Farming Simulator 2013

I did consider wether to try and make a Lets Play out of it, but there's no option to farm unicorns...

Frankly this shouldn't work. There's no aim, the early game is boring beyond belief and relies on you mashing the speed up button while shouting at the sky "Why do you hate me?"

Let's get it out of the way now. Yes, you can have bees. From a Gameplay perspective they are essential. Low outlay, high income (hah!) AND ignoring the wider environmental elements that are mashed into your face by this gam... Sorry.

Cereal crops, livestock, spraying, encouragement to develop monoculture. There should be a sub game where you have to stamp on bumble bees and butterflies let alone rely on beehives to top up your meagre earnings.

And breathe.

The sub games are stupid, from the start they demand kit you cant afford for 50% of the missions, for the rest, if you play your cards right, sell some stuff, keep others and sell the secret stash of crops the tutorials don't tell you about you can plant a tractor with a grass mower in the golf club and camp site and rake in cash. Naturally I didn't and tried buying the cheap mowers. Don't. At the start keep two of the useless tractors, fit mowers to them and park them in the golf course (bottom right) and camp site (top right) of the map where the green trailer icons are.

Despite all of that I'm prepared to wrestle the interface, the lack of a decent explanation for anything and a tutorial system that assumes you know what's happening. Because it's the only way outside of the latest racing game I'll get to drive a Lamborghini. They make tractors, who knew? Google is your friend for everything in this game but even the game guides out there are pretty slim.

There is something laid back and relaxing about this in a way that I'm sure real farming isn't. The early game forces you to sit and twiddle your thumbs while you figure everything out. The Mill pays more for Barley? That's nice, where's the mill? Even having driven off on a grand tour of the locale you can still get back in plenty of time to wonder what to do next. At some point you will start to harvest a field and forget to turn off X120 time progression and find that half the crop is ruined as a result.

It's not a game, it's a great, big, aim free, sandbox where you get to drive tractors and combine harvesters around: ( obligatory link to the wurzels)



For that, it's compelling, I want that big field I cant afford, I enjoy running my tractor alongside the combine harvester and I dream of a set up where I can spray cowshit instead of chemicals. The income on anything other than easy will quickly shatter those dreams.

Oh and buy bee houses. It makes no sense but it gets you lots of money to fund your loans and worker payments. I get why so many farmers just go "fuck it" and quit.

I've only seen the videos where the Yogscast guys play it, and based on that, it seems to be a game about disentangling tractors that appear to be trying to mate with each other.

Seriously though, the game itself did look rather dull, and they made it fun by turning it into more of a social experience.

There needs to be a Breach / Rules of Engagement type modular system whereby you grow the crops, then transport them using Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Oh god. Even combing the two, with the truck driving in real time, this would be boring. In the previous version you could just plant fields, now you have to buy them. At prices that would have the French burning sheep at Calais and demanding subsidies were improved.

It's a game with bees in it and it bores me.

My Loon found it relaxing, then again he finds driving trains also relaxing. I have no interest in it from the perspective of ..whee let's drive machinery. I can vaguely understand why folk like it but these are also the same folk who go photo train cars to recreate them explicitly for a game.

To each their own.

I almost bought this game, but couldn't figure out how much time I would actually have to run around in 3rd Person which I don't care for. I wish someone would kickstart SimFarm 2014.

This game does not look boring.

Not at all !



And regarding the song you posted Nellie, that still worked best in Evil Aliens.
(If you look that up, be prepared for lots of violence and definitely NSFW stuff!)

Oh wow there's a bunch of new ones recently.

None. It's pretty much all driving up and down in Straight lines. Very rarely you get off a tractor to buy a field or use a bank ATM.

Having played the game again over the past few days I've decided that without "cheating" the early stage of the game is largely an exercise in frustration.

Farming simulator isn't a farming simulator, it's a sandbox tractor simulator off the back of which you can attach interesting things which let you do stuff.

Presumably because it assumes people want to accumulate money the game gives you very little of it and places very high prices in comparison against new things to attach to your tractor. So while technically you can do lots of different things in the game you're frequently priced several days of real time out of being able to buy the necessary kit you need to do it given your starting resources. At least if you look at the kit you're given and assume you should try and use it to make the money to do stuff.

This time around I simply sold everything but the two decent tractors they give you and bought solar panels and beehives. You can't do anything with them and they give no farming benefit but they're passive money generators. Then I just cranked up the game time to x120 and went to bed. This morning I paid off the loan and bought more solar panels and beehives and left the game running while I go to work. By this evening I should have enough cash to buy some fields, equipment and cows and actually be able to do something interesting.

I dare say there's a config file somewhere you could edit to just crank up the starting cash to the million or so you actually need to get a couple of decent sized fields and the kit necessary to farm them but this seemed a reasonable lazy compromise.

It bugs me somewhat that I've resorted to this and thinking about it I could just spend a few days mowing grass which grows liberally everywhere and dumping it at the golf course which pays for clippings for some reason, but you'd still have to sell everything and max the loan to be able to afford the trailer which collects grass.

There's a mod that adds a small forage wagon for a reasonable price. The building at the farm with hay in it will buy grass and straw, if you back your trailer, or even the little mower, into it.

I usually sell all the stuff I don't need as well except for the big green tractor. I've slightly modified my game by removing all the trees and rocks that are too close to fields. That way the retarded ai doesn't get stuck and you can join smaller fields together by plowing the roads between them. I buy the small field next to the one you start with then join and expand it as much as possible. Once that's planted I invest in the ride on mower, flatbed trailer and the tractor thing with the telescopic arm along with a pallet fork. The money I have left over I invest in sheep. The trailer fully loaded with wool bails returns a nice profit. While waiting for stuff to grow, I usually mow and sell grass. Initially with the ride on at the farm until I have enough cash for the small forage wagon and mower attachment.

Dwarf Fortress has ruined me. I almost found the last posts enticing!

I hadn't realised you could dump grass in the hay barn.

Having raised a pile of cash I then proceeded to waste it buying the wrong tractors. I skipped sheep and went straight to cows which might be a mistake, but I can at least get them to 70 % production on grass and sileage. I might yet sell them all and try sheep instead, but the solar collectors and beehives raise a reasonable amount of background income that I don't feel quite as constrained by everything always seeming a million miles away that I think I'll just plough on, if you'll pardon the pun.

At the beginning sheep are better because they only need grass. Cows are better later on because the milking is automated, the wool bales don't stack unfortunately so you have move them once they reach 100%.

So this is multiplayer? I heard? You can co-OP farm? Someone should form a glorious people's collective!

I was toying with the idea. The only downside is that all the cash raised stays on the server rather than going to individual players though the server owner can dish it out.

If people are interested I'll set a BF server up that can be always online. I played FS11 multiplayer and it is surprisingly good fun.

The people's collective would need centralized capital ownership. And committee meetings. Many commune meetings.

Noooooooo! not more committees! I've installed steam on my server, I have no objection to buying another copy of FS2013 as BF collective farm so that the BF farm is separate to my own career game. I can set it up to generate cash of its own accord and buy stuff that people want or people can log into it as a, vanilla, new game and we can make cash from scratch and, at the point we have all the kit we want, I've certainly no problem with doling out cash that the server makes to those who play on it.

If there's only you and me interested then I'm sure we can sort something out.

Not until the game is $5 :p

I won't buy a copy for the server just yet then. Though by time it drops to $5 it could have meeelions of dollars to buy toys with.

You could take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.

Can we form a sub committee to decide how the executive officer works followed by another meeting to determine how we decide how the executive officer will be chosen?

Of course, but by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major decisions.

So, I cheated even more and just edited the save game file to give me enough cash to buy some decent kit and a few fields.i tried sheep but moving the wool bales just annoyed me. They weight about as much as a paper bag and fly around like one in a breeze, but I'm enjoying raising my cows. I think cows are the way to go, at the beginning their productivity is hampered by your own lack of kit, but they sort of tie everything up together and it's fun going from 10 to 35 to 80 to 100% productivity with them. Plus they give you free fertiliser.

Now I'm enjoying playing, for the most part, I'm starting to eye up the mods.

I've not really found a good resource for laying out which mods are any good and/or most beneficial.

Someone mentioned a no tree mod and I am starting to think I should get that but what else is out there that's possibly a must have?

I'd really like:
Anything that helps you line up your tractor/tool it's towing with the edge of the field
A bigger capacity poo/slurry spreader or a tank you could plonk by the field.
A bigger trailer to stick on the corn chaff harvester