Farming Simulator 15
- Thread starter ~Mike~
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I just bought this in the steam sale. Anyone still playing it? Any tips or guides for noobs?
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I liked the sound of it so when I saw the offer I decided to buy it. I don't know when I will start playing it much as I am obsessed with ED atm.
FS looks as if it could have more to it than euro truck sim but that seems to be much more popular on here than FS.
FS looks as if it could have more to it than euro truck sim but that seems to be much more popular on here than FS.
Soldato
OK, a bit of an introduction and a few tips to the various aspects of FS15 / wall of text.
This is based on the Bjornholm map without any mods (unless mentioned).
Harvest the first field. Take the crops to the farm storage tanks for now rather than selling them immediately.
Cultivate (blue flatish thing with prongs coming out of the bottom) or plough the field (it makes no difference if you plough as well as cultivate, but the option is there) and then sow the field with wheat, barley or canola (known as 'oil seed rape' here in Northumberland). Don't do corn immediately as you'll need to buy a corn header for your combine before you can harvest that. It may look like canola gets the most money at the stores ('I' key), but a canola yield is half that of wheat or barley, so you get roughly the same money from a field, but with no opportunity to bale the straw that wheat or barley gives (not that you'll be able afford a baler yet, but keep it in mind for later).
When you can afford a more powerful tractor and the 6m Vaderstad seed drill you won't need to plough or cultivate first - that thing does both jobs. For Bjornholm don't buy the biggest seed drill, as it needs too much space at each end of the field to turn and it's a real pain if you don't plant a headland (a border around the edge of the field) - it's better suited to Westbridge Hills. Never plant grass in a field you may want for something else later as to remove grass you need to use a plough and it can get quite messy. You can also use a plough to combine two fields together for when you get the bigger machines - there's an option when a plough is attached to "limit to fields", which you'd turn off, so it can be handy keeping a small plough even if you don't use it.
When you can afford a fertiliser spreader or a sprayer you can start increasing the yield (I think this doubles the yield for each crop type, but has no effect on grass). You only need one or the other, unlike the real world where you might use several fertilisers and pesticides at different points. You can fertilise at any point from when a field has been harvested up until before the field is ready to harvest (so the final green growth stage (shown as blue on the map in the 'I' menu)), but it's easiest to see what you've fertilised if you do it after you've cultivated or sown. The fertilised status will be reset when you harvest. Note that you can also spread manure instead of fertiliser, but you'll need cows before you can use manure, and again if you manure a field, you don't need to use fertiliser or the sprayer.
When you can afford it, buy another field near the farm. Two fields of fertilised crop will obviously bring in more money and you can have a hired worker do one job while you do another, so...
Don't forget you can use the hired workers too for basic field work. They can harvest, plough, cultivate, seeding and spread fertiliser and spray (I think that's all off the top of my head), so you could do the grain carting while you leave a hired worker to do the harvesting, if you wish. You'll have to pay their wages though (you'll notice your money going down faster in the corner, and you can check how much it has cost you each day in the menu).
Regarding the crops you've harvested, you can keep them at the farm until the price increases (you can check using the 'I' menu) or wait for a great demand (a message will pop up on the screen when a great demand occurs) which will increase the price of an individual crop by as much as 2x when selling*. It's probably not worth waiting for a great demand early on as you'll want to buy new equipment sharpish at the start of the game. Instead, when you want to sell a crop wait for the start of a new in-game hour, and slow the game speed down to 1x (7 key slows the game, 8 increases it (main keyboard, not the numpad)), as the prices change each hour, and once you start selling a crop, the price of that crop can drop dramatically when the hours changes, recovering slowly thereafter, so try to sell what you want to within that hour. Green up arrows indicate a crop's price is rising, while a red down arrow means a price is declining, and it will do this randomly to a degree too.
Try to sell grain at the train station, as you get money when you unload the trailer, plus it doubles if you get out of your tractor and pull the leaver which sets the train away. The extra money will appear in your account a minute or so after the train has left.
* A demand can happen anytime from twice a day to once every 3 days, and you won't know which crop it will be (and it could be silage which you have none of at the start, or wood chips, which you have, but you'll need a front loader with a bucket on your tractor to load it into a trailer and I can't remember if you start with one).
Once you've bought a fertiliser spreader (the cheapest way to increase crop yield) the next purchase should probably be a round baler and a bale auto-stacker, as you can sell bales at the farm (on Bjornholm it's the barn near the farm house with straw coming out of it, I can't remember where it is on the Westbridge Hills). You won't get much for bales, but it can be a half-decent source of income early in the game. You don't need the auto-stacker, you could use a front loader with a bale fork (with a trailer for longer journeys) or a bale spike mod, but Farming Simulator's bale handling physics are long known as a source of frustration, so it's probably best to stick with the auto-stacker.
Potatoes and sugar beet have no benefit in the two stock maps other than harvesting and selling. In some mod maps you can use them to feed beef cattle and pigs, along with wheat and the usual grass-based feed (below).
That covers sowing and harvesting, so I'll move on to milk and wool, which aren't exactly massive money earners and entirely optional. Off the top of my head I think you have exactly zero equipment for cows and sheep at the start of the game. All you do with each animal is keep them fed, make some money and for cows you can also use their liquid manure (slurry) and solid manure.
The following is for cows as sheep are borderline pointless from a money point of view (you can only sell their wool, and not for much), so I tend to ignore them most of the time, as I do the chickens.
For basic feed you can start by cutting grass. You then row it up using a wind-rower, load it into a grass trailer and unload it in the cow shed (or it might be an outside trough on the stock maps). If you want you can sell excess grass at any of the grass heaps placed around the map). You'll probably want to give them straw in the same way, which is used as bedding and increases their milk and this will produce manure.
The next stage is probably to make hay bales. For a hay bale you need to cut grass, turn the grass using a tedder (turns it to dry grass), row it up using a wind-rower and then bale it. To feed a bale you will need a mixing wagon (in the feeding section of the store - a bale shredder may work, but I've not tried it). Make plenty of hay bales as you'll want to combine them with the next part too for full productivity...
Silage. Ah, the real money maker and combined with hay and straw is the source of all goodness for cows. Silage is usually cut grass, which is sealed for months (in real life) to ferment. In farming sim it takes two or three days to ferment. To make silage cut the grass, load the grass up using a grass trailer and dump it in the concrete pit at the cow farm. Once you have a certain amount (I think the minimum is the silage pit has to be 11% full) you can compress it (driving a tractor back and forward over the grass continually, and the heavier the tractor the quicker) and once it's 100% compressed you can cover the pit (the 'R' key I think it is).
To use silage you'd use a mixing wagon and I think you load one round hay bale and one round straw bale and two scoops (front loader on a tractor with a bucket) of silage. I tend to use square bales, which are bigger than round bales, so your mileage might vary. Anyway, you can check what you've made by jumping into a tractor hooked up to the mixing wagon and looking at the top-left hud - you want each of the blue bars between the markers (the |---| things). Don't try to fill the mixing wagon up full as it's unlikely to turn into the magic "mixed ration" which is the gold the cows love for full productivity - it will just be emptied as individual straw, hay and silage rather than mixed ration.
You can cut corn into silage too, using the Krone Big X 1100 with the Easy Collect header, connecting a trailer (I think the only stock trailer which will fit the Krone is the Fleigl Bull - maybe the small Agroliner with its pain of twin axles) or hire a worker for the Krone and run alongside it with a tractor and trailer. You can also cut any crop into silage using the X Disc header (though it's not an efficient use of the other crops). For the British way, use the Easy Flow header and pick up wind-rowed grass, which is much more fun with a mate in multiplayer.
You can also make silage bales, which I *think* is a round hay bale which has been wrapped using the bale wrapper. I say "I think" as in real life (at least here in Northumberland) a silage bale would be made from freshly cut grass, not the dry grass from which a hay bale is made, but by default you can't bale fresh grass in FS15, so here is a mod which allows it: Baler Add Grass.
Any silage you don't need you can sell, and silage sells for a lot. To sell silage you take it to the BGA plant (look on the map) and unload it into one of the bins/hoppers. You can only sell so much before the BGA is full, but you can fast forward time (15x I think is sufficient) which will get it done quicker. You're best off selling silage bales at the BGA, or actually ferment the silage at the BGA (they have their own silage pits) and loading the hoppers with a bucket loader (ideally the large Liebherr wheel loader as it has the biggest bucket).
Once you've cut grass you don't need to sow more or do anything to help it, just wait until it grows again (it takes about two days I think).
A cheat to get a load of money is to collect the 100 gold coins scattered around the map (once you've found 10 the rest will appear on the in-game map). Once done, have a look for a wishing well in one of the forests. As I'm at work I can't remember where the heck it is, but one of the coins is near it, so you'll probably find it yourself! When you deposit the coins down the well you'll find you've got rather a lot of grain in your store ready to sell... That's for Bjornholm - I've no idea if there are even coins on Westbridge Hills.
Anyway, that should be enough for a brief intro into the basics of each aspect of FS15. I won't cover forestry as I've never done it, but there's be plenty of guides on Youtube if that's something you're interested in.
You're missing out on loads if you don't download mods though. Map mods can change large aspects of the game, introducing new animals (beef cattle, pigs, lamb and fattening chickens), new crop types (sunflowers, oats, rye, poppies, etc) and other things. I'll repeat again that Coldborough Park Farm is awesome, but it isn't hired-worker friendly due to the non-square fields, trees and hedgerows, but go around a field a couple of times yourself and if there is sufficient space to turn, the hired worker will usually be able to do most of the field itself - Coldborough also adds beef cows and pigs, as well as needing to give the cows and sheep water.
There are also plenty of British-style tractors, such as an excellent Massey Fergusen pack that has just been released on FS-UK, Timber131 has released some excellent Case tractors, SiiD's Claas combines are great too and there's the Krone baler released in the mod contest which allows you to bale and wrap at the same time without stopping. There's plenty of other mods too. Modded maps prepared with the optional soilmod brings more complexity to the game, where ploughing and cultivating brings benefits, as well as needing to irrigate the soil and spread pesticides and fertilisers.
Mods are installed (as a zip file (some will need extracting first, so have to look to see if there is a zip in the zip)) to the My Documents > My Games > Farming Simulator > Mods folder. They are accessed by opening the shop menu ('P') and clicking the arrow at the top-right twice. I'm happy to share some of my favourite mods if there's any interest and you haven't fallen asleep yet.
This is based on the Bjornholm map without any mods (unless mentioned).
Harvest the first field. Take the crops to the farm storage tanks for now rather than selling them immediately.
Cultivate (blue flatish thing with prongs coming out of the bottom) or plough the field (it makes no difference if you plough as well as cultivate, but the option is there) and then sow the field with wheat, barley or canola (known as 'oil seed rape' here in Northumberland). Don't do corn immediately as you'll need to buy a corn header for your combine before you can harvest that. It may look like canola gets the most money at the stores ('I' key), but a canola yield is half that of wheat or barley, so you get roughly the same money from a field, but with no opportunity to bale the straw that wheat or barley gives (not that you'll be able afford a baler yet, but keep it in mind for later).
When you can afford a more powerful tractor and the 6m Vaderstad seed drill you won't need to plough or cultivate first - that thing does both jobs. For Bjornholm don't buy the biggest seed drill, as it needs too much space at each end of the field to turn and it's a real pain if you don't plant a headland (a border around the edge of the field) - it's better suited to Westbridge Hills. Never plant grass in a field you may want for something else later as to remove grass you need to use a plough and it can get quite messy. You can also use a plough to combine two fields together for when you get the bigger machines - there's an option when a plough is attached to "limit to fields", which you'd turn off, so it can be handy keeping a small plough even if you don't use it.
When you can afford a fertiliser spreader or a sprayer you can start increasing the yield (I think this doubles the yield for each crop type, but has no effect on grass). You only need one or the other, unlike the real world where you might use several fertilisers and pesticides at different points. You can fertilise at any point from when a field has been harvested up until before the field is ready to harvest (so the final green growth stage (shown as blue on the map in the 'I' menu)), but it's easiest to see what you've fertilised if you do it after you've cultivated or sown. The fertilised status will be reset when you harvest. Note that you can also spread manure instead of fertiliser, but you'll need cows before you can use manure, and again if you manure a field, you don't need to use fertiliser or the sprayer.
When you can afford it, buy another field near the farm. Two fields of fertilised crop will obviously bring in more money and you can have a hired worker do one job while you do another, so...
Don't forget you can use the hired workers too for basic field work. They can harvest, plough, cultivate, seeding and spread fertiliser and spray (I think that's all off the top of my head), so you could do the grain carting while you leave a hired worker to do the harvesting, if you wish. You'll have to pay their wages though (you'll notice your money going down faster in the corner, and you can check how much it has cost you each day in the menu).
Regarding the crops you've harvested, you can keep them at the farm until the price increases (you can check using the 'I' menu) or wait for a great demand (a message will pop up on the screen when a great demand occurs) which will increase the price of an individual crop by as much as 2x when selling*. It's probably not worth waiting for a great demand early on as you'll want to buy new equipment sharpish at the start of the game. Instead, when you want to sell a crop wait for the start of a new in-game hour, and slow the game speed down to 1x (7 key slows the game, 8 increases it (main keyboard, not the numpad)), as the prices change each hour, and once you start selling a crop, the price of that crop can drop dramatically when the hours changes, recovering slowly thereafter, so try to sell what you want to within that hour. Green up arrows indicate a crop's price is rising, while a red down arrow means a price is declining, and it will do this randomly to a degree too.
Try to sell grain at the train station, as you get money when you unload the trailer, plus it doubles if you get out of your tractor and pull the leaver which sets the train away. The extra money will appear in your account a minute or so after the train has left.
* A demand can happen anytime from twice a day to once every 3 days, and you won't know which crop it will be (and it could be silage which you have none of at the start, or wood chips, which you have, but you'll need a front loader with a bucket on your tractor to load it into a trailer and I can't remember if you start with one).
Once you've bought a fertiliser spreader (the cheapest way to increase crop yield) the next purchase should probably be a round baler and a bale auto-stacker, as you can sell bales at the farm (on Bjornholm it's the barn near the farm house with straw coming out of it, I can't remember where it is on the Westbridge Hills). You won't get much for bales, but it can be a half-decent source of income early in the game. You don't need the auto-stacker, you could use a front loader with a bale fork (with a trailer for longer journeys) or a bale spike mod, but Farming Simulator's bale handling physics are long known as a source of frustration, so it's probably best to stick with the auto-stacker.
Potatoes and sugar beet have no benefit in the two stock maps other than harvesting and selling. In some mod maps you can use them to feed beef cattle and pigs, along with wheat and the usual grass-based feed (below).
That covers sowing and harvesting, so I'll move on to milk and wool, which aren't exactly massive money earners and entirely optional. Off the top of my head I think you have exactly zero equipment for cows and sheep at the start of the game. All you do with each animal is keep them fed, make some money and for cows you can also use their liquid manure (slurry) and solid manure.
The following is for cows as sheep are borderline pointless from a money point of view (you can only sell their wool, and not for much), so I tend to ignore them most of the time, as I do the chickens.
For basic feed you can start by cutting grass. You then row it up using a wind-rower, load it into a grass trailer and unload it in the cow shed (or it might be an outside trough on the stock maps). If you want you can sell excess grass at any of the grass heaps placed around the map). You'll probably want to give them straw in the same way, which is used as bedding and increases their milk and this will produce manure.
The next stage is probably to make hay bales. For a hay bale you need to cut grass, turn the grass using a tedder (turns it to dry grass), row it up using a wind-rower and then bale it. To feed a bale you will need a mixing wagon (in the feeding section of the store - a bale shredder may work, but I've not tried it). Make plenty of hay bales as you'll want to combine them with the next part too for full productivity...
Silage. Ah, the real money maker and combined with hay and straw is the source of all goodness for cows. Silage is usually cut grass, which is sealed for months (in real life) to ferment. In farming sim it takes two or three days to ferment. To make silage cut the grass, load the grass up using a grass trailer and dump it in the concrete pit at the cow farm. Once you have a certain amount (I think the minimum is the silage pit has to be 11% full) you can compress it (driving a tractor back and forward over the grass continually, and the heavier the tractor the quicker) and once it's 100% compressed you can cover the pit (the 'R' key I think it is).
To use silage you'd use a mixing wagon and I think you load one round hay bale and one round straw bale and two scoops (front loader on a tractor with a bucket) of silage. I tend to use square bales, which are bigger than round bales, so your mileage might vary. Anyway, you can check what you've made by jumping into a tractor hooked up to the mixing wagon and looking at the top-left hud - you want each of the blue bars between the markers (the |---| things). Don't try to fill the mixing wagon up full as it's unlikely to turn into the magic "mixed ration" which is the gold the cows love for full productivity - it will just be emptied as individual straw, hay and silage rather than mixed ration.
You can cut corn into silage too, using the Krone Big X 1100 with the Easy Collect header, connecting a trailer (I think the only stock trailer which will fit the Krone is the Fleigl Bull - maybe the small Agroliner with its pain of twin axles) or hire a worker for the Krone and run alongside it with a tractor and trailer. You can also cut any crop into silage using the X Disc header (though it's not an efficient use of the other crops). For the British way, use the Easy Flow header and pick up wind-rowed grass, which is much more fun with a mate in multiplayer.
You can also make silage bales, which I *think* is a round hay bale which has been wrapped using the bale wrapper. I say "I think" as in real life (at least here in Northumberland) a silage bale would be made from freshly cut grass, not the dry grass from which a hay bale is made, but by default you can't bale fresh grass in FS15, so here is a mod which allows it: Baler Add Grass.
Any silage you don't need you can sell, and silage sells for a lot. To sell silage you take it to the BGA plant (look on the map) and unload it into one of the bins/hoppers. You can only sell so much before the BGA is full, but you can fast forward time (15x I think is sufficient) which will get it done quicker. You're best off selling silage bales at the BGA, or actually ferment the silage at the BGA (they have their own silage pits) and loading the hoppers with a bucket loader (ideally the large Liebherr wheel loader as it has the biggest bucket).
Once you've cut grass you don't need to sow more or do anything to help it, just wait until it grows again (it takes about two days I think).
A cheat to get a load of money is to collect the 100 gold coins scattered around the map (once you've found 10 the rest will appear on the in-game map). Once done, have a look for a wishing well in one of the forests. As I'm at work I can't remember where the heck it is, but one of the coins is near it, so you'll probably find it yourself! When you deposit the coins down the well you'll find you've got rather a lot of grain in your store ready to sell... That's for Bjornholm - I've no idea if there are even coins on Westbridge Hills.
Anyway, that should be enough for a brief intro into the basics of each aspect of FS15. I won't cover forestry as I've never done it, but there's be plenty of guides on Youtube if that's something you're interested in.
You're missing out on loads if you don't download mods though. Map mods can change large aspects of the game, introducing new animals (beef cattle, pigs, lamb and fattening chickens), new crop types (sunflowers, oats, rye, poppies, etc) and other things. I'll repeat again that Coldborough Park Farm is awesome, but it isn't hired-worker friendly due to the non-square fields, trees and hedgerows, but go around a field a couple of times yourself and if there is sufficient space to turn, the hired worker will usually be able to do most of the field itself - Coldborough also adds beef cows and pigs, as well as needing to give the cows and sheep water.
There are also plenty of British-style tractors, such as an excellent Massey Fergusen pack that has just been released on FS-UK, Timber131 has released some excellent Case tractors, SiiD's Claas combines are great too and there's the Krone baler released in the mod contest which allows you to bale and wrap at the same time without stopping. There's plenty of other mods too. Modded maps prepared with the optional soilmod brings more complexity to the game, where ploughing and cultivating brings benefits, as well as needing to irrigate the soil and spread pesticides and fertilisers.
Mods are installed (as a zip file (some will need extracting first, so have to look to see if there is a zip in the zip)) to the My Documents > My Games > Farming Simulator > Mods folder. They are accessed by opening the shop menu ('P') and clicking the arrow at the top-right twice. I'm happy to share some of my favourite mods if there's any interest and you haven't fallen asleep yet.
Last edited:
Associate
Wow, many thanks for that. I will have to read through it later when I have time. I will also have to bookmark it as I am sure it will be useful to come back to when I start playing the game.
