Mastering Crop Prices (Bjornholm)

Where to sell your grain. And when?
An in-depth analysis of crop prices based on data-mining and in-game experience.

Introduction

Like many players, I was wondering what would be the best place and time to sell my hard-earned crops for the best profit possible.

Searching the web on this topic returns guides and forum posts with different hints, tips and/or data that I consider to be incomplete or inprecise.

This is an attempt at a semi-scientific approach on the subject of crop pricing. I will use data gathered from game files, as well as in-game observations, to try and create a guideline for selling crops in Farming Simulator 15.

Although this guide will be focused on the unmodded "Bjornholm" map, it should be possible to apply the general game mechanics discussed here to other maps as well.

This is the first version of this guide. Some assumptions, statements and conclusions may be inaccurate, flawed or generally wrong, mainly because I have not yet tested all of them thoroughly enough.

Too long, did not read!

As a new player, I would focus on canola and immediately sell it to the Freight Yard and send off the train.
Doing so should allow me to expand my farm fairly quickly, without being dependent on great demand events. Having to wait for those can be a pain, espacially in the beginning.

Once I have acquired a few additional fields and harvesters, I would start stocking up the other fruit types as well (Gold Coins...), so I would be prepared for profitable great demands, especially Freight Yard ones! I would avoid great demands of the other stations below x1.7 or x1.8, because I could have made that sale to the Freight Yard without great demand bonus for similar profits.

Once I have a decent financial buffer and progress into end-game crops an animals, I would probably start min-maxing my crop sales by speculating on Freight Yard great demands only.

Base price

The different prices for a certain fruit type displayed in-game are all based on a hidden base price, which is then modified by multipliers to result in the final displayed price at a station.

The base price of a fruit type varies throughout the game based on different factors.
One major factor is the player's selling behaviour. You may have noticed how emptying your silo can lead to the prices for the respective crop dropping dramatically.
Low prices regenerate over time and by selling the other types of crops.

The price updates are performed every full in-game hour, this can be exploited by selling all the crops within an hour - prices will stay the same no matter how much you sell.

The important thing is that the hidden base price of one fruit type is the same for every station.
So essentially, if you know the given price of a fruit type at one station, you should always be able to predict the prices for all the other stations using rule of three arithmetics and the respective station modifiers, which will be covered in the next section.

Trading stations

The Bjornholm map has a total of five trading stations which accept different fruit types, along with individual modifiers for each one of them.

The indivual modifiers of each trading station can be extracted directly from the map file. These modifiers are based on the current base price of the corresponding crop, which we discussed in the previous section.

The modifiers for the Bjornholm trading stations are as follows:

As you can see, different crop types have different base price modifiers for each trading station. A higher modifier generally means better prices for that kind of crop at that trading station.
Potatoes and sugarbeets are not accepted everywhere, which is indicated by the "N/A" values.

For example, wheat has relatively high modifiers at the Windmill and the Grain Elevator, which you may have already noticed in the form of higher in-game prices. The same applies to barley, while canola seems to be favoured by the Transport Company, and so on.

The Freight Yard seems to have a major disadvantage in every regard, when considering these multipliers. Those really bad multipliers affect the displayed in-game prices of the crops, which may lead players to avoiding the Freight Yard altogether, because of the seemingly bad prices.

However, the Freight Yard features a special mechanic commonly described and referred to as "sending off the train", which will be discussed in the next section.

The train

As discussed in the previous section, the Freight Yard offers significantly lower prices for crops than the other trading stations, due to low base price multipliers. However, the Freight Yard features a train that can be "sent off" after selling crops using the interaction point (!), which results in additional funds being awarded to the player after a short time (30s).


This somewhat hidden game mechanic has been uncovered and discussed in various guides and forum posts, and depending on your research effort and/or luck, you may or may not have already stumbled upon it.

Since the reward for sending off the train usually more than doubles the profit gained from actually selling the crop, some players considered the Freight Yard as unbalanced, rendering great demand events meaningless, since you can always sell at double the price at the Freight Yard regardless of such events.

Those people may not have realised that the Freight Yard offers much lower prices than the other stations to begin with, or maybe the modifiers were only recently patched to compensate for a "broken" game mechanic.
Either way, it seems interesting enough to have a closer look at the train mechanic itself.

The first step is to determine the exact amount of bonus money earned when sending off the train. The train mechanic is not configured in the map file, so we cannot extract this information directly, but it is easy enough to retrieve and validate the amount by comparing unloading profits with the bonus money awarded from the train, which is what I have done.

The bonus money awarded is identical to the value of the previously unloaded crop at the base price, with a multiplier of 1.0

Theoretical example:

• You unload 100 tons of barley at the Freight Yard at $750/t displayed price, worth a total of $75,000.
  
• With the multiplier for barley at the Freight Yard being 0.75, the (hidden) base price would be $1,000/t. (-> 100 * 1000 * 0.75 = 75,000)
  
• You will earn an additional $100,000 from sending off the train (100 * 1,000 * 1.0 = 100,000), resulting in a total profit of $175,000.
  
• The same amount of barley would net only $115,000 if sold at the Grain Elevator(100 * 1000 * 1.15), which has the best multiplier for barley (but lacks the trains mechanic).

Essentially, we can add the number 1 to all of the Freight Yard multipliers due to the train mechanic, if we want to compare the profit to that of the other trading stations.
Considering this, the Freight Yard clearly beats every other station, with multipliers around 1.75, while the other stations have maximum multipliers below 1.2 or even below 1.0.

However, this does not automatically mean that the Freight Yard is generally the best place to sell all crops, and this is because of the Great Demand game mechanic, which is the subject of the next section.

Great demand

At random points in the game, a "Great Demand" may be announced for a certain fruit type at a certain trading station, lasting a limited amount of time.

Great demands apply a visible multiplier to the displayed prices of the affected stations. This muliplier can range from 1.5 to 2.0.

The great demand multiplier is multiplicative with the station's base multiplier for that fruit type, so the final price can be calculated as follows:

Final price =
hidden base price * station crop multiplier * great demand multiplier

and for the Freight Yard:
Final price =
hidden base price * station crop multiplier * great demand multiplier + train bonus
with train bonus = base price * 1.0

We can now create effective total multipliers for all the possible great demand multipliers for each fruit type at every station. Those can be compared to each other independent of actual base prices to determine the relative profit between the different stations during great demand scenarios.

Comparisons

We can provide a decision aid for selling crops by combining the station multiplier data, the train bonus mechanic, and the great demand scenarios into total base price modifiers.

Here are the resulting combined values for wheat:

• The first value is the base multiplier for the station when there is no great demand - these are the same values presented in the trading stations section.
  
• The second value is the total value when sending off the train at the Freight Yard (no great demand)
  
• The following columns represent the total combined modifiers during the respective great demand events. (Note that the train bonus is not affected by great demands, only the unloading profit [needs verification])
  
• Green values represent scenarios with "above average" multipliers - this is just an arbitrary scale for quick visualization.

Now, what do all these numbers mean?
As you can see with the wheat example, it is NOT generally the best option to sell it at the Freight Yard. The numbers show that even a great demand event as low as 1.5 at the Windmill (total of 1.77) beats the no-demand profit of the Freight Yard (total of 1.76).

If you absolutely need to sell wheat (or any other fruit type) outside of a grat demand, the Freight Yard IS always your best option. This is, however, an extreme case, as most players will always wait for a great demand event before selling.

The other end of the extreme scale are great demands at the Freight Yard. In a min-maxing consideration, you would always wait for the 2.0 great demand at the Freight Yard before selling (if your fruit type is bought there)

The key is to find the balance between maximizing profits and generating available funds to progress the game. Thesweet spots should be mainly depending on individual player preference.

In an attempt to facilitate finding these sweet spots, I have introduced the arbitrary "above average" markup for the values.
But since we are already here and forced ourselves through this wall of text, why not discuss all the other crop types one by one?

Here we go...

Barley:
Barley has a pricing pattern similar to wheat - the basic Freight Yard option only beats the lowest of the great demand values for most stations.

Canola:
Canola seems more interesting regarding the basic Freight Yard option - the combined multiplier is actually above the average, and only the higher great demand multipliers at other stations actually beat the all-time profit at the FY.

Corn:
Corn is generally considered to be inferior crop in regard to selling, because of the low profit per hectar. Nevertheless, the all-time Freight Yard profit, as with canola, seems to be worthwhile.

Potato:
Potato is the only fruit type which is not available at the Freight Yard, which basically leaves us with comparing the base multipliers of the stations with no real alternative other than hoping for a good great demand event.
Potato and sugarbeets are considered end-game crops because of the money investment required to efficiantly farm them, so these values may be irrelevant for starting players anyway.

Sugarbeets:
In contrast to potatoes, sugarbeets can be sold at the Freight Yard, and it might be a worthwhile option to do so. A great demand at the Shipping Office or Trading Company would need to have at least a factor of 1.8 to just slightly beat the all-time FY profit including the train.

Resources

Data mining for the trading stations was performed on an unmodded Bjornholm map file (game version 1.4.1). The file is usually located in the game installation directory under /data/maps/map01.i3d. The price multipliers can be found by searching for "priceMultipliers" followed by "stationName" in the next line.

[Scopez]

sorry guys im 9 years late

[KickitGood]

There is a mod that will do price comparrisons on the fly. http://www.modhoster.com/mods/preisvergleich

It includes the bonus for the freight yard if the map has one.

[tkraftson]

I discovered that the great demand price lasts only until the end of the hour in which you start selling, eg. If you start selling a load at 7:55 you get the demand price, at 8:00 the next load will bring about 60% of the "advertised" price. Therefore, if you have multiple loads to sell, wait for the next hour to start selling and complete all your deliveries within the hour (slow time to 1).

[firstdeathmaker]

Nice investigation, did something similar and came to the same results. But one thing is missing here: production and transportation cost. Wheat has a lower price, but you harvest much more of it per surface. On the other hand, you have to transport the stuff to the selling stations, therefore I always go for the granola in the beginning, because it's "price density" is higher. In the later game, it is better to have the crops more equally on stock, so the prices get more time to regenerate.

[Meneer de Uil]

Great guide! 8/8

[Dethstarr15]

That was a really good guide, is there any way to create train stations with a long track sendoff.

[chris.marlow4]

Thanks for that very thorough, and helpful analysis! I don't think you need to worry too much about finding a "sweet spot" for grain selling though.
Surely, silage is still the best money maker in the game, so you can always wait for the really good high demand prices to come along before selling your grain?