- Get a better overview of what the income and costs are for dealing only with our own stuff. In theory we could do that with calculations while contracting, but skipping contracting simplifies tracking it and the result will be easily viewable in that years accounting numbers.
- See if it's more fun to just deal with own stuff. While we will certainly make a lot less cash, we will be using far less real time to play that year, so we may find it more rewarding to play faster.
While not having that much to do, we will use the opportunity to gather extra statistics to get a better overview of actual income and expenses. Income is easy, as all income is through explicit selling of goods, but tracking the expenses to the correct income sources is difficult. So what do we want to find out?
- The chicken pen should be fairly easy to figure out. The forklift and trailer in there will only be used in chicken pen, so we can just track total usage of those for the year. Other than that, we just need to track the total number of eggs we get, and the total amount of barley we feed them. (We assume they eat the same of either barley or wheat, and as wheat has slightly higher sell price, giving them barley sounds best). The chicken pen is full. All chickens should be old enough to lay eggs, and none should be so old they die during the year.
- The cows are a more complex story. We have already looked at manure and tried to figure out how much we get, and give it a value based on cost of alternative fertilizer. Tracking how many cows we have at any point in time that is actually giving milk is tricky. And tracking exact amount of food and bedding is also a bit more than for chickens but certainly doable. We need to give bales a fitting value, and the correct measure sounds to be the income we'd expect to get from a field if we didn't need bales. Thus, likely we had sown something else and sold something that is worth more than the bales we ended up producing.
- Then it is field income. Here we will still have skewed numbers. We haven't worked the same fields perfectly 3 years in a row, so the crop rotation bonus will not be the same across the entire field. This will make calculated yield numbers incorrect. We'll do as best we can to track the numbers though. Hopefully they will get more correct later on. But apart from the yield and actual sell price we manage to get, we'd also like to check how much expenses needs to be tracked with it. Fuel and maintenance costs, and seed and fertilizer usage.
- Our tractors cost different maintenance, and use different amount of fuel. When fertilizing, some tractors might not be able to keep full speed up a hill, so we may use extra fertilizer. Try to do job with different tractors to measure differences. Especially fertilizing that we need to do multiple times.
If we're careful about tracking numbers, I hope we will get good values we can use to estimate how much expenses to track here and there. We'll leave our fields as is after harvesting, to track all preparations of the field in the same year as we get the income.
We're considering writing something that digs data out of savegame, and save the game between all jobs, so we can track data like numbers of hectares worked and operation hours added to vehicles and gear. If we don't do that, we'll need to manually track operating hours, or repair/refuel often to track usage with the task using it.