Be Excellent To Each Other

Full game and demo are on Steam. Official site and mods here, unofficial ones here.

God bless the Germans. With their kooky enthusiasm for all things related to efficiency, management and realism, there's a raft of these 'Simulator' titles coming out. Ships, Diggers, Buses, Police (yes), Faaaarms. Farm Simulator 2009 (they really want to be Flight Simulator) reviewed well in PC Gamer so when this new one came out on Steam for 20% off I figured I'd give it a try.

Welcome to Perkies' Farm! *loads gun*

As I'm new, I don't have much yet. All the buildings and stuff come pre-built, and you start with a crappy tractor, a crappy combine, and all the basic implements. In the background are the seed bags to fill your sower. To the right is the weed spray tank, the barn is where I can store bales of hay for any cows I own (I don't). Left to right is the trailer, cultivator, (behind tractor) sower, plower, sprayer.

There's also a fuel tank for refilling your vehicles, and several silos for storing stuff you don't want to sell immediately.



Let's go farming!

The map is filled with pre-plowed fields for you to use, so I went straight for the cultivator to make the land ready for sowing. The grey patches are uncultivated land.



You stick the cruise control on and roll at a steady 11mph, turning at the end of the field.



After that was done, I went to fill up with seeds and decided to sow some barley.



However, after painstakingly cultivating and then sowing, I got itchy feet and wanted to go explore. Plus the neighbouring field several times bigger than the first, so I hired Cletus The Idiot Boy to cultivate it for me.



Running across the fields, I found this:



I wonder what they sell here?



There's a lot of different things you can buy... not just vehicles but tools to fit to them.



Internet people decided they didn't want to have to save to buy the good stuff, and so, rather depressingly, many of the mod vehicles are all ridiculously cheap. A huge tractor and an awesome combine for $2!



Still, with the car parked in my driveway inaccessible (wife must be mad) I accepted the Ford F-350 pick-up for $13.



WE DON'T TAKE KINDLY TO FOLKS NOT TAKING KINDLY.



With Cletus still slowly and methodically plowing the huge field, I decided to go for a drive around the map (I'm fucked if I can find the map anywhere for you to see apart from the one in the manual, but it's dotted with various industries you can sell to, roads, buildings, and stuff) and see what I could find.



I spotted this at the side of the road, and decided to go for a ride.



That's my farm down there, that is.



I saw this at the side of the road and stopped and pulled over. At first I thought DAMN this guy has a huge haul ready to go already! Then I realized I'm the only farmer in the game, and I could just jump into this combine and harvest all the stuff.



This pub has a microbrewery and will pay top dollar for my barley.



A beautiful sunset reminded me to stop drinking and drive drunkenly home (it IS the country) to check on Cletus' progress.



I blocked the missus' car in the driveway. Hah.



Alas, it seems that Cletus was unable to cope with the scarecrow.



I hated to think how long he'd been stuck like that, spinning his wheels madly, so I took momentary control of the tractor to get it around the insurmountable obstacle and then told him to get the hell back on with it.

Unfortunately, night fell and he was still trying to finish.



Tomorrow: Perkies buys some cows and tries to get Cletus to drive the trailer alongside the harvester.

good work sir. I look forward to reading about your Mythril tractor later on.

So there are no female farmhands to woo with gifts of silage and wellington boots?

Awesome!
We have an identical looking tractor to that - an International Harvester from the 50s. It doesn't run so we recently got a small 4 wheel drive John Deere, mainly to tow the old one out.

I'm looking forward to Office Simulator 2011. With authentic Excel simulation and tossing around on the internet minigame.

* Starts singing the song from that "Yeo Valley" advert *

That's pretty barren, featureless landscape you've got there. I give it two seasons before it turns into dustbowl central. Plant some trees, quick!

Great piece.

Perhaps your idiot farmhand boy needs a hoe.

I can't find the demo

Aha, here's one: http://www.gamershell.com/download_65506.shtml

[edit]The first one download a dodgy "downloader" exe - no thanks.
[edit][edit]That was was in German! Try thins one...

This looks absolutely awesome. First Born will go mental for this. At least the tractor driving bit.

It's got online multiplayer, too.
The first thing I did, obviously, was to take a tractor off-roading. It can climb any mountain you point it at (bah), always lands on its wheels (bah) and gets mad air off bumps (whoo). Oddly, all the rivers are at least fifteen feet deep, and your tractor will die if you drive in them.
Also, the game appears to have no idea what speed is. It takes about two seconds to cross a road when driving at 40 mph.

I believe the game you require is Advanced Tractor Simulator.

I dislike that tractor, it is too new.

I made a video!




But it hasn't processed yet.

But it might have by the time you press play!

Nope.

Reminds me of Mass Effect.

How come real tractors can't do 50mph? Think how much nicer B roads would be!

Some can. Depending on how wide they are & what they have attached to them there are speed restrictions though.

JCB Fastrack FTW. Wouldn't like to get in the way of one though, I'm not sure they can stop very smartly.

They can. But the farmers decide to drive along roads really slowly.

I followed a huge combine down a lane a few months back and the huge track marks it left on the nicely kept verges outside peoples houses are still there.

Fucking farmers, driving on our roads, providing us with food.

It's the ones who drive their ancient steam-powered tractors around major London roads that really annoy me.

Hey, it was 17:30. We were going at the same speed as everybody else.

Don't forget all the handouts we give them though, those tractors are practically publicly owned. In fact I'm going to write to [farmer up the road from me] & ask when I'm getting a shot on my tractor

(Please, don't start arguing about agricultural subsidies. I'm only taking the piss)

I presume you're referring to the New Zealand sheep farmers, American orange farmers, Spanish tomato farmers and the kindly South African apple farmers?

And your Mum, the Melon Farmer.

You're a freak, Meaty. A beautiful, beautiful freak.

He is to be cherished.


It's ploughed though. Ploughing, ploughed, ploughman, plough. Plough. PLOUGH!

Plough looks weird now eh?

Ploff.

Plowger.

Ploo.

In a hundred thousand year's time or so, it'll be very different to how we see it.

Perkies' Farm, day 2.

Before we start, can I say the game is excellent, though the developers missed a serious trick by not including normal cars and trucks. The F-350 is the most heavily used vehicle on my farm, due to its speed and versatility towing things and generally doing stuff while the AI does the plowing or sowing. It's not as cool as what I got later, though, read on to find out...

When we last visited, Cletus the idiot farmhand had been made to work all night to finish the field after his altercation with the scarecrow put him badly behind schedule.

Day dawns over the farm. Farmer Perkies gets up later than real Perkies (NB: you don't need to sleep in this game, as you can't get into the house)



I discover that the trailer hitch on the pickup actually works, and I'm able to tow the small tipper trailer that came with the farm. I decide to go and check to see how Cletus is getting on with sowing the field.



CLEEEETUSS!!!!!



While I let the crops ripen, I decided to explore the area, and found the docks, which will accept any cargo I produce, albeit at a lower price than the other industries.



I also found the local grain elevator. You can tell the game is German, if it was in Canada there'd be the biggest train you've ever seen outside, loading up.



I drove back to the farm...



...and found that Cletus has fucked off as soon as his work was done, not even returning the tractor to the yard.



I took the tractor with the trailer around to that old combine I'd found yesterday, intending to harvest the huge field of barley there and take it to the nearby pub to sell it.



This is one of the more challenging things I've done in my sim career... trying to keep pace and distance with the combine so it can deposit the produce right into your trailer as you go along. Note that the game only shows the plume of stuff for a few moments, but so long as your grain meter keeps ticking up, you're doing fine.





I then delivered the stuff to the pub so they could brew lovely lovely beer with it.



When I got home, I sold my crappy tractor, my two crappy combines, their implements, and used that together with the proceeds from the barley-to-beer operation to buy a new tractor and new combine with a corn attachment.





Okay corn, it's go time. Deploying corn implements...





And away we go!



CLEEEEEETUS!!



I took the corn, together with some that I had already in the silos (whoever owned this place before left loads of stuff behind) and took it to the mill.



I used the money to buy a mower and a forage trailer, which gathers the cut grass to make cattle feed. Because, you see, I bought two cows! Adelbaset (not really, but the name it gave me was so impenetrably Teutonic that's all I can remember) and Flora (really - that must be what she specializes in making).



Delivering the grass to the ranch and dumping it into the feed trough.



These are the best animated cows I've ever seen... they capture the lovely, placid nature you assume of real cows.



Om nom nom.



I passed MaliA in the local town.



And so ended the second day.



Another early start and I invested in a second new tractor and a new strategy. The first tractor, with the plow or cultivator, heads off first and does a few trips back and forth. Then the second with the sowing machine follows it and plants the seeds.



This still takes time, though, so I explored some more and found this nice medieval church.



With two huge fields across the river now grown, I had a pretty decent operation going. The two tractors prepare one field while the harvester threshes its way through the other. I have the truck and trailer and regularly empty the harvester's internal storage so it can work continuously.



When there's nothing else to be done and the crops are growing, I take control and use the weedsprayer to ensure they produce more crops for me. (you can also use the manure and slurry from your cows if you buy the appropriate and expensive equipment necessary, though there's no bank for you to spray shit across)



Work continued thus into the wee hours of the morning, with the final load being emptied into the trailer just before midnight.



I was tired, but I'd worked hard and knew I now had the money for my new toy.



Can you tell what it is yet?







Seriously, how fucking awesome is this thing?



With the tractor-trailer, I can now transport both tractors simultaneously to a distant large field and set them to work, and then return to collect the harvester(s) or more tractors with fertilizers. While the AI is doing its stuff, I can be hauling equipment to or from them (there are some gigantic fields further out on the map) and then I can hook the huge tipper trailer up to the truck cab and collect a colossal amount of crops to go and sell. Excellent mod, hope the devs take notice of it.

Excellent stuff.

Do the crops grow real time (in-game, I mean), or spring up magically overnight? If the former, what do you do for 6 months?

One thing your farm really needs, though, is some anisotropic filtering

Baffling.

Although not the kind of game I'd play, I love this thread! It looks ace!

I think they grow over a set period of real world time. You can choose how quickly the in-game clock runs (real time, 4x, 16x, etc) I'm not sure if this determines how fast the crops grow. Over the course of those two in-game days in the pics on this page, I had the two huge canola fields grow to maturity and be harvested twice.

There's several stages each crop grows through, from freshly sown to little green shoots to taller to maturity. If you're that patient you can watch this happen in real time, though blink and you might miss the field going from yellow to brown. It does happen quickly enough that for my biggest field, even with the two tractors preparing it, one side was already showing signs of growth while the other side was still being plowed and sown.

Update us do? Did you let the farm return to nature in the end?

Hmm looking at this it looks like it's coded by the same guys who did Railworks. If so it's probably a pissload of fun

Farm is still going, bought another harvester and a rigid truck to carry the produce. A lot of the mods have fucked physics causing the trucks to wheelie when pulling a trailer, or only drive in first gear.

I will post more once I have something significant!

Farming simulator 2013 will be released on 360 and PS3. It will. You are hearing me talk.

I expect we'll see a lot of shovelware on both consoles as the licensing costs are reduced due to the next-gen consoles in the pipeline.

It'll probably be crippled to fuck and back like Minecraft 360, with a tiny little area and no competing business to sell crops to, or something. Not to mention a significant part of my fun and enjoyment was due to mods like the flatbed transporter and pickup truck which made getting around and performing a number of in-game tasks a LOT more pleasant.