Rough Guide To Avoiding Penalties When Cutting Twice

[DrNewcenstein]

So you often get the "advice" from the game that the grass on a particular map may be too high to cut in one pass, and you should either cut at a slower speed, or make multiple passes with various deck settings.

However, if you go over a lawn with the wrong deck height - even if you go back over it at the correct height - you get a penalty.

While I'm sure I'm not the first, I've arrived at a solution to avoid the penalty and do a pre-cut: run across the lawn with the trimmer by angling the camera so just the head of the unit is visible. (And I do mean Run - hold the sprint button or set it to toggle on/off. You do not want to walk across the entire map).

Pro-View (Detective Mode, whatever) will show none of the grass as cut, and the Completion % will not indicate you've made any progress, but it will be manageable with the mower.

I tried it on the Royal Stones DLC map, and it took about 45 minutes to pre-cut roughly half the area with the taller stones, if you use the path as the center divider. There are patches I need to dress up, as I first started doing zigs and zags, but once I settled on a more uniform back-and-forth pattern, I was able to separate it into sections without all the zig-zags.

When pre-cutting with a mower, Pro-View shows whatever you've gone over as cut, even though it's at the wrong height, so going back over it at the right setting is a little difficult (been there). Using the trimmer may result in uneven sections, but run up the slopes directly, rather than side-stepping, and you should get a fairly uniform cut.

The current level in Royal Stones I'm working with is 31-43 cm, with a desired cut of 7-8 cm, and I'm using the first Knight mower available (forgot the model - definitely not the OFT, which is my favorite), which has a max height of 8 cm, so going over it twice isn't an option, except with the trimmer. I'm able to run at max speed, but do still have to adjust for thick patches, so it's not exactly making it easy-peasy OP.

Enjoy, and let me know if this works for you, or if you've already discovered this "trick".

[DrNewcenstein]

Final Result:
Map: Royal Stones
Equipment: Knight OFS1 mower and EGO ST1400E-ST trimmer
Specs: 39" deck, 13.7" head
Time: 4 hours 10 minutes
Summary:
I don't think it took less time doing it this way, but I didn't get a penalty for cutting at the wrong height, and I didn't have to creep across the lawn at 0.3 MPH to get it done, which is one of the biggest sources of boredom. Running through with the trimmer doing the pre-cut is definitely tedious, but if you can plan ahead and do it in sections, and set yourself up to be as efficient as possible (I'm not very efficient), then you could probably come in at a respectable time with such low-level gear. I was able to run at max speed of 4.4 MPH, and actual cutting time on that was about 45 minutes. Pre-cutting with the trimmer took 3 hours 20 minutes. The rest of the time was the Ground Check and switching between the trimmer and mower to test the initial theory.