A Quick Guide for New Players - Updated 11th October

[Cypher]

Hi FD fans and please keep updating this pin - especially you, Merck. Thanks mate :)

Many thanks also to those others of you who do the same. FD deserves us all.

I've dumped the original (long) post which was 9 months out of date. Everything else in here is well worth reading, to get you on the long & happy road of farming.

Beers out on the roof this evening!

-Cypher-

[Senior Gracz]

Quick Early Game Money

My 2 cents

In fact all that you need to do has to be done during Day 1 to get the best results.

DAY 1

1. Repair the chicken coop
2. Rebuild the greenhouse with the metal nearby
3. Go to your pantry and attic and take all the food you'll find there
4. Process raw materials into canned food
5. Collect some apples in the orchard (around 50 is enough). Process into canned food.
6. Go to John's shop. If he has any raw produce, buy all. Sell all your cans to him (leave up to 5 for yourself). If you bought anything from him, go back home, process into canned food, resell.
Also buy the grilled sausage and give one to the dog on the other side of the road. It'll run away, but you will meet the dog in other parts of the area. Feed dog with sausage each time you see it. After the fourth time, you have got yourself a dog.
7. Go to the bus stop and go to the agricultural shop (south of you).
8. Buy: 20 chicken (don't bother buying less, you want quick money, right?) and 300 zucchini seedlings. If you can still afford it, buy a cat, if not, we'll get back to it later.

Explanation: Zucchini (and melon) have the shortest vegetation period of 20 days, which means that you can plant and collect three full times until the end of the season (30 September). Your greenhouse can grow 70 trays at once so 3 x 70 = 210, and you'll use the remaining stock later on. You can of course try to buy around 210, but it's too much fiddling with the cursor.

9. Go back and plant your zucchini, water the greenhouse.
10. Start repairing your farm.

And that's it for Day 1.

DAY 2
1. Collect the eggs. Process them into canned eggs. Sell to John. Leave some for yourself to have food for the next days. Buy a fishing rod.
2. Do some fishing (2-3 fish is enough)
3. Buy a cat (unless you have already). Feed one fish to the cat. Buy a rooster. Since you have max hens, if another one hatches, it will be sold automatically, giving you some passive income. Buy some chicken feed.
4. Start repairing your farm. You should be able to complete the repairs within Day 2 and collect more than 50,000 social points in total.

DAY 3 and on
1. Every morning, collect the eggs. Put them in the pantry. Do not sell anything yet unless you have to.
2. Do the quest for Oliver, get the tractor.
3. Look for other jobs. The machines you want to collect and transfer to your farm are:
a. the harvester with wheat header
b. the baler
c. grain trailer
d. bale trailer
======================================
4. Harvest the wheat field.
5. Sell the grain to the mill.
6. Hire a worker to harvest and sell the canola (you will get more money even with the harvesting cost than harvesting it yourself)
7. Bale the straw with the baler. Collect bales and put them in the barn or sell to the agricultural market. Not very much money, but still money :)

I recommend harvesting wheat since I do not know where the workers sell it, and the mill offers way better price than the agricultural market
=====================================

Every morning [TAB} > Farm Statistics. You'll know the number of eggs to collect and also when your zucchini is ready for harvest.
Visit the greenhouse from time to time. The statistics may show "Perfect" humidity, but it's not always the case.

On Day 21 Collect the zucchini and plant new seedlings right away. Do not sell.
=======================================

Don't rush with rebuilding your farm. Spend the free time fishing and picking apples and mushrooms. While looking for mushrooms/strawberries, hold your RMB pressed. It highlights the harvestable objects.

Continue collecting eggs, mushrooms, apples, strawberries until September. Then the September Festival opens and you'll find Rose with her stand in the Town of Redberry (North-West of you, the bus stop near the gas station. Rose will offer you much better price than John.

Also, until September and through September, find people willing to trade, and buy all their raw produce from them. Process into canned food, sell to Rose, profit.

Do all the quests for social points

Do quests for money, e.g. deliver (the price for the product is always way higher than at the shops, so you profit easily), transport (it is usually collecting and bringing a parcel, not real transport of goods), repair...

In the process, buy all three cookbooks, but sell them back after you have read them.

As a side note: the dishes from the cookbooks are nice, but their selling price is less than the sum of ingredients after canning. You'll have to make your own maths to decide whether you want to sell the canned food or the ready made dishes.

If all goes well, you should collect 210 x 8 = 1680 zucchini from your greenhouse (560 each 20 days), which should bring in a substantial amount of money.

NOTE: John does not replenish his supplies. The people in the Town of Redberry do, but not every day, so don't be surprised if they have nothing to sell.

NOTE: Use your RMB to show you where to place bee hives, and scarecrows in your fields.

You can hire workers to work your fields for you :).
You can start to rebuild your farm completely (remember about solar roof tile (gives money and social points), and if all goes well, at the end of the season, you should have enough money to buy yourself the greenhouse complex near the bus stop West of you. Or another field or whaterver you wish.

All comments and questions welcome

Good luck!

[Merck]

Lots of very useful information here Robertus. Should really be handy for all players.

[OldKarli]

well done guide...........thx. I startet a new game and will follow lol

[ethereal]

Thank you Robertus for taking the time to write this guide!

[Everton coutinho]

jogo muito bom

[Merck]

Green Manure

There are often postings about the cultivating jobs that have a player work a field with a standing crop in it. Many calling it a bug or a glitch, but I think of it as something farmers have often done.

This was a common practice in the years prior to the mass fertilization practices that are common these days. Previously, fertilizers were much more expensive, & farmers had to do with what was available to them.

So the farmer would use the crop as a green manure, which in my area (Minnesota) is usually a hay type crop such as alfalfa. But either way the crop is plowed under to enrich & help loosen the soil by working some fibrous matter into it, while also adding some natural nitrogen that the plants have gathered from the air

Alfalfa is part of the legume family. This means it has the ability to fix nitrogen from the air and store it in nodules in their roots. So these cold-weather legumes will grab the nutrient from the air & store it for use during the growing season, which then is plowed down to take advantage of those nutrients.

Winter rye puts on a huge amount of growth in the spring, and establishes easily even into late November. And the best part of rye is its ability to hold fertility over the winter. Even when 2 to 4 inches high in November, it binds up many of the soluble nutrients that might otherwise disappear down to the water table. Then there is the bonus of a large crop of green manure to plow down in the spring.

And finally, many players have found that they can make it work real well for themselves, by first harvesting the standing crop, & then cultivating it for the farmer.
Win - Win.

[Merck]

Old Seeder

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1960482393
Many report having problems backing this piece of equipment. The reason is that the planting mechanisms (drills) are in the lowered positions. Unfortunately this seeder does not state the key to raise or lower the grain drills in the upper left of the screen as all other equipment does.

The Operate 1 - up/down key (default R), will raise or lower the grain drills. You can see this small amount of movement if you watch carefully, or you can often see the difference in the ground texture if the drills are down. And you cannot back this seeder up if the drills are in the down position.

[Pozzy Thump]

"Don't compliment her too often, or she won't be a complement to you."



Wheat and Canola only. I've heard some be saying that two more might be possible.

I've had two fields of peas, next to each other, and if one didn't have an indicator of being "ready for harvest," I would have thought those were the tall tan weeds. Not so pleasing to the eye. I am going to see what they look like after the winter, grown over the winter with a small field (that tiny one to the SSE).

Didn't know barley was still going for 3000 a bale - I thought that changed with some developer-work in December. Do the sale prices fluctuate due to demand? Perhaps that would be a good reason to have barley when no one else (proverbial NPC's) is selling it..

I also like the thought of keeping track of the crops by growing only a certain one in each part of the map. Peas down below me, maize up by Redberry, maybe soy down in the Old Man's Wharf. Wheat near the silos, for a shorter trip to sell the bales. This also works well for the idea of keeping one tractor near a group of fields of one crop; they all should be ready at the same time. You can do a blink-transport there, and blink back in time for honey stuff.

GO ASK ALICE, WHEN HER CORN'S TEN FEET TALL:
If you really want the freak-out, put on some Jefferson Airplane and walk diagonally through a well-grown cornfield. Psychedic, man!

~pozzy thump

[Pozzy Thump]

Originally posted by Robertus Lubin:

Quick Early Game Money

My 2 cents

In fact all that you need to do has to be done during Day 1 to get the best results.

DAY 1

1. Repair the chicken coop
2. Rebuild the greenhouse with the metal nearby
3. Go to your pantry and attic and take all the food you'll find there
4. Process raw materials into canned food
5. Collect some apples in the orchard (around 50 is enough). Process into canned food.
6. Go to John's shop. If he has any raw produce, buy all. Sell all your cans to him (leave up to 5 for yourself). If you bought anything from him, go back home, process into canned food, resell.
Also buy the grilled sausage and give one to the dog on the other side of the road. It'll run away, but you will meet the dog in other parts of the area. Feed dog with sausage each time you see it. After the fourth time, you have got yourself a dog.
7. Go to the bus stop and go to the agricultural shop (south of you).
8. Buy: 20 chicken (don't bother buying less, you want quick money, right?) and 300 zucchini seedlings. If you can still afford it, buy a cat, if not, we'll get back to it later.

Explanation: Zucchini (and melon) have the shortest vegetation period of 20 days, which means that you can plant and collect three full times until the end of the season (30 September). Your greenhouse can grow 70 trays at once so 3 x 70 = 210, and you'll use the remaining stock later on. You can of course try to buy around 210, but it's too much fiddling with the cursor.

9. Go back and plant your zucchini, water the greenhouse.
10. Start repairing your farm.

And that's it for Day 1.

DAY 2
1. Collect the eggs. Process them into canned eggs. Sell to John. Leave some for yourself to have food for the next days. Buy a fishing rod.
2. Do some fishing (2-3 fish is enough)
3. Buy a cat (unless you have already). Feed one fish to the cat. Buy a rooster. Since you have max hens, if another one hatches, it will be sold automatically, giving you some passive income. Buy some chicken feed.
4. Start repairing your farm. You should be able to complete the repairs within Day 2 and collect more than 50,000 social points in total.

DAY 3 and on
1. Every morning, collect the eggs. Put them in the pantry. Do not sell anything yet unless you have to.
2. Do the quest for Oliver, get the tractor.
3. Look for other jobs. The machines you want to collect and transfer to your farm are:
a. the harvester with wheat header
b. the baler
c. grain trailer
d. bale trailer
======================================
4. Harvest the wheat field.
5. Sell the grain to the mill.
6. Hire a worker to harvest and sell the canola (you will get more money even with the harvesting cost than harvesting it yourself)
7. Bale the straw with the baler. Collect bales and put them in the barn or sell to the agricultural market. Not very much money, but still money :)

I recommend harvesting wheat since I do not know where the workers sell it, and the mill offers way better price than the agricultural market
=====================================

Every morning [TAB} > Farm Statistics. You'll know the number of eggs to collect and also when your zucchini is ready for harvest.
Visit the greenhouse from time to time. The statistics may show "Perfect" humidity, but it's not always the case.

On Day 21 Collect the zucchini and plant new seedlings right away. Do not sell.
=======================================

Don't rush with rebuilding your farm. Spend the free time fishing and picking apples and mushrooms. While looking for mushrooms/strawberries, hold your RMB pressed. It highlights the harvestable objects.

Continue collecting eggs, mushrooms, apples, strawberries until September. Then the September Festival opens and you'll find Rose with her stand in the Town of Redberry (North-West of you, the bus stop near the gas station. Rose will offer you much better price than John.

Also, until September and through September, find people willing to trade, and buy all their raw produce from them. Process into canned food, sell to Rose, profit.

Do all the quests for social points

Do quests for money, e.g. deliver (the price for the product is always way higher than at the shops, so you profit easily), transport (it is usually collecting and bringing a parcel, not real transport of goods), repair...

In the process, buy all three cookbooks, but sell them back after you have read them.

As a side note: the dishes from the cookbooks are nice, but their selling price is less than the sum of ingredients after canning. You'll have do your own math to decide whether you want to sell the canned food or the ready-made dishes.

If all goes well, you should collect 210 x 8 = 1680 zucchini from your greenhouse (560 each 20 days), which should bring in a substantial amount of money.

NOTE: John does not replenish his supplies. The people in the Town of Redberry do, but not every day, so don't be surprised if they have nothing to sell.

NOTE: Use your RMB to show you where to place bee hives, and scarecrows in your fields.

You can hire workers to work your fields for you :).
You can start to rebuild your farm completely (remember about solar roof tile (gives money and social points), and if all goes well, at the end of the season, you should have enough money to buy yourself the greenhouse complex near the bus stop West of you. Or another field or whatever you wish.

All comments and questions welcome

Good luck!

This is a great post, for those who don't want that hassle of finding out the nuances yourself, and the enjoyment of a long & relaxing game.

At least 95% of these things would, yes, be a very quick way to make that money and get to the end of your 4-hour game.

[Senior Gracz]

Originally posted by Pozzy Thump:

Originally posted by Robertus Lubin:

Quick Early Game Money

My 2 cents

In fact all that you need to do has to be done during Day 1 to get the best results.

This is a great post, for those who don't want that hassle of finding out the nuances yourself, and the enjoyment of a long & relaxing game.

At least 95% of these things would, yes, be a very quick way to make that money and get to the end of your 4-hour game.

On the contrary, my friend. This is a way to a long and relaxing game, since your crops grow next season, and you have plenty of time to investigate the game, the surroundings, the people, hunt for chests and whatever your heart desires. It's just that you have more of a kick-start at the beginning. :)

[Merck]

Baling straw

1. First you have to harvest the crop with a combine;
   https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1970523816
   Both wheat & barley will give straw piles that can be baled.
   
   
2. Next you bale the straw with one of the balers;
   https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1970523161
   https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1583629746
   
   • Just drive down around the fields - centered on the rows of straw. There is no rake in this game, which IRL would be used to combine or narrow the straw piles, but the balers do have a wide pickup range, so real easy to do.
     
   • Almost all other field tasks benefit from Cruise Control (default T), but I personally just drive around the field, adjusting my speed according to conditions.
     
   • You can just drive around the fields with the balers, which will drop the bales on the ground, but then you will have to make a second pass around the fields with a hay wagon, & manually pickup the bales & place them on the wagons.
     
   • Awhile back an update added the auto-load feature that if you have one or more wagons hitched behind the baler, it would automatically stack the bales onto the wagons.
   
   
3. Disposing of bales;
   
   • You can sell the bales at the grain elevator, which is located just south west of the farm;
     https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1244148484
     There is a Bale Market just inside the elevator, where you will receive a prompt to Sell Bales.
     NOTE: You can also receive this Sell Bales prompt, just outside the fence, from where you would drive inside to sell the bales.
     https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1254997267
     
   • You can also use the bales to feed your cows. All you have to do is drop the bales just inside any of the doors in the cow barn. I often drive the wagon up to the south doors, & drop them right there. Every so often use the Engineer's Sight (RMB) to check how full the cow's feed is.

[Bysel]

the auto load just works with the new bale wagon...or with the old one too??

[Merck]

Originally posted by Bysel:

the auto load just works with the new bale wagon...or with the old one too??

All hay wagons. And the old one can be hitched behind the new hay wagons also.

[Merck]

Beginning game equipment

There are beginning game quests (sort of the built-in tutorial), that you can get the beginning equipment in exchange for doing some work.

1. Jack Bear C tractor - fix some of Oliver's buildings.
   
2. Old plow - Clara wants a field plowed & cultivated.
   
3. Harvester with both grain & corn headers - Janet's greenhouses & other buildings on farm.
   
4. Old hay wagon - fix some greenhouses & a few buildings.
   
5. Old fertilizer spreader - talk to a male NPC & convince him to ask the lady out.
   
6. Old grain wagon - fix a small greenhouse & a hay barn.
   
7. Old slurry spreader - fix a hay barn.
   
8. Old planter - plow a good sized field.
   
9. Old baler - fix farm buildings for a gentleman that is wishing to return to the sea.

Note: these quests can be done in any order you desire. Some items you may not need initially, so you can do them as you require the equipment or as some players do, they get the old equipment - use it once or so - then sell it for some extra income.

Additionally; All current quests in the game only require Repairing & NOT Upgrading. So you do not have to purchase any building materials for any of these quests.

Note 2: Upgrading or fixing these old equipment will increase their efficiency & capacity about 10%. So may be worthwhile fixing before using. But that will require funds generated from others sources initially.

Alternative starting income sources:

1. Buy some chickens - use eggs for food & sell extra. BUT upgrade foods before selling to get better cash value.
   
2. Buy raw foods from John's store & random NPC's. Then upgrade all raw foods before selling them.
   
3. Do NOT use other foods to satisfy hunger - eggs are one of the cheapest items, & will keep your character satisfied until you can get more financially stable.
   
4. Harvest produce from the surrounding countryside - then upgrade & sell.
   
   • Mushrooms
     
   • Raspberries
     
   • Apples - Other NPC's do not seem to care if you harvest all the apples from their trees.
5. Plant what seeds you have in the greenhouse. Then over time purchase a few more seeds to use all available greenhouse space.
   
6. Once funds increase, purchase a cow. Milk & then upgrade to canned, to sell to John's Store or other NPC's.
   
7. Solar panels are a steady income source (clear skies, etc..). High cost initially but if can afford to buy a skid, install on a roof.
   
8. Treasure chests are scattered all over the map. They often contain good loot that can be sold for a decent revenue income. Or saving you the cost of having to buy some of the tools.

[Merck]

Uploading screenshots to forums – [GUIDE]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2123939380
I created this guide in Lumberjack Dynasty, but the procedures are exactly the same in any Steam game.