farm planner

[El goblin]

hey everyone, is there any online tool or spreadsheet prepared to help me layout my farm in advance? ty

[Darkness Vortex]

That could be pretty awesome.
I was just using grid paper to plan out mine. xD

[El goblin]

Originally posted by Darkness Vortex:

That could be pretty awesome.
I was just using grid paper to plan out mine. xD

yeah I was about to do that too xD was hoping for some fancy tool

[Darkness Vortex]

Yeah, a fancy tool would be useful, but may have to be a fan-made thing like SDV has. If you have access to a database or spreadsheet program, you could potentially make a grid of squares 280? x 140? and then fill in each cell with colors and letters/numbers/characters, possibly images, to represent each kind of thing you would want to place. A legend to keep track of everything may be in order if it's not readily rememberable. :D

[jackofshadows]

I’ve determined a very workable way to design a FT2 farm.

I tried various autocad and drawing type programs and found them to be just too complex. I finally figured out a way to do it with LibreOffice Calc (free open source spreadsheet). I would imagine that Excel would work the same way.

This is going to work for you only if you are quite familiar with using spreadsheets – or you’re willing to learn! (Spreadsheets can mushroom into incredible unnecessary complexity quite quickly – and before you know it!)

Here goes:

* Select 280 columns and format the width to be 0.15”.
* Select 140 rows and format the height to be 0.15”.
* Choose the 281st column, give it an arbitrary large width and format it with a black color.
* Choose the 141st row, give it an arbitrary large height and format it with a black color.
* Duplicate this sheet.

You now have a layout for a fully opened farm as well as a separate sheet to use for templates.

* On the template sheet, you can now create blocks of crop, tree, flower, animal, fish objects.
* To start – select a block of empty cells. (Each cell representing a tile on the farm.)
* Format a color for the block of cells you have selected. (e.g. green for trees, yellow for flowers, blue for fish etc.)
* Copy/Paste a simple text border on the edge cells of the block. (I just use an “X” in each edge cell.) The block is now quite distinct.
* You can also type some sort of identification in any middle cell(s) of the block. (e.g. “6 Animals; 18 tiles wide by 34 tiles deep” or “40 Trees; 120 tiles wide by 34 tiles deep” or “1 Farmhand; 17 tiles wide by 17 tiles deep”.)
* Repeat these steps for creating whatever objects and sizes you want to plan for in your farm.
(edited to hopefully make it a little easier to understand)

You can now copy/paste the block “objects” you’ve created on your template sheet onto the actual farm layout sheet.

Some key points to keep in mind:

* Color coding each block and giving them a simple text border makes it easy to see each area/block and thus select it.
* In LibreOffice, when a block of cells is selected, you can hold the mouse button down on the selection and drag that selection anywhere you want on the sheet. Thus you can paste something from the template sheet and drag it around on the farm layout until you have it exactly where you want it.
* It is important to NOT do any formatting (other than the color formatting to create the blocks) on either of the 2 sheets. When you copy/paste, you won’t have odd formatting appearing and disappearing!
* DO NOT delete cells, rows or columns on either of the 2 sheets. Doing so will deform the farm layout. Instead, use the various spreadsheet commands to ‘clear content’ and ‘remove formatting’ if you need to clear any text or color formatting.

A final note (edit): Most drawing/cad software is 3 dimensional - i.e. they have "layers" and objects can be moved on top of one another. A spreadsheet is 2 dimensional. If you copy something on top of another, you will lose something! I believe LibreOffice will warn you if you attempt this - but just keep it in mind.

[jackofshadows]

I have turned my post above into a guide, It is possibly a little overwhelming, Kirita, and I apologize for that.

For anyone who is spreadsheet savvy and interested, check out a slightly more detailed and - hopefully - more understandable version in the Guides section.