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Currently on Farming Simulator 17 this series of games picks up where SimFarm left off in the farming game arena, rather than the Stardew Valley style picking up where Harvest Moon left off. If you enjoy the farming parts of Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc, and want a game just about that, and specifically about modern mechanized farming, well this is the series for you! From the steam store listing for FS17:  quote:Take on the role of a modern farmer in Farming Simulator 17! Explore farming possibilities in a new North American environment. Drive over 250 farming vehicles and equipment from over 75 manufacturers, including new brands such as Challenger, Fendt, Valtra or Massey Ferguson. More impressive than all that is that with mod support (even on consoles!) there's options for playing with 50s tech, 70s tech, fantastical post-apoc tractors, as well as vast selection of modern equipment. These games are very light on the sim elements; no processing soil samples or mixing your own fertilizer, although mods to make various aspects arbitrarily technical also exist because of course they do. The basic gameplay is that you do stuff to get money to buy equipment and land with which to do more stuff. Stuff to do ranges from animal husbandry, traditional row crop agriculture, alternative energy via wood chips or silage, lumberjacking, beekeeping, renewable energy via solar/wind, and various mods add in entire fabrication chains as well as additional crops and animals and buildings. I'll flesh this out if there's more goons spergy enough to play this than just me, but here's some general info on what all machines you can expect to play with:  Tractors - Varying in horsepower and thus the PTO-driven implements they can use, tractors are the most common farm vehicle and can, with the right implement, deal with almost any farming task.  Harvesters - From self-propelled combine harvesters to forage/chopper harvesters to tractor implement harvesters, the point of a harvester is to turn a live plant into something salable.  Plows - Plows accomplish two main purposes; they define field dimensions (the area that is plowed is "a field") and as an option in FS17, fields can require periodic (every 3rd harvest) plowing to achieve full productivity.  Cultivators - Cultivators can't define new fields and most don't address the need for periodic plowing, but in between a harvest and a sowing, the ground must be either plowed or cultivated to prepare it for sowing, and cultivators are typically faster, more efficient, larger, and require less powerful tractors than comparable plows.  Sowers - Sowing machines or planters put seeds into cultivated or plowed ground so that the seeds will grow up into plants to be harvested. Sowers that cultivate at the same time are available, as are sowers with integrated fertilization application.  Tippers/Trailers - Once harvested, put your crops into a special kind of trailer called a "tipper" (because it can tip to unload) to transport them to storage, transport or sale.  Forage Wagons/Trailers - Forage trailers pick up loose material from the ground like cut grass, hay or straw and store it in a convenient trailer for storage, transport or sale.  Trucks & Dollies - Trailers come in a variety of formats, some are meant to be hauled by tractors, others by pickup trucks, some by special goose-neck attachments, and some via the traditional 5th-wheel semi-tractor-trailer combination vehicle. A dolly is a small trailer with a 5th-wheel arrangement to facilitate transport of a semi-trailer by a vehicle that does not possess a proper 5th wheel of its own, like a tractor or a pickup truck. Semi trucks are large and powerful trucks capable of hauling very large trailers to transport a large amount in a single trip.  Lumber equipment - chainsaws, buncher-fellers, log transport trailers, log grapple loaders, and a variety of other equipment is available to facilitate turning trees into money via the process of cutting them down and into manageable pieces, which are then hauled to a lumbermill for sale.  Loaders - Front end loaders for tractors, wheel loaders, telehandlers, skid steers, and forklifts are just some of machines are available for moving stuff from point a to point b. Pallets of raw materials need to be taken to sale points, trimmed logs need transporting to a lumber mill for sale, manure needs shoveling into green houses, spreaders, or storage. If it needs to be picked up and put Over There, loaders do the job.  Windrowers - a windrow is a long narrow pile, usually of straw, hay or cut grass. Windrowers rake up material in a large area into a nice windrow along their central axis for easy collection later.  Tedders - cut grass can be run over with a tedder to be turned and dried into hay.  Balers - balers take loose material on the ground such as straw, hay or cut grass and store it in convenient bales for easy transport, or in the case of hay bales, wrapping to ferment into silage. Strictly speaking, balers don't accomplish anything a forage wagon couldn't, and are typically heavier, require more powerful tractors to operate, and are otherwise larger hassles than they are perhaps worth. Fertilization: fields in FS17 can (via the options menu) be set to the FS15 standard of one-and-done fertilization (a field is either fertilized or not) or to the new 3-level system. On the 3-level system a new fertilization method can't be applied until the field has been worked in some way since the previous one. For example, if a freshly harvested field has manure spread on it, that will give it 1 level of fertilization, if it is then cultivated with a combination cultivator-slurry-sprayer, that will advance the field's state to cultivated and 2 levels of fertilization. A third pass with a combination sower-fertilizer would achieve maximum output. There are many options for fertilization: Manure: Good old animal poo poo. If you raise animals on your farm, this is already produced for free by cows or pigs provided with straw bedding. Manure is cheap, even if purchased rather than using free manure and can be applied to a large area by a fairly low-power spreader. Slurry: The liquid form of manure, also produced as a by-product when hay, grass or chaff is fermented into silage. Slurry is cheap, even if purchased rather than using free slurry, and can be applied to a large area by a fairly low-power sprayer. An added benefit of slurry is that combination cultivator-slurry spreaders exist, allowing simultaneous cultivation and fertilization of a field Fertilizer: Solid CHEMICALS. Synthetic fertilizer is expensive (although it's still cost effective to use) and is easily applied to a large area by very low-power machinery. The only real reason to avoid using fertilizer is cost, or if you are RP'ing organic ag. Spray: Liquid CHEMICALS. Synthetic sprays are expensive (although still cost effective to use) and easily applied to a large area by very low-power machinery. The only real reason to avoid using spray is cost, or if you are RP'ing organic ag. Weeding: Mechanical weeders grant a level of fertilization to a field, and as purely mechanical devices, achieve such with 0 input cost, making them somehow even more cost effective than using literally free animal poo poo. The downside to weeders is they can only be used on fields with very immature crops (but that have already sprouted) making this the only real time-limited option. Green Manure: A final option is to grow some kind of crop on the field and then plow/cultivate that crop right under to fertilize the next one. Oilseed Radish is available for this purpose specifically, although any crop will do. The radishes are the cheapest option, however, and have no other real use besides green manuring. Notably a combination weeder-sower exists that can plant oilseed radish, allowing a completely organic option with no inputs (organic or synthetic) for achieving full fertilization; mechanical weeding of the immature oilseed radish for 1 fertilizer level, followed by plowing/cultivating the oilseed radishes for another level of fertilization, and then mechanically weeding the intended crop once it has reached sprout stage. For extreme penny-pinchers, the combo radish sower/mechanical weeder provides a full-output farming methodology. If you find this all rather confusing, here's what I do and how I do it: 1. Harvest/plow field (if needed) 2. Spread Manure 3. Combo cultivator-sower 4. Spread Slurry 5. When crop is sprouted and immature, mechanical weeder. Since step 5 is time-sensitive and can be missed, I keep a fert spreader around just in case I mess up and miss my time window for mechanical weeding; it is still better to achieve all three levels of fertilization than to wince at the price of fertilizer instead!
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Jul 5, 2017 08:09
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| # ? May 6, 2024 11:01 |
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I don't remember how I got into this but this is my ultimate secret video-game vice. It's stupid relaxing and I don't loving understand why I like it so much. I think it's appealing to me because you usually start with not a lot of equipment/money and you have a very real sense of progression for the work you do. Start with some lovely Russian tractor that has trouble getting up hills or running a mower and end up with a fleet of high-horsepower monstrosities that pull semi-trailers full of logs or 30-foot wide plows. Oh and the forestry is one of the coolest silly things I've ever done in a video game.
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Jul 5, 2017 08:30
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As a start to compiling a list of useful mods that aren't in the in-game browser, Rattlesnake Valley is definitely the highest-quality map I've found, by far. Author somethingonmyshoe outdid the pack-in maps Goldcrest and Sosnovka, which to my knowledge is something no FS15 map mod managed. Apologies for gushing on this, but it really is a loving masterpiece of a map. If you find the 4x maps are too large for your liking, Turfway is a high quality 1x map. Turfway doesn't have as much attention to detail and realistic terrain, but is still a standout for 1x size maps. chairface fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Jul 5, 2017 |
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Jul 5, 2017 09:16
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