Farming Simulator 22: This time it's seasonal

In settings, “info trigger”

It won’t necessarily have an effect. Even before the patch, you would still get the “needs ploughing” state, for instance, if you had ploughing turned off, until you ploughed it the first time.

It’s treated as a grain.

I knew that part, also that it can be used for flour and used as feed. The part I was questioning is covered by Farmer Klein here …

i.e. No swath possible no use of the leftover for straw in any way. Chaff only possible with a forage harvester and even then, to the detriment of final sorghum product.

It just looks strange, akin to a harvested corn field. Taller than the other grains. I mulched it anyway so I guess that was the correct thing to do.

Lots of mods added after the recent update, including the popular survival map, No Mans Land. Some of you may have played this before, I have not. I decided to load it up and start a second game with settings on Hard and that map. That difficulty includes fuel usage set to High and dirt set to Normal. The only changes I set back to easier were Crop Destruction (because I’m not insane) and Automatic Engine Start (because it’s annoying to me, especially when hopping between farm gear while listening to the radio.) Seasons and snow are on by default in that setting.

It started me with 500K, with 200K of that from a loan it takes out. I thought that was a bit much but it started to make sense a bit when I understood I had only a very small amount of equipment, did not own any land, had no house, had no supplies, etc. I’m not sure if that’s what NML is supposed to start with but I can tell you I blew through that 500K without difficulty not thinking about a lot of things I’m still missing. There is only one place to buy/sell/refuel/repair from the get go. There are no production points. There is no storage of anything. Your equipment is in very poor repair state. You have no means to even load pallets to get them to/from where your equipment is, along with the only field. Also, even if you buy land there is exactly one of 60 total land plots with a pre-existing field, and even that one is in sad shape with a withered crop and rocks. Any other fields have to be created by the player. The map has many trees and many large rocks, some water sources, etc. It’s up to you to build your kingdom and anything that makes a part of that.

So off to my slow start, using a single wide as my home. Canola is planted, lets do this…

Dammit, I’m already in the middle of too many games.

Oooookay. Talk about a gut punch. It’s going to take a different playstyle for this survival map mod. My first year I just went off the existing field and threw down canola. Due to the crop calendar and high price tracking now working you really have to wait out when to sell. Without storage, that means it sits in the trailer until sale date. And after all that my total take from that first field for sale? A whopping $2731. Hell I paid twice that counting using AI to plant THIS season plus the interest on those loans. I need more solid fertilizer and that’s $3600 a pallet I think. I do have extra seed, for now.

This was the highest price I’ve seen on Canola, one month AFTER I sold at $707.

I may not make it here.

My two fields:

I’m going to plow another narrow field over on the right side of my plot but the problem is large rocks in the way plus it is inclined on both ends. These two tractors I have barely have the HP to do the new field I plowed and that’s less steep. I’m pulling some of this equipment around at 4mph or slower on the Steyr and just barely above that on the John Deere.

Again, I may not make it on this playthrough. Even selling some gear I wouldn’t be able to cover that loan.

If you’re playing No Man’s Land survival, you don’t take loans and you don’t use AI, try that and let me know if you’re still sane after.

(In '19 it’s super fun because you can get things like the washed/sorted potato mods, the varied types of straw and the honey production.)

Crap now I want to install '19 and do that.

Getting used to the no AI part, BUT, I started on hard which starts you with a 200K loan. Not sure if I should have payed that off with the 500K total money you have at start or not. Obviously I bought gear and made that mistake.

Oh yeah in previous years people would just pay the loan and then cheat their money to zero. It’s a struggle for sure. Very fun, though.

Also, not sure I’ll make it this time around but this was the push that got me using a GPS and learning how to solo drive things with it. I just have one hate item: anything offset. Fuck that shit. Offset tools suck.

No Man’s Land is currently awaiting an update. It’s been submitted but not approved by Giants yet. Apparently the map doesn’t allow selling (for any profit) of wood for the time being. You can get around that with another mod that can make wood chips from wood, but that’s a stopgap that will be resolved once the update goes in. For now I’ve halted my game there. I have no ability to repay loans there without something substantial so it’s either a restart or wait for update (and possibly still restart.)

Soooooo, I rolled a new game with hard mode on Elm Creek. I immediately paid off the loan, bought the cheapest of the cheap stuff to get going and ended up borrowing about 20K for seed/lime/fertilizer/herbicide. It’s rough. The best bang for my buck was re-buying the starter lot, which comes with no house but still has buildings you can sell for a little profit. Along with that it had three crops and I’ve slowly harvested them and hope they get me through year one. Along with that I’m taking a tip from No Man’s Land and expanding any field as much as I can. Unfortunately the starter plot has some hilly terrain and some actual decent area for gear storage so I kept some of that.

Tools are basic, machines are as cheap as I could get. The cheapest harvester and header, and though not the cheapest, the best bang for the buck tractor I could afford, a Fiat. Price / horsepower / speed, pick any two. The Fiat has horsepower and cheap cost but MAN is it slow.

Here she is hauling at a record breaking 16mph:

Doing some expansion on the pre-defined fields:

Some strange limitations on the crop area applied to the lot. Whatever, I’m expanding within a yard or two of the road, which I’m sure would cause a headache and some fines from a normal township.

She’s limed up and ready for planting. Things I’m unable to do right now: mulching/rowing, serious weeding. I’m using herbicide because I can leverage that same sprayer for liquid fertilizer.

Of the two GPS mods I’ve chosen VCA (Vehicle Control Addon.) Yes, I know it’s free to all vehicles. But it is also easy to use. I’ve balanced that a little with also adding the Headland Management mod which does cost to add per vehicle, and I’ve not used it so far. Essentially, it adds auto-turning when using GPS or VCA.

At any rate VCA has allowed me to not only take over all duties without AI, but to also allow very clean lines on field work, especially open plowing.

Small patch out today, apparently fixes the red forklift weirdness.
Meanwhile, I have learned that barns will accept unshredded bales for feed, which is a godsend. Not only does it make storage easier, but you can just stack them on the food drop point and it will automatically top up.

Ginger where do I go to see these patch notes? I noticed you posted the last one as well.

There’s an announcements forum on the Giants site, but this I got from Reddit

Well, well, well. With a tip from reddit and the patch for No Man’s Land I’m slowly climbing my way out of debt. I didn’t know the first rule of NML, which is forestry before agriculture. I built a sawmill and that’s helped a TON. with around $22K for a placed sawmill and 1K for a chainsaw, I used my existing pickup truck and flatbed trailer to fell a few trees and get some wood plank production going. And with that small step, I’m slowly paying off my loans. I’m making 8 or so pallets a month based on the amount of tree work I do (2-4 large trees,) and that’s paying 8-10K a month in profit. I paid off the extra amount taken out on loan for the sawmill and have now been slowly paying down my 225K debt.

We’re gonna make it.

Back to work time in No Man’s Land.

The farm with the new sawmill constructed beside it. It’s huge.


The business side of the sawmill, pickup of planks on one side, chips on another, with a drop off point in between. What I’ve found is that you don’t really have to get trees trimmed down to just trunks, the largest and most twisted messes you can get over there are fine. You can fell whole small trees and drag them right over. Once you have a pile, “sell,” them and in they go to the production.

I’ve sold as many as six pallets of planks at a time but I seem to be making about 5 per every 2 weeks. This is selling 5 for a total of $6602 in profit. I’m not storing these along, I’m selling them as I go but I am driving them to the sell point. I haven’t enabled auto-sell, I just assumed it would be a lot cheaper.

I have flipped and had to reset the pickup and trailer a few times hauling 5 pallets of wood planks around at 70+ mph.

Beautiful shot of doing some plowing late at night with the rain just starting to let up.

“AI worker D is blocked by an object” coming to real farms soon:

This makes complete sense, especially since I think they had the first auto-turn technology anyway. It’s the future for sure.

Knowing John Deere though, it will be something like a paid service add-on, almost as if … wait for it … paying for someone to work the field.

An update on my original farm. I went back to my first farm (Elm Creek) and updated the game to Normal difficulty with seasons and whatnot enabled. I find hard mode doable but godawful slow. Like deliberately slow due to sell prices, without any benefit. Since I want to explore more of the game and gear, it makes sense to step back a bit.

Knowing more about creating fields and terraforming and felling trees though, I set about a pretty major change to the farm. Along with that, the farm has grown.

But the land is much more leveled and clear …

And the fleet has grown …

I’m slowly moving over from multiple crop farming to cotton–>fabric–>clothing. I still haven’t converted all my fields though, nor started sheep pens on the farm. So far so good. I’m floating between zero and 200K on loans but it’s working for now.

I feel like I got a steal yesterday on that John Deere 9420R tractor. It was in the store at 60% off and I had the cash to throw at it. I’ve needed a big boy tractor to step up to and I’ll admit this was NOT one I was looking at. It’s slow and not tracked. But it was 60% off! And the repairs were less than 3K. I paired it with the large Kinze planter that I’ve been coveting, something to get through planting quicker on my fields and hopefully larger expansion fields as I move to them. I have two MUCH smaller Kuhn planters and it was getting ridiculous having two tractors plant on the same large field, one by me and one by AI.

I’ll also pair this with a larger cultivator once I have a bit more cash. This is my first articulated tractor. So far it’s nice for straight turns but a bit of a chore backing up with the double pivot point for some trailers. We’ll see. Here she is cultivating on contract in the snow:

Finally started on viticulture, which is ultimately going to feed into a cereal operation. Spent over a million planting field 32 and still haven’t got it entirely covered.

I keep starting new games. I have three going currently, this game has become my zen time-passing go-to.

I’ve got a ton of modded rides in them now as well. In my furthest game I’m still doing cotton, however. I’m up to three spinneries and two large sheep pens, which is nothing compared to what I’ve seen on reddit. All of those still don’t keep a single tailor shop full.

I keep trying games on hard but it’s just sooooo sloooow. I really wish hard mode were a bit more like normal but with something akin to an increased likelihood of a critical failure: weather, disease, natural disasters (flood, bugs, drought, etc.) The game just doesn’t model that though so all they do is lower the price of what you do for the most enjoyment in the game, grow crops.

If I were a coder and had unlimited time, this game sorely needs a mod that overlays an economy on it. Something akin to Farming Baron or such. A loose economy and competition between farms, purchasing land, working contracts with stores/chains to provide so much via bidding, etc. I love what they have, I just want more, so, I’m a typical Giants game fan now.

@Ginger_Yellow a thank you for mentioning this in another thread and piquing my interest.