Tips for beginnners

[(TEAMKILL)]

1. Free water. Water from your pump on your farm (any pump on map actually) costs you money. Free water can be obtained by backing the water tank trailer into the river and loading it while submerged. The sandy "beaches" next to natural water formations is the best and safest spot.

2. Starting Tractors. You have more tractors than you really need. Keep your biggest tractor and then the one with the lowest hours. This will give you two tractors to start with.

3. Plant soybeans at first. They cost the least to plant and harvest. At later stages you will need to get more variety.

4. Missions. Many feel that missions pay to much for to little effort and shun them. That is your choice in how you want to play YOUR game. Missions are a good (prob best) way to earn cash. In FS17 all you have to do is show up and provide the labor (time). As the equipment is provided to complete the mission.

5. Logging. Tress are free-for-all all over the map. Logs are worth more the longer and bigger (dimaeter) they are. Wood-chips can pay more than logs if you know how to manipulate the market fluctuations. Log prices do not change, chip prices do. Avoid the Heating Plant (so not worth it) and the smallest chipper (useless PoS).

6. Silage. Cut grass, sweep up grass, dump grass, compact grass, cover grass. Its that simple. It can be more complicated if you want. Free grass is all over the map along all the fields and roads. Clearing trees along the fatter grassy areas can be a double benifit. Logging cash and easier silage base.

Silage can be as easy as mower deck on front, loader trailer on back; cut, pick up, same time; haul to plant, spread as you unload trailer, compact; cover when you decide you have enough. See a guide for more detail.

7. Workers. You can hire workers to run your tractors on many jobs. Allowing you to do more profitable tasks.

8. Test game. Use one of your game save slots to run a "test" game. Sell everything on this test game, you will need none of it. You also have the 200k bank loan available to you. You lease equipment on your test game to see if it does what you need. Test anything that is costly.

9. The right tool for the right job. Useing a HUGE tractor that is costing you big money to pull a bale wrapper is bad. Putting hours on your tools timer makes thier "running" cost go up faster. If a small tractor can do it, use the small tractor.

10. Fertilizer. Fertilizing your fields can increase your yields by 90% (plowing 1-n-3 times returns 10%). Fertilizing can only be done once per growing stage. Depending on your game settings you may need to fertilze once, or three times. The starting sower will fetilize while (first) it plants your crop. For your second (if needed) use a weeder (counts as fetilizer and no mat's cost). Third and final round (if needed) can be done however you have decided.

[(TEAMKILL)]

If you think of something you wish you had known at first, post it and I'll add to list, thx.

[Alshain]

2. I actually reccomend selling all the starting equipment and taking out an extra loan to buy a new harvester, tractor, sowing machine, and cultivator. The loan interest is far less than the equipment maintenance costs. A $200,000 loan has an $850 interest cost, but that harvester is costing you $2000 a night.

If you sell it and buy the cheapest tractor and cheapest combine you can get, you will be saving a lot of money.

[BanDHMO]

7. Hiring workers for all tasks is still profitable (on easy, anyway) and much faster. It lets you run multiple tractors at the same time.

8. Do not freak out at high equipment maintenance. An old tractor that costs 5 times as much to maintain as a new one is still very much profitable to run. Don't get rid of equipment just because it isn't shiny and new, only sell it if you genuinely don't need it and have something better.

9. Working your own fields is a pretty slow way to make money in single player. If you are looking to expand quickly, look to other options, such as:
- missions (tons of easy money quickly)
- solar power / beehives (slow money, but zero effort, making for short days)
- greenhouses (IMHO, a nice compromise between fields and solar, you still have to do a bit of work, but it's not nearly as long and grinding as fields)

[BanDHMO]

Originally posted by Alshain:

2. I actually reccomend selling all the starting equipment and taking out an extra loan to buy a new harvester, tractor, sowing machine, and cultivator. The loan interest is far less than the equipment maintenance costs. A $200,000 loan has an $850 interest cost, but that harvester is costing you $2000 a night.

Your math is true, but it's worth remembering that you can only get one $200,000 loan. There are much better things to spend that money on than replacing perfectly good working equipment. IMHO.

[Alshain]

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Originally posted by Alshain:

2. I actually reccomend selling all the starting equipment and taking out an extra loan to buy a new harvester, tractor, sowing machine, and cultivator. The loan interest is far less than the equipment maintenance costs. A $200,000 loan has an $850 interest cost, but that harvester is costing you $2000 a night.

Your math is true, but it's worth remembering that you can only get one $200,000 loan. There are much better things to spend that money on than replacing perfectly good working equipment. IMHO.

Not really. You need a sower, a cultivator, a tractor, a tipper, and a harverster. After your first paycheck, get a fertilizer. Plus, you can get more that $200,000 loan, that's just all you need (and that includes the starting loan btw). That equipment isn't perfectly good anymore, it's costing you way too much money. You could keep everything but the tractor and harvester if you really want, that stuff isn't costing you all that much, but the harvester really needs to go.

[BanDHMO]

Originally posted by Alshain:

Plus, you can get more that $200,000 loan

How? The "Borrow" button gets disabled after you hit $200K.

With that $200K, instead of buying new equipment, you could've bought 8 greenhouses by a beach. Supplied with free water, they will give you WAY more income every day than the entire maintenance cost of all your equipment combined.

You're advocating spending tons of money in order to save a few thousand, when you could've spent that money to make over ten thousand a day instead.

Don't compare your savings to the cost of the loan, compare it to the money you could've been making if you invested elsewhere. Opportunity cost.

[Sir Crashalot]

10) You can collect grass faster by putting both of the Pottinger mowers on the front (connect to the double then connect that to the single) and a Windrower on the back. For balance reasons you may want to connect the Windrower to your tractor first.

11) Maintenance is paid daily so will be more of an issue if you like to speed up time, if you like to play fast then it is recommended you place some passive incomes to offset the costs, Greenhouses are the best value by far, even if only supplied with water.

12) A good mower/windrower set up (see 10) with a round bailer and wrapper can earn you hundreds of thousands a day at low game speeds but will require a lot of real time and effort.

13) Don't smoke near the slurry tank.

[Alshain]

Another suggesting is to avoid using expensive tractors for small tasks, it drives up the maintenance costs and is much more expensive to replace. Instead of using a front loader on a $150,000 tractor to stack bales, pallets, and clean animal pens, use a $50,000 skid steer.

[Sir Crashalot]

14) If you want to try logging, lease your equipment first. That way, if you decide you don't like it, you will not have lost much.

[Alshain]

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

Originally posted by Alshain:

Plus, you can get more that $200,000 loan

How? The "Borrow" button gets disabled after you hit $200K.

With that $200K, instead of buying new equipment, you could've bought 8 greenhouses by a beach. Supplied with free water, they will give you WAY more income every day than the entire maintenance cost of all your equipment combined.

You're advocating spending tons of money in order to save a few thousand, when you could've spent that money to make over ten thousand a day instead.

Don't compare your savings to the cost of the loan, compare it to the money you could've been making if you invested elsewhere. Opportunity cost.

You are going to spend that money anyway. You aren't going to use that starting equipment forever. All I'm saying is replace it sooner, not later, and it will save you a lot of money. It's not just the maintenance cost that goes up, the price for selling it goes down.

[BanDHMO]

I think we should take the upgrade starting equipment discussion to a different thread, since it's a bit off topic here.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/447020/discussions/0/154643085274323098/

[(TEAMKILL)]

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

I think we should take the upgrade starting equipment discussion to a different thread, since it's a bit off topic here.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/447020/discussions/0/154643085274323098/

hehe, thers already a thread, I think Alshan started on that topic last week.

[Rev Counter]

I'd turn this post and additional tips into a guide :)

[Sound Zero]

In response to your number 10...I disagree with that method.

The most efficient way is to buy one of the cultivator/sower/fertlizer attachments.

After harvest, just plant oilseed.

Takes a day to sprout, immediately plant your chosen crop.

You only need the one piece of equipment for all but root plants, corn and sunflowers.

You can have a plow too if you wish, but that 10% may not be worth the effort in early on cases.

Once you get going, plant wheat or barley. These two crops are accepted the most places and the prices remain stable longer in my experience. Also, alternating helps keep the market from crashing on them.

They both provide you with straw after harvest, and the round baler is cheap to get and the auto-load trailer for them is cheap as well.

They sell on your own farm, making them easy to clear with decent speed once you get the hang of running the baler.

After a few harvests, the baler and trailer will pay off with just the bales you collect. In my experience I was pulling four trailer loads of round bales per field on the starting fields. It's a bit over 2000 per trailer load. That's 8000 per field. Not bank, but it's easy money. Plus the equipment is cheap to maintain and can go a long time without becoming expensive.

One thing about that is that you can sell bales even while storing the grain for better prices or a big demand. Decent way to pay off maintenance costs, and make a little bonus on the side.

And while loggins is profitable, don't underestimate the value of wood chips.

First, you have infinite storage for them, just dump them on the ground somewhere if needed and the price bottoms. You can buy a chainsaw for 1000 bucks, and if you cut the pieces small enough you can just pick them up by hand and feed the chipper.

In my experience, the cost of logging equipment means you have to cut a lot of trees to break even, and while in the long run those trees can bank you more cash, if you sell chips when the price is fair, you can actually make more money on chips for a LOT less equipment investment.

And if you don't like using a bucket to move the chips off the ground, just lease one of the belts for a few hundred bucks. You can actually drive the thing at 1 MPH, so get it close to the pile, drive it close and turn it on. Pull your trailer up and let it fill it up. Note, though, that the smaller trailers are the only ones that are short enough to fill it up with just the single belt. But a few hundred more will get the longer belt, and the two together make short work of the largest piles of chips on the ground. We timed it out, and found it took about 2 minutes to pull 500k chips off the ground with the two belts.

Reset the belts back to the store when done, turn them in, and you're done till next time.

We actually never even moved into full scale logging because chips came out close enough for us that the huge investment in logging equipment just didn't seem worth it. But logging is mega fun, so if you haven't done it...at least try it once.

Just remember that logging requires good cuts of wood to make good money. If you aren't experienced with it, you may find it lacking at first. Long cuts of wood matter...

And you can always chip the tops of trees, which makes more money than selling them to the mill as logs. Test it, you'll see. Those short and thin pieces are more profitable as chips.

Anyway. My 27.334 cents.

Cheers.

[(TEAMKILL)]

Originally posted by Ghostmane:

The most efficient way is to buy one of the cultivator/sower/fertlizer attachments.

Why would you buy one? You are given one free when you start.

After harvest, just plant oilseed. Takes a day to sprout, immediately plant your chosen crop.

IMHO, the oilseed is a total bust and not really thought out addition to the game. Why waste time planting oilseed? I can plant a cash crop in that time. I have not timed it, but I dont think you are saving enough cash to off set the time you lost when a cash crop could be growing. Just to save some pennies you lost out on dollars.

Once you get going, plant wheat or barley. These two crops are accepted the most places and the prices remain stable longer in my experience. Also, alternating helps keep the market from crashing on them.

Wheat and barely cost more to plant. They use more seed than soy does. Each crop uses seed at a differnet rate in the same field. Soy uses the least amount of seed, thus less cash spent to plant.

Each crop gives different yeilds in the same field. Soy and wheat for example. One of my fields yields 15,200 soy vs 30,150 wheat. That means more hauling, more work, more time on my tools, costs more money.

If you track your earnings you will find most of the crops will pay you close to the same on each field. By the time you factor in extra seed cost, extra equipment costs its really hard to decide.

I am on about day 25 of my game, mostly Real Time. I have planted almost exclusively soy. I have yet to blow the price out of to $900 up bracket. I plant, I harvest, I may have to wait a little to sell, but I sell for over $950 evey time before next crop is in. Hard mode.

They both provide you with straw after harvest, and the round baler is cheap to get and the auto-load trailer for them is cheap as well.
They sell on your own farm, making them easy to clear with decent speed once you get the hang of running the baler.

The balers are insanely expensive to use just to sell bales at your barn. You get the same cash selling lose right from a loader. With out all the hassles of dealing with bales. Only reason I can see for baler is if you want to bale silage. That is of course just my opinion.

After a few harvests, the baler and trailer will pay off with just the bales you collect. In my experience I was pulling four trailer loads of round bales per field on the starting fields. It's a bit over 2000 per trailer load. That's 8000 per field. Not bank, but it's easy money. Plus the equipment is cheap to maintain and can go a long time without becoming expensive.

Why do people use thier fields for grass? Its all over the map, for free. I do grass "work" while my crops are growing. Remember I play realtime almost exclusively.

Balers are not cheap by any means. If you are baling hay to sell you are gonna do a lot of work to pay off that 60k baler. A bale of hay is like $125 on my hard game, and as I mentioned, 60k for that baler. Making silage bales will pay it off quickly ($980 each bale), but I do bulk silage and skip the baling and wrapping.