Farming Simulator 22: This time it's seasonal

Games
1

I’ve played it for a good few hours now, though I’m still very much in the opening stages. Early impressions are fairly good, especially since these games tend to come in pretty hot. It should be amazing in six months to a year once community mods and maps are out.

AI workers are as expected pretty janky and can’t do some of the more sophisticated stuff you can do with Courseplay, but it’s still such a godsend to be able to just send a tractor somewhere without having to do it yourself, or to have a load of crops be dropped off at a sell point. And it’s all built into the UI, albeit with some of the usual Giants wonkiness.

Seasons alone is a huge shake-up from previous games and it plays a lot slower, especially early on when you only have a tiny farm and little equipment, so you can’t deal with different crops at different times of year. So far it seems greenhouses are the way to get a steady early income.

Really looking forward to checking out the production chains and the new crop types like olives and grapes. I’ve also been meaning to give forestry a go for a while. Probably not on this map though.

2

I’ll probably check out how it’s doing in a few months.

3

Do I need to play the 21 other farming simulators do get this?

4

Just the ones where you grow gold doubloons. Arghhhhh matey!

5

I’ve always wanted to get into one of these titles but the last attempt I made I couldn’t get over the pathing and UI wonkiness to get some traction going (pun intended.) I’ve read a lot of good things about this version though, better graphics and engine update, better AI, better machine handling/driving, etc. It’s early, but I’m not invested in any '19 modding or content so … why not?

Any tips for an early start for a newbie?

6

It has a fair tutorial. Pick the casual difficulty and the map it defaults to. For transparency, I don’t have this one yet, but I caught a bit of the tutorial on YouTube.

7

Followed the in-game tutorial, which is quite short. However it was a good first day. I learned how to drive multiple farm vehicles before deciding I suck at it. Instead I’ve hired several undocumented workers today to finish things for me. Jose’s wife brought some empanadas over to the farm for lunch so I’ve promised the boys some cervezas later. I also sold some wheat for a minor profit, nearly ran over someone walking in the middle of the highway, pissed off some commuters behind me and learned I cannot navigate a small farm town very well. I posted my profile on FarmersOnly.com so obviously I’m in this for the long haul.

Here we go …

8

Fun with AI workers:

9

Had to sell some stuff on the farm. The price of lumber is through the roof so I sold the barn, the vehicle building and that former storage building I wasn’t using. I also sold the family pickup truck, it was doing me no good leaking oil over there at the storage building. With some of that money I upgraded to a better seeder and trailer and got busy planting soybeans. Or at least Jose and Carlos did. I love those guys. After seeding bills kept coming in but I was in the wait game. I got serious with my drinking while the crops were growing. I dropped by Mi Familia occasionally to check on the boys and have a few tequila shots. I may have a problem.

February finally came and I recruited the boys to harvest some soybeans for me. I could barely see straight through my hangover. I made a little money, enough to get by for another planting anyway. I don’t know what grows this time of year so I just replanted soybeans. Kikkoman doesn’t make itself. But I did sock away enough to keep the farm rolling and upgrade the cultivator to about double it’s prior width. At least things will go faster. I need some more land to keep the liquor money flowing. I should investigate a nice new plot.

10

As I say in the OP, greenhouses seem like the best bet early on. They’re relatively cheap, they provide a steady income, and the only input is water, which you can get for free from lakes/rivers. Set them up to auto sell if you don’t want to deal with all the pallets.

Cropwise, canola seems like a decent early moneymaker, also soybeans, or oats if you want some straw. But definitely take a loan and buy a field or two as with the new growing speeds you’ll be waiting too long if you just do organic growth, as it were.

It seems that, as usual, silage is a good medium/long term goal, but there’s a fair amount of equipment involved. It’s highly profitable, and helps with cows if you want to do that.

In previous FS games, it was usually a good idea to get some equipment that could do multiple things at once, like cultivating and seeding, to save time and cover as much ground as possible. With the new crop growth system, where you spend more time just hanging around and there are more stages to growth, that seems much less important. While I haven’t done the maths, it seems like you want equipment to cover each stage of growing ASAP to get the maximum yield bonus. So far I have a plough, a cultivator, a stone picker, a roller, a mulcher, a weeder, a seeder, a planter and a lime/fertiliser spreader.

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BTW, based on some tips in a walkthrough I have a lot of those items turned off in game to keep it relatively simple for now. No stone, no need for lime, no traffic, etc.

12

With the new crop growth rates, I would recommend turning lime back on. It’s not expensive, and it’ll give you something else to do between harvests. Also you can use the same trailer as for fertiliser if you want.

Speaking of fertiliser, contracts can be a good way to earn money early on, especially when you have downtime between tasks on your own farm. At the moment harvesting contracts are bugged though, and cultivation is too slow to worthwhile. Fertilising is the best balance between time and money in my experience. Baling can also be fun and lucrative but it’s quite labour intensive - not a huge issue if you’re just waiting for the next stage of crop growth. You’ll probably also have to borrow the equipment for it, unlike fertilising.

Stones I would probably leave off. Repair costs are really high in the new game.

13

Roger that, lime now re-enabled. I’ve been doing contracts. I also got three large greenhouses set up and selling (to make it easy.) I set up one of each type. It’s good side income but they take up some space. Also I consider it a monthly chore added to the list to resupply those with water.

I’m -slowly- learning each tool as it becomes something I need, either for contracts or for my own stuff. I noticed that the harvesting contracts were bugged, or at least, I was unable to get anything because there was no crop! This current season was the first time I needed to plow, wow that’s slow. But the fields around the farmhouse I do on my own and my new field I usually hire out. I did borrow for that field and I have yet to start repaying so it’s weighing on me a bit. Interest is nothing, but I’m afraid I do not know the timeline to pay back the loan? Is this loan simulator 22? I’d like to start doing more but again, I’m in debt for about 250K. By the time I have kids in their teens I’ll probably have that paid off right?

Random questions:

  • Should I mow around my fields?
  • Is grass growing even worth it?
  • There’s a lot of production buildings and combination things, should I be starting down that path?
  • When would you use a silo?
14

There isn’t one. Just a $500k credit limit.

15

If you have mowing equipment, sure. There’s not really enough grass in the verges to make it worth buying equipment unless you dedicate a field to it though,
Totally. Silage is extremely profitable, and you can get several grass growing cycles in one year.
I wouldn’t bother with production chains early, but maybe aim for a simple one in the medium term (I’m going for grain/bakery first). Just bear in mind that the oil chain doesn’t make economic sense at the moment.
Depends which kind. The tall round ones you can use to store your crops until the month in which the sale price is most valuable, or just to have around, eg to feed chickens. The ones that are basically just walls you use for silage.

16

So I’ve just about got my farm to a sustainable place, so I can start thinking about buying out a production chain and getting a mowing operation going. Just need another field or two to make more efficient use of my equipment. So far in addition to the starter fields on Elm Creek I have two large fields, one on sunflowers and one on wheat (currently being used to feed chickens, but ultimately to feed into the bread chain). I have one of each large greenhouse, a chicken coop and one of the largest beehives. I’ve upgraded my shittiest tractor to a Fastrac to transport stuff around more quickly. As well as all the ground working tools I have a baler and a large bale loader so I can get more cash for straw and ultimately for silage/animal feed. I also have a curtainside trailer and a telehandler for transporting honey, but no truck yet. Honey seems to be quite a good moneymaker, but there’s a lot of handling involved as you can’t just pick up the pallets, unlike eggs, which I can just carry to the pickup. All I really need now is scale and mowing/forage harvesting equipment. Need to get my debt down too though.

More impressions after a bit more time played

I really like seasons, though I wish they’d brought more of the mod’s functionality over, especially stuff like crop rotation. I assume this will be in the precision farming DLC. It does make the start a lot slower, as you can’t just speed up time to get more growth cycles in - even with seasons turned off, apparently, it still takes many months for crops to grow. But once you’ve got a decent size farm, it feels so much better and, if not realistic, at least more true to life.

The sounds and many of the animations are much better than FS19. The tractors sound so much better. Otherwise it’s not much of a graphical upgrade. A bit of an improvement to lighting, but textures are much the same apart from ground textures.

Worker AI when doing fieldwork is sadly just as bad as ever, if not worse. And the oddities from previous games are still present - you still can’t hire a worker to do baling for some reason.

Pallet physics is much improved, I no longer do everything I can to avoid dealing with them, and maybe autoloader mods won’t be necessary. I still managed to get one permanently stuck in the scenery though, so definitely not perfect.

Not sure I really like the new train system, but it works OK on Elm Creek. Hopefully in other maps you get a bit more freedom

The economy definitely needs a balance pass. As well as the sunflower oil situation I mentioned above, apparently pigs cost more to feed than they sell for. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other oddities like that. Repair costs may need to be reduced too.

Pending more detailed testing, it seems like the various ploughs/cultivators/subsoilers/harrows,spaders still don’t really vary all that much in function other than the basic cultivation/plough state. Some dig up bigger stones than others, and they produce different textures, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to use, say, a cultivator over a harrow, or a plough over a subsoiler. It would be good if they implemented gameplay to make the differences meaningful, especially as they’ve had these different implements in the game for years. Edit: Seems this is wrong: disc harrows, or at least the one I just used, seem to leave you with weeds that you can’t remove (except with herbicide? I don’t have a sprayer so can’t test). But since the weeds get destroyed when you seed the field, I’m not sure it makes any difference in the end.

There’s quite a lot of bugs, especially around field states, it seems. Thankfully, though, they seem to have fixed the pause crash bug from FS19.

17

Speaking of pause, and save, and exiting the game … would it kill them to make those just a tad more noticeable in the menu? Like, right on one of the corners when you hit escape.

I have one large lot besides my starter lots. Right now, everything is on canola because I very badly depressed the soybean market. (Which is why I was asking about silos.) I’m not messing with animals, grass, forestry or bees until I feel I have my feet under me with a lot of the rest. I’m still in relatively simple mode so as my very first FS game, I’m easing into it. No seasons or snow on for me.

Successes:

  • All three greenhouses are indeed a decent money stream. With three large, that’s about like having a good contract per month for nothing but the time for me to shuffle water to them.
  • I got a large shipment of canola shipped to the other town by train and that worked very well for a huge cost increase it sold at there. Renting the train was minimal cost as I had everything in that transport silo and ready to go. I looks like the 1K cost is really pro rated based on the time taken.
  • I’ve done a few contracts for side pay and gotten decent pay out of them. I’m also driving a lot more on my own, with the exception of my large new field.
  • I successfully connected the larger two starter fields together after understanding plowing and whatnot. The AI even will perform duties to it without issue. I did not try to expand anything within my lot though.
  • I placed a pressure washer and successfully combated the OCD I have for how dirty the farm gear is getting.
  • I have successfully turned every parking lot, storefront parking or open driveways near me into my own personal farm equipment parking. The people have not noticed.

Failures:

  • Lime needs to go on before seed. I wrestled with that shit for hours last night before finally getting the AI to take over, only to realize that the 3/4 of the field I’d already seeded didn’t take the lime. Wasted money for that but lesson learned.
  • I keep forgetting to check the used sales at the store. I could have saved a bundle. I’m not sure if there is a way to upgrade the engine in a tractor after purchase. Sure wish I could though.
  • One failed contract due to the bug for harvesting fields not being ready.
  • Multiple failed AI workers due to a number of small issues. For sure I’m glad they are in game, but you have to babysit them a bit. I’d love to know how to have one pick up from beside a harvester, probably the hardest task for me to get used to in-game.
  • I bought a weather station in game only to realize it does me no good since I have seasons off.
  • I delayed harvesting some soybeans due to rain, only to have it start raining the next day attempt I did for getting them. Rain sucks.

It’s a peaceful game but it’s full of one-more-turn kind of gameplay. “Well I’ll just get through this planting then I’ll go to bed.” I went to bed at 4AM Friday night.

18

Maybe. Haven’t tried it in FS22 yet, but in FS19 it would definitely cause some issues unless you did it just right. That said, apparently the map now shows joined fields properly, so it’s possible there’s some under the hood improvements that would also help worker AI.

Not possible in the base game, at least not how you’d want. There’s mods for FS19 that do this, though, and presumably they will eventually come to FS22. If you do a looping deliver job, though, you could sort of do it by manually taking the harvester to the pick-up point as needed. You just can’t do it continuously like you really need to with, say, a forage harvester.

This is probably wise, though I would recommend getting some chickens once you start farming grains.

19

I was able to clear my stuck pallet with snow actually. I plowed near it and the snow raised it out of the ground. I picked it up and moved it away. I got rid of the bees because the pallets were a pain in the ass to move around.

I would also suggest playing on the middle map instead of elm creek. its a bit bigger but it’s laid out better with more room to move stuff around and has some useful buildings. As a new player to this series i think it worked better.

I do have a question, how do you pick up silage once it done? I tried using a wagon thingy but it didn’t pick up stuff under the white tarp thingy?

20

I’m just doing Elm Creek to try out the new stuff, as it seemed to have the widest range of production chains and enough field space to do all the crops. I’ll be switching to mod maps as soon as they get released.

On silage, it depends how much you invest. Starting out, it’s easiest to use a front loader or telehandler with the biggest bucket you can manage. But mid or late game you want to get a conveyor belt system running to take it directly from the bunkers to the sell point.

I suppose you could use a mixer wagon if you really wanted to just run over it.