed this myself.

I'm interested in the slow mode:
Day 1: seeding
Day 2: 1st gowth stage
Day 3: 2nd gowth stage
Day 4: 3rd gowth stage (darkest green)
Day 5: ready to harvest

Am I correct?

I did attempt this. It works, however, you are incurring 5 days work of running costs for each harvest cycle. For example, your starting combine accrues more than $10,000 in maintenance costs before you use it

The alternative that I found to work best for me is this:
Use fast growth but play in real time. Fast forward the evenings and start working around 5:30am. The basic idea is pretend every 2 hrs is a month. January is midnight to 2am. Feb 2-4, Mar 4-6 etc.

Has anyone else come up with other ways to simulate seasons?

IRL our equipment cost us whether were using it, or its sitting in the barn collecting dust,lol. So playing on slow is more realistic than on the other speeds. Not that I fault anyone for how they play, wether you want to emulate what us real farmers do, or you just want to play around. Also game doesnt account for taxes, so thats something to take into account. I wish they would add seasons in, the game, and days you wanted to skip you could just skip ahead if all you want to do is plant and harvest, maybe FS19 we will finally get a calender and seasons.

Also growth is suspended when doing missions. To tell when your doing a mission just hit ESC, and cycle thru the pages, till you get to settings, and you will see growth is turned off while your in the mission.

NateS wrote:

masterplan wrote:

erict43 wrote:Fast = 4-hour growth cycles
Normal = 8-hour cycles
Slow = 24-hour cycles

I have read claims that growth is suspended when doing missions, so time spent in missions may shift the times of the growth cycles, but I have not confirmed this myself.

I'm interested in the slow mode:
Day 1: seeding
Day 2: 1st gowth stage
Day 3: 2nd gowth stage
Day 4: 3rd gowth stage (darkest green)
Day 5: ready to harvest

Am I correct?

I did attempt this. It works, however, you are incurring 5 days work of running costs for each harvest cycle. For example, your starting combine accrues more than $10,000 in maintenance costs before you use it

The alternative that I found to work best for me is this:
Use fast growth but play in real time. Fast forward the evenings and start working around 5:30am. The basic idea is pretend every 2 hrs is a month. January is midnight to 2am. Feb 2-4, Mar 4-6 etc.

Has anyone else come up with other ways to simulate seasons?

Running costs are not an issue for me, I've got many cows and quite a few greenhouses to more than cover for it. I've got a big farm and even on normal and I don't have time for anything except seed - fertilise - harvest. It's a bit better on slow, I have a bit of time to do other stuff like tending for my animals. Yet some ready to harvest fields must wait several hours.

masterplan wrote:

NateS wrote:

masterplan wrote:
I'm interested in the slow mode:
Day 1: seeding
Day 2: 1st gowth stage
Day 3: 2nd gowth stage
Day 4: 3rd gowth stage (darkest green)
Day 5: ready to harvest

Am I correct?

I did attempt this. It works, however, you are incurring 5 days work of running costs for each harvest cycle. For example, your starting combine accrues more than $10,000 in maintenance costs before you use it

The alternative that I found to work best for me is this:
Use fast growth but play in real time. Fast forward the evenings and start working around 5:30am. The basic idea is pretend every 2 hrs is a month. January is midnight to 2am. Feb 2-4, Mar 4-6 etc.

Has anyone else come up with other ways to simulate seasons?

Running costs are not an issue for me, I've got many cows and quite a few greenhouses to more than cover for it. I've got a big farm and even on normal and I don't have time for anything except seed - fertilise - harvest. It's a bit better on slow, I have a bit of time to do other stuff like tending for my animals. Yet some ready to harvest fields must wait several hours.

Right. Once you have enough animals or greenhouses or other daily income to offset your running costs, that is a good time to switch to slow growth.

erict43 wrote: Right. Once you have enough animals or greenhouses or other daily income to offset your running costs, that is a good time to switch to slow growth.

Definitelly. I used my 1 million from gold nuggets to buy another 200 cows, so now I have more than 400 and with them and 7 greenhouses, my net daily surplus is approx. 80 000.

I always end my working days around 7pm or a little later if I'm finishing a job. I never work through the night, just start again 5 or 6 am next day. I usually just stick with normal growth. Any talk of realism is pointless when you are arguing between crops being fully grown in 1 day, 3 days or 5 days or whatever. It's all the same really unless you are so hardcore you do a 365-day rotation and don't own any equipment or animals!

Good news certain skilled modders are currently working on a season mod

erict43 wrote: I have read claims that growth is suspended when doing missions, so time spent in missions may shift the times of the growth cycles, but I have not confirmed this myself.

Everything gets suspended when you do missions. The time doesn't change. I don't think it affects your growth cycle in any way as far as the in game clock is concerned. Your crops don't grow but they do stay on schedule if that makes any sense. Essentially when you do a mission it pauses the game outside of that mission. Kind of cool but I typically do the missions at night time and it would be cool if when I got done with the missions it could be daytime or early morning. It really makes the night drag on.

glamdring27 wrote:I always end my working days around 7pm or a little later if I'm finishing a job. I never work through the night, just start again 5 or 6 am next day. I usually just stick with normal growth. Any talk of realism is pointless when you are arguing between crops being fully grown in 1 day, 3 days or 5 days or whatever. It's all the same really unless you are so hardcore you do a 365-day rotation and don't own any equipment or animals!

I do the same, perhaps I end a bit more late. Anyway I have my fields phased, so that different big fields or groups of small fields have a different stage at any time. I own a lot of fields and I don't want them all ready to harvest at the same time. This would happen if I skipped the night on normal plant grow.

And speaking of which, I think I might even turn the plant growth off for the night as even when I play on real-time, it's getting hard for me to do all the things I need / want before the field-stage changes.

Matt4president16 wrote:

erict43 wrote: I have read claims that growth is suspended when doing missions, so time spent in missions may shift the times of the growth cycles, but I have not confirmed this myself.

Everything gets suspended when you do missions. The time doesn't change. I don't think it affects your growth cycle in any way as far as the in game clock is concerned. Your crops don't grow but they do stay on schedule if that makes any sense. Essentially when you do a mission it pauses the game outside of that mission. Kind of cool but I typically do the missions at night time and it would be cool if when I got done with the missions it could be daytime or early morning. It really makes the night drag on.

I start my ai before I do a mission. the ai works maybe plowing the field and might be still plowing when I finish the mission but like you say, the time doesn't change in the game. I haven't figured out if I can get more work out of the ai on an hourly basis yet. that might be practical??? chas

It seems like the AI do get work done during a mission, so I don't think the game pauses completely, but I have noticed the growth cycles shift when I do some missions. I've also noticed that harvesters will not unload during missions. I had a harvester going with the AI, with a Courseplay helper unloading, and during the mission I could see it go up to 100% with Inspector. It stayed at 100% until the mission was over, and then immediately started unloading.

Matt4president16 wrote:

erict43 wrote: I have read claims that growth is suspended when doing missions, so time spent in missions may shift the times of the growth cycles, but I have not confirmed this myself.

Everything gets suspended when you do missions. The time doesn't change. I don't think it affects your growth cycle in any way as far as the in game clock is concerned. Your crops don't grow but they do stay on schedule if that makes any sense. Essentially when you do a mission it pauses the game outside of that mission. Kind of cool but I typically do the missions at night time and it would be cool if when I got done with the missions it could be daytime or early morning. It really makes the night drag on.

Time does carry on when doing missions but only moves at real time but you can change the timescale speed for the outside world and crop growth is off so it's pointless changing the timescale. Hopefully in some future patch or update giants will allow us to put Plant Growth on when doing missions .... PLEaaaaseeeee Giants

Hi,

one growing stage at normal is 6h an 40min. At slow it is 13h 20 min.

BUT there is a time limit, when you can seed and get the next stage at the next change.

Let me explain that a bit different.

The growing stage changes are fixed. Every 6h20min (normal) or 13h20min (slow) you get the next one. You can seed in between this changes and get the next stage at the next change, if you don't get to close to it. The time limit there is 1h in normal or 2h at slow.

Example: ´grow stage changes would be at 00:00 -> 6:40 -> 13:20 and so on...

if you seed now at at 1:00 you get the first stage at 6:40. if you seed at 5:00 you get the next at 6:40 (still in the 1h time limit), if you seed at 6:00 you don't get the next one at 6:40 (time limit) you have to wait till the next one at 13:20.

Hope that makes it clear.

Martin, who thinks that maybe he should do a video tuorial about that.

edit: not 5:40 on normal- >6:40

Motoventurer wrote:Hi,

one growing stage at normal is 6h an 40min. At slow it is 13h 20 min.

BUT there is a time limit, when you can seed and get the next stage at the next change.

Let me explain that a bit different.

The growing stage changes are fixed. Every 6h20min (normal) or 13h20min (slow) you get the next one. You can seed in between this changes and get the next stage at the next change, if you don't get to close to it. The time limit there is 1h in normal or 2h at slow.

Example: ´grow stage changes would be at 00:00 -> 6:40 -> 13:20 and so on...

if you seed now at at 1:00 you get the first stage at 6:40. if you seed at 5:00 you get the next at 6:40 (still in the 1h time limit), if you seed at 6:00 you don't get the next one at 6:40 (time limit) you have to wait till the next one at 13:20.

Hope that makes it clear.

Martin, who thinks that maybe he should do a video tuorial about that.

edit: not 5:40 on normal- >6:40

Can you tell us how you determined these growth times? I was pretty confident on 8 and 24 hours based on research in FS15, and I didn't think it had changed in FS17.

erict43 wrote:Can you tell us how you determined these growth times? I was pretty confident on 8 and 24 hours based on research in FS15, and I didn't think it had changed in FS17.

Yes I can. First you plant a lot of small streches every ten minutes (seeding -> fast forward -> seeding ...)



Then you have an idea how long and when the grow stages are.

By seeding in a timeframe before a grow stage change I determined the time limit.



Then you do that again for the next growing speed



Then you read here different opinions and do it again to check your findings



Martin
edit: please note that I experienced that the changes can vary about 1-3 minutes. looks like when the game has to compute a lot at this time it can take a bit longer. It might increase with the time acceleration

Excellent research! Can you do a bit more and find out exactly what effect missions have on growth?