Full review of FS 19 Platinum Edition

FS19 PE (v 1.5.1.0)
I am brand new in this Farming Simulation series, so I don't know any of the old games (FS15, FS17 etc.) and came with a fresh mindset to FS19.

My experience is now more than 200 hours in FS19 and I have tried the most.

Vanilla game
Graphics:
Graphics are nice but textures are not that detailed, especially on the distance. Colorblind mode is included which is nice.

Animations:
For vehicles, trailers, doors and gates animations works just fine, but when it comes to the animals there are some lagging and funny situations like when pigs jumps right up in the air.

Audio:
Nothing special here. You have the standard sliders for main volume, vehicle, environment, radio and GUI.
Ingame sounds from vehicles, doors, gates etc gives a nice realism to the game.

Controls:
You can setup keys for all functions in the game, which is nice.

Input devices:
Mouse and keyboard, but also gamepads or steering wheels are supported - the later I have yet to experience. In the parameters there are some sliders for mouse, camera, steering and vehicle-arm sensivity which is very nice and needed.

Gamemodes:
The game has 3 ways to start a game:
1) prebuild farm with some vehicles and money in the bank to buy seed and animals etc.
2) choose a farm and build it from scratch (you got some money in the bank)
3) like 2, but where you got almost no money in the bank (hardcore).

Crops:
There are different crops like wheat, barley, oat, corn, canola, sunflowers, soybeans, potatoes, cotton, sugarcane, grass etc. You buy seed and sow your crops. First you must plow or cultivate the field, then you furtilize, watch the crops grow and then you harvest.
Some crops takes different kind of vehicles like cotton and potatoes. There are mods which introduces more crops and fruits but haven't tried them yet.

Animals:
You can buy, breed and sell animals. Chickens are the easiest to keep; they only require some grain and they produce eggs. Sheeps require hay and produce wool which can be sold at the spinery. Pigs requires hay or straw, a mixture of food and water. You can also keep and breed cows and horses (haven't tried those yet).
All animals (except chickens) requires you keep their pen clean or they will get sick and die eventually.
The bigger the animal, the more care they require, and the higher price you get when selling them and their offspring.

Forestry:
You can plant your own trees and poplar. Watch them grow (trees takes longer than crops), cut them down, transport and sell them at the sawmill.
Trees can be chopped up to wood chips - poplar always get harvested as wood chips. Wood chips are also sold at the sawmill. Picking up the trees for transport is a timeconsuming task so I recommend getting a mod with an autoloader trailer.

Vehicles:
You can buy and sell or lease your vehicles. To begin with it's nice to just lease because you don't have that much money and you don't know the different vehicles. When you buy and use your vehicles, you can sell them again, but at a lower price. Vehicles also needs fuel and repair over time.
To help you drive the vehicles there is some mods like "Steering Guidance" (GPS) and "Autodrive" (haven't tried them yet).
As a funny little feature, you can set the speed of dirt on your vehicles, trailers and tools and wash them with a high pressure machine.

AI helper:
You can choose to drive all your vehicles yourself and for some tasks (plowing, fertilizing, harvesting etc), you can hire a worker (AI helper) to do the work. It's a nice thing when a task becomes too monotonous, but keep an eye on your workers - they are not flawless!

Business:
On the map there are diffent places to buy and sell animals (animal dealer), trees and wood chips (sawmill), seed, furtilizer, vehicles etc (store) where you also can repair your vehicles.
There are several places to sell your crops and prices vary over time so use your silo's to store them and wait for the right time to sell.

Bank:
You start off with a loan in the bank and you can loan more (to a certain level) or pay back in increments of 5000. Be sure to pay back your loan as interests will be added.

Maps:
The vanilla game only comes with 2 maps, but they are nice starter-maps and there are plenty maps for free to be found in the mods section.

Gameplay:
A very usefull feature, and a must-have for a simulation, is the time speed parameter. When the tasks for the day is done and you're just waiting for next day to come, you can do 2 things:
1) adjust the time scale slider in the parameters (Real-time, 5x, 15x, 30x, 60x, 120x)
2) go into your bedroom in the farm and get some sleep (from 2 hours up to 13 hours)
This speeds up the gameplay and keeps you busy. I recommend using 5x when you feel busy and 15x when you're not in a hurry.

Contracts:
If you need stuff to do or need some fast money, you can go to the contracts tab. Here you can sign contracts with you neighbors to sow, plow, fertilize, harvest etc. You can use your own vehicles or borrow from them.
Remember you have to buy the seed yourself but you also get the earnings from the crops besides the contract-price. There are also some transport contracts, but they seem to be buggy and they don't pay off that well.
You can only sign up one contract at a time, which is a shame.

Help and guides:
The game has a nice ingame overview of most things on the info-tab but there is no manual and when it comes to gameplay stuff and hacks, you must use steam dicussions or guides to get help. But that is not a big problem because of a strong community and nice people who are willing to help.
Ingame you also find the F1-help in the GUI, but that only shows keybindings (which is very helpfull).

Tutorials:
The game contains 6 tutorials which I strongly recommend you to play through. It takes relatively short time (app. 5 minutes each) to learn the basics of the game and is a good investment. They can be played several times.

Multiplayer:
The game supports multiplayer and I know from several streamers that there are some strong and large communities who have there own servers. I have not tried multiplayer at all, so won't comment on that.

Mods:
There is no workshop in Steam, but ingame MOD-store works just fine and third-party mods can easily be installed by copying files to the mod-folder. Third-party mods are NOT supported in multiplayer.
The mod "Seasons" with it's big variations of Geo mods is a must-have in my opinion. It expands the gameplay by adding the 4 seasons which each extends over 3 to 24 days (parameter). It adds more reality to the game with different things to do in each season (sowing in spring, harvesting in summer etc.) and keeping animals are tweaked.

DLC's to buy
There are a few DLC's on steam, but they don't add more features to the game, only more vehicles and trailers.

Issues
- Transport contracts are buggy
- My PC is lagging when running game and I go out of game (alt-tab). Don't have this problem with other games/programs
- AI traffic is aggresive. It almost kicked me off the road when transporting a harvester on a lowbed trailer, so I turned off traffic in the options

Nice to have
- Grouping of vehicles: When you have +10 vehicles, the feature to toggle through them with the tab-button is insufficient.
- Working/decoration lamps to place around your farm would be very nice, especially with the season-mod where the nights are pitch-black.
- Fences: The ability to repair/move/remove and build new fences and gates to the fields would be awesome.
- Watering/irrigation system: The ability to buy waterspraying- and watertank-trailers or even watertubes to layout on fields would be really great.

Vanilla game

DLC's to buy

Issues

Nice to have

[CrushedBun]

i joined the same!

[Ghost DK]

"Farmington Simulation series", LOL
Thx for pointing out - it's corrected now ;-)

[turtleman0829]

@Ghost DK I'm sorry I keep seeing this and not saying anything but there's a typo in Farming Simulator at the beginning.

[Ghost DK]

@GripenE: Cool, nice to get some historical background information

[fllankerr]

Yeah, Each game gets a big DLC about 1 year into its release, (FS13 Titanium, FS15 Gold, FS17 Platinum, FS19 Platinum) Each of these big DLCs usually introduces a new map and a new brand, this time round it was Claas which has easily been the most wanted brand in the FS series. FS19 and FS19 PE are identical apart from the addition of the new brand in the Platinum Edition.

[Ghost DK]

@GripenE: thx for pointing that out . As I think I wrote, PE was my entry point to the game series, so I never thought of it that way.

[fllankerr]

Pretty good overview of the game as a whole, although what you are talking about is the main game, The Platinum Edition is just a fancy name for the big DLC that each game has, The Platinum Edition in this game just adds 35 Claas vehicles and attachments.