Customize Farm Terrain Chunks

This guide outlines the method to creating a completely custom, hand-crafted farm layout rather than relying on the default randomly generated terrain.

Introduction

As it stands, the only real choice you have when it comes to farm layout is the farm type (default, water, mountains, or flat) and then randomly generating a bunch of farms until you find one that works for you. So long as the devs don't change anything about save storage, this will allow you to tweak your farm by swapping a few chunks here or there, or completely build your dream farm from the ground up.

I get that some people will consider this cheating or at least a door to it, but where there is a will there is a way; it's the Unity engine. If you want to cheat infinite money and ribbons go ahead; you'll just be stealing hours of gameplay from yourself. I want to cultivate an atmosphere of fun modding and people helping eachother enjoy the game even more.

So, with all that said: let's Cartograph Together.

Getting Started

The first step is to decide what it is you want to do. You can swap a few chunks if you want, but this guide will go over a complete redesign. Let's start by seeing what our options are. Below are six randomly generated farms that give us a pretty good selection of what is available. There's ~50 ChunkIDs here, but there are probably more. The game must have three pools of chunktypes (default, water, and mountain) in which every map has default chunks, but is sprinkled with some type-specific chunks too.

Default Farms:

Mountain Farms:

Water Farms:

My recommendation is to write down the ChunkIDs you want or make a little map or something because it's easy to lose your place when editing. If you are starting a fresh new farm, continue to the next step. If you are swapping chunks on an existing farm, recycle or move everything out of the target chunk(s) and create a backup copy of your farm.

For this guide, I will start on a flat farm and do this ridiculous layout to demonstrate what this method is capable of.
The backslash will be "FiveMountains", the two verticals will be "Lake", and the circle will be "Flat_Chunk".

Modifying Chunks

Now that we've got a plan, we can start making some changes to our farm. Navigate to your Farm Together farm saves, typically located at:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\(YOUR USER ID)\673950\remote\Farms"

If you are swapping chunks, make that backup copy now. If you are starting fresh, make a dummy flat farm in game: we will be injecting into it.

Open your farm or dummy farm with 7zip. You can probably use WinRAR, but it is finicky with editing files within an archive. In 7zip, right click the farm file and click "Edit" in the drop down. This will open in your default text editor (probably notepad). Don't be afraid if it looks like hell; this stores the state and contents of every tile in every chunk.

Now, this is wear the guide splits.

If you are SWAPPING chunks

Ctrl+F to find ChunkID you want to replace and change it to the one you want in this document. So "ChunkId":"Lake" would be changed to "ChunkId":"Hills" or whatever you want. You may have more than one instance of the would-be swapped ChunkID, so refrain from using the replace function unless you know exactly which chunk you are changing. Let's say we are replacing the top left chunk, that would be: "ChunkId":"Lake","Unlocked":"false","ChunkPosition":"0,4" -->
"ChunkId":"Hills","Unlocked":"false","ChunkPosition":"0,4"

Refer to this coordinate chart:

If you are COMPLETELY REDESIGNING from scratch

Keep the notepad open, but don't make any changes to it. Instead, open this formatted and cleared out map data into a new window. I suggest notepad++ because it allows you to view it neatly.
www.mediafire com/file/7l462ib1nlv4e1i/FARM+FORMAT.txt (Add a period)


If you're not comfortable downloading a random file that's alright, it's just messier without the formatting.

Now go down the list replacing ChunkIDs as you wish (in the downloaded file, or in directly in your farm), and custom tailor your farm to your tastes or the collective tastes of whoever you'll be farming with. So long as you type the ID right, you can swap out anything including the starting chunk. Just remember that the FIRST chunk is the bottom left, and the LAST chunk is the top right.

Here is my bizarre layout in text:

Once you're done with the layout, change the very top line farm style to either default (normal xp) or leave it at flat (hard mode, reduced xp).
"FarmStyle":"FarmStyleFlat" --> "FarmStyle":"FarmStyleDefault" (or leave it)

Now save your first notepad if you edited right in there OR copy all the formatted data into it and then save it. If you're copying the formatted data in, completely clear out the other document before pasting so you don't have duplicate chunk data. Don't worry about the formatting, the game will strip it out upon loading. After saving, close the farm data document, 7zip will say the document has been modified. Hit "OK" to update the archive.

Test it, Tweak it, Test it again

If you used the formatted template, leave it open until you are sure everything looks right. Open up your farm in game and see how it looks. If something is out of place, the wrong chunk coordinate was changed. If you get a loading error or the whole farm is wrong, there was a typo: ex. "FveMountain" instead of "FiveMountains".

This is how my monstrosity turned out:


A disaster, just like we planned.

After you get the hang of it, and everything is where you want it you are free to close everything and start working on your dream farm!

[VietNam 30/4/1975]

First of all, please allow me to say hello to the Farm Together community, I am a Vietnamese who really likes this game of yours and I would like to ask if there is a pretty cool idea that would be great if it were updated into the Farm Together game. character customization section, since you have to exit Farm Together for yourself and your friends, why don't you upgrade the wardrobe in your house? In Farm Together, if you always want to change clothes, just go into your house and choose. Outfits while on the Farm do not need to leave the farm to customize expressive outfits to wear more time and increase the fun of everyone while still gathered on a farm? Let's add a wardrobe feature in the house so people can change things on the farm themselves without wasting time going back and forth to the farm?

[Perry]

Hi, how can I still save the game after I edited the chunks? The change itself works, but after I close the game a popup shows up "Game was not able to save" and the process is gone.

[Dotolius]

thanks for sharing

[Mirrhi]

None of the suggestions in this guide worked for me so I tried Daxidol's guide and it worked perfectly first time

[MissAnaHappy]

I wish I could get this to work. All I wanted was a flat map with a lake in the center, but alas, it won't change the map in-game no matter what I do. Thanks anyway!

[Vexleigh]

Thank you for this fantastic guide, with its help I have created the farm of my dreams.

For those who want to try for themselves, I have some tips.
1) 7zip opening the text file in Notepad when you want to use Notepad++.
Simply Ctrl+A to select all of it in Notepad, copy, and paste to a fresh file in Notepad++.
2) The mediafire link doesn't work.
With your freshly pasted copy in Notepad++ (see tip 1), Ctrl+F to open the search, and type "ChunkId" into the box (that's id, not Ld), press Find next and press enter before every instance of "{ChunkId:" to arrive to the formatting example given by the creator of this guide. When you're all done, Ctrl+A again, copy, and paste it into the original Notepad file, save, and let 7zip update the archive.

Finally, as stated below, the coordinates of the chunks go up to 6,6 now, with 3,3 being the starting chunk.

[burntotears]

Well I can't post the link. So basically the starting chunk is 3,3 and they've just added new chunks on the outside edges of the whole map so that the first chunk on the bottom left is still 0,0 and the last chunk on the top right is now 6,6. All the numbers now go up to 6 rather than 4. Hope that helps.

[burntotears]

Hey guys, I'm back! So I do have the new coordinates for the added Chunks and I mapped out how my farm loaded after starting the Default Terrain (first choice). From what I see, they just added a Flat_Chunk all the way around. Here is a link to the new coordinates: {LINK REMOVED}https://bit.ly/34s3QHL

Via my previous comment, I changed a ChunkID only and it did not populate the new terrain for that ID. In fact, it reverted back to the old ID after opening the game and then looking at the file again. So I went back, copied an empty Tile List from a Flat_Chunk ChunkID, pasted it into the chunk I was trying to change, and THEN changed the ChunkID. After opening the game again, it DID load the new terrain for that chunk.

I hope this helps someone else. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to help.

[burntotears]

So I gave it a try with the new chunk amount by extrapolating what the coordinates are via what has already spawned in my farm, but it didn't seem to change anything. No errors upon load, just none of the chunks I tried to change were edited. I assume this is because all the tiles are defined in those chunks already so it just ignored my chunkID change.

Question is, if I edit all the tiles to be empty (like a flat chunk) is it going to make all those chunks flat chunks, or will it spawn something inside them if the ID is changed but the tiles are blank? If you have any further insight on this, that'd be helpful. Maybe it only works when swapping from Flat to something else? I might tinker with it a bit more and see if I can come up with anything.

[Estarsi]

please update this.
I cant reach your mediafire link.
with more chunks now i'm not sure the grid numbers are correct.
Thanks for working this out for us that rolled crap farm plots!!! <3