How does this compare to Farming Simulator?

[TofuStranger]

I'm curious how this compares to Farming Simulator 2022 if anyone has played that as well

[eggzntaters]

I've just recently started playing Farming Sim 22. I think the two games have quite a different feel to them. Farming Sim is more a mega agricultural corporation, managerial type game, whereas Ranch Sim has more of a hands on, small homestead type farm feel to it. They both are fun to play, but just don't quite have the same feel to them.

[LittleTofoo]

Yes, basically as the previous poster said. FS is running a huge farming operation, and it's more about driving tractors, working growing amounts of land and creating a modern agricultural empire. Ranch Sim is is like... a PC version of those mobile games that start with "your grandpa left you a falling apart farm". You do everything with your own two hands. You don't just plop down a building, you fell trees, make lumber and build things bit by bit. There aren't huge fields and 20 tractors (though you can have 2 smaller fields and a bit of machinery once you can afford it, for the sake of feeding your animals etc). You don't just have a coop that has 5 chicken sprites in it while the "real number" of chickens in it is 50 and then a pallet of eggs doesn't mysteriously spawn every morning. You actually select a coop type, build it, paint it if you wish, you purchase a chicken and rooster at the local shop, put them in your vehicle, drive them home, put them in the coop, feed them, give them water, and them come with a basket to get eggs every day, which you can then check with an ovoscope to see if some might be fertile, and if you put those back, baby chicks will hatch. So yeah, it is a slower paced, hands on simulation of living on a small ranch / homestead, not a farm management money maker sim.

[CSI48]

I dosen't. they're 2 different games.

[richv68]

Day (FS22) and night (this). On FS22 you have literally hundreds of machines (including tractors, harvesters, and every possible equipment you can ever need for farming), plus myriads of extras from mods. The FS franchise has already evolved the game through several generations of the game (FS22 being the latest, and soon FS25 will release). Anyone who tells you FS22 is less hands-on than RanchSim has not played FS22. In FS22 you're as hands on as you want to be, to the point that any machine/vehicle you want to use (whether you buy or rent) you can control it, but also you can use peripherals such as steering wheels and pedals (if you play driving games etc), or even dual joysticks for other machines. Or just your keyb/mouse, or a gaming controller. It's totally up to you, and the physics of the vehicles have been tweaked for years now and are insanely better than anything on RanchSim and its few ice-on-hot-skillet trucks and couple of farming options.

The thing with FS22 is that beyond a far far more engaging and perfected hands-on experience, you have a vastly superior range of choices to grow your farm and use your time. You usually start similar to RanchSim, with some money and a small plot, but by managing contracts for your neighbors and other clients, you can keep earning income that allows you to buy better equipment, more plots of land, begin incorporating industrial uses for the products you farm, and even start hiring AI-based extra hands (or you can play coop as well) so you can (only if you choose to!) delegate most things that you could do yourself in the game. But it's totally up to you to decide this. Or do all of it yourself. Some Youtubers do just this. they keep a small farm and enjoy the pleasure of using their old small tractors and vehicles, and just go farming at their pace; it's especially nice to see and hear some real life farmers do this and love the whole experience using models of their real life equipment). The game has several DLCs whose reception by players vary based on the players' preferences. There is so so vastly more to do there that it's painful to even try to compare both games.

The ONLY thing that FS22 misses (and really the only reason RanchSim has barely a hope of existing in this planet) is that in FS22 when they added a ranching component, they did it to support their farming activities. So for example, one of the many specialized crops in the game (specialized as in "it will need dedicated equipment at least for some steps") is sugar (which in the game can come from sugar cane or from sugar beet, both needing special vehicles for planting and/or harvesting; what amazing pieces of engineering). I've spent way too many hours watching Youtube videos of FS22 machines that, for the life of me, could never believe they exist ILR, and then I go and see real American farmers use them in our country's fields (and some overseas, why not), and realize just how good and realistic the in-game models are, to the actual operation speeds and load capacities. Then you go to the only harvester in RanchSim, barely driveable, and begin to cry in your heart...

So back to sugar, you could decide to set up a plot for farming sugar beets and then sell them to open market, or you can deliver the sugar beets to a sugar factory for profit (if game-owned) or to produce your own sugar (if you own the sugar factory) and get better profit per amount of beet. But then the FS devs added a barn and basically a cattle industry, so you could also produce milk (if you buy and breed milk cattle; there are meat cattle creeds in game as well) and you can then produce chocolate with the sugar and milk (the game has no cocoa yet). Chocolate gets even better profit, so if you get loans from the in-game's bank to set up your chocolate industry, eventually you'll pay the loan and catch and pass your profit line above beets or sugar alone. And you found a motivation to jump into ranching. But do remember: at any moment YOU can do ANY of the operations required for all this (all the field work to plant and harvest beets, the harvesting and delivery to the sugar factory, the purchasing of each cow and transport using those models of cool looking real-life cattle trailers, etc) to your ranch, the proper preparation of food and water for them, etc. Then the milk delivery to chocolate factory, and so on. Or you can delegate any and all to the AI drivers (supported by brilliant mods like AutoDrive or CoursePlay). And this is just the cattle-for-chocolate example from many production lines they have, some that involve ranching and some don't.

So why RanchSim? Well, the FS devs made a choice (which at any point they could change) that the barns, coops and pig areas (forgot their in-game name) are kind of rabbit holes. I.e. you can do EVERYTHING related to them (even drive a tanker to collect slurry from the pigs to use as fertilizers in specialized machines in your fields, again either you doing this or paying an AI contractor), but the ONLY thing you cannot do is have your character actually interact with a cow or a pig or a chicken. You do not collect by hand the eggs. Instead, after a while enough chicken have produced eggs so that a pallet loaded with eggs appears in the loading area of the chicken pen. Similarly, you will not milk one cow at a time. Instead, you can collect the milk with another tanker at the pick up point of the barn, etc. You get the point.

Si that's it. It's THE ONLY reason why RanchSim can even be compared. if you want to actually carry the eggs, check if they are fertilized, fight with each pig to force them into their pens, milk a cow by hand, etc, that's why you would play RanchSim. that's what they did uniquely in their game, and for the most part THAT part of their game works well (with some room for improvement and a lot for adding more). Anything else in RanchSim is done insanely better, with more details, quality and depth elsewhere (FS22 being an obvious but not the only choice). The hands on interaction with animals is really THE ONLY thing RanchSim has going for it. Yet instead of improving it, the devs try desperately to broaden the game's scope and end up with embarrassing attempts like a handful of pre-defined fields to do farming, when in FS22 you can basically create fields anywhere where there is no physical buildings (so long as you can finance them), or you can join (or split) your fields, or reshape them at will, or buy off your neighbors land, demolish stuff, take out any tree, and create a massive field of whatever crop you want (with modders adding capacity for even more crops).

And did i mention mods? Hundreds of them, many supported literally for years? On the other hand you have the stone-age mentality of the RanchSim devs arguing that they have no plans for a 21-century game to have mod support, and similar primitive gamers supporting this. Then you go play FS22 and develop a new addiction, to add yet just another new mod of the week, if anything just to add more colors to your favorite tractor, whereas the RanchSim devs devoted a good portion of a major update just to a few colors on the coolers we use to carry sausages (big deal, i guess...?). In FS22 many modders handle stuff like this, so the devs could (if they chose) to focus on more core-oriented stuff (note that they have also had their own bone-head moments, in all fairness...). It's insane the power of modding, and sad when it's not understood...

So just go and see in Youtube the handful of RanchSim supporters clinging desperately to their game, and then see the myriad of things (including HANDS-ON!!!) you can do in FS22, and make your choice. See how some people are using wheels, pedals, two joysticks (there's now a farming-oriented joystick and corresponding matching left-sided control panel by Thrustmaster, called SimTask for FS22, just in case you're still not "hands on" enough like others say...), eye/head tracking software (like Toby tracking), etc, to operate any machine you want. Then scratch your head why anyone would say that RanchSim is "more hands on" (maybe the devs' girlfriends posting?) than FS22. And then realize some may have "just started" to play a game they feel entitled to criticize. Don't fall for that. Go do your proper homework and check that game out yourself. A real farming simulator.

My only hope for RanchSim is for the devs to realize that they DO have a hope to hold a critical place in the game industry, in their hands-on RANCH side. Their driving is preposterous (play FS22 for a few dozen hours on all the machines they have and then try defending RanchSim's pathetic "driving"). If RanchSim ever fixed their driving physics to be to the very least acceptable (more akin to the pre-UE5 update), and if they keep building on their ranch aspects, they could have something (oil fields, really? cats?). Look at the insane flexibility of the economics of FS22. So many ways to manage what you do with what you produce. FS22 has a real forestry industry with dedicated machines to bring down and process trees (some people whine about this, but most of us have understood the in-game tree mechanics and do quite well). Then a full DLC is dedicated to expanding forestry even more.

I could go on and on. Just go watch a few videos, and give the game a chance and make up your mind. But NO, there's no comparison in here. FS22 is a real farming simulator (and again, not the only one in the gaming industry); RanchSim's farming is a terrible, sad, embarrassing attempt, likely desperately driven by marketing goals to "broaden" the scope of the game and to entice more people to buy the game under the "oh, and you can farm too!" premise. When you go and play a real simulator you cannot avoid get so annoyed at the RanchSim devs because they cannot stop wasting their times on these pathetic efforts instead of going back to the true few things they bring to the gaming industry, to make THOSE better, and to fix the broken essentials that would make their game relevant. It's really a sad story, but they may surprise us and abandon all nonsense and return to their core and make it better.

[SOMEDAKILL]

[Apocalypse]

I actually really like the "manual" feeling of Ranch Sim, the crafting, building. interacting, even up to the loading of a car making everything fit.Maybe it gives me more immersion, I dont know. Immersion is usually one of the most important things for me. But I agree that there is not that much content, I actually force myself to not use some of the really snowbally stuff like oil pumps so that I dont reach the "end" too soon. And even then it does not take that long.

The only activity that I have seenin Farming Sim that seems to wotk in a comparable way is the tree sawing? I have not seen that much so maybe I am wrong. Things automaticcaly appearing in crates I would def not like in a game where I am the one controlling a character, dont mind it in city builders and stuff.
But maybe I am incorrect.
Another thing that always kept me from buying Farm Sim is the scope, I always see people having to work on a field monotomously for a long time because of its size, does anyone actually have fun preparing, sewing and than harveting such a large field for so long just staring at the screen row after row? Or is it something you just have to sit through because you want the field to be doen? Would defeat the purpose of engaging in entertainment in that case for me, cause I would not find it entertaining.

I actually hope I am wrong cause those things keep me from trying out farm sim.

[dragonsphotoworks]

Like richv68 said its huge different.

FS25 is out now and this pales in comparison. Even "beta" fs25 runs lot better then this for me. Also FS25 is more fleshed out BUT it is a large farm focused game. You dont manually pick up single eggs. You get pallets to spawn.

I prefer FS25 in many ways except a few.. Here can build as wish. As have "parts" you can use to build with to design the look. It is what I always wanted in FS but they never added it.. and likely never will sadly.

Driving is so much better in FS series then here. UTV and physics for it... with out writting a a book on whats wrong with it ill just say it sucks badly.

If want a running mega farm or corporation FS is way to go. If want tiny farm and more.. hands on with each step then this is fine. If had to choose one it would be FS hands down. This game should be still in EA and have long way to go. Too much is chunky or badly done. Stacking logs is a royal pita. Tried to load UTV with logs and takes for ever to get them to line up so will place.

So for fun.. FS.
For frustration or tiny farm and hands on.. This.

[Guybrush]

Farming simulator: 10/10
This game: 0/10