The Seasons mod for Farming Simulator came out late last summer. Now, vanilla Farming Simulator is sandbox where you play with tractors. It?s visceral, if shallow, fun. Season recontextualizes all that by linking everything to a twenty-seven day calendar and tightening up a lot of systems. Suddenly, you?re on the clock and you?ve got chorin? to do, pitter patter let?s get at ?er. Everything becomes a long production chain governed by available land, equipment, and time. Crop rotations need to be planned, the market needs to be watched, snow might even need to be plowed. And don?t forget to feed the dog and rub her belly. Maybe play fetch later. Yes, you can do all three of those things.
I played on the basic Ravenport map with the Midwest US Geo mod. I started out simple, skipping the small fields near the spawn point and buying the plot on the opposite corner of the map. I started with soybeans in the summer and wheat over winter. Having mastered this simple rotation, I decided to try animals. Bought another field, planted it with grass, grabbed some equipment for baling hay, and bought thirty or so sheep. Now I?m doing hay twice a year or so and storing it in rows of bales under a shelter. Mid winter up through spring is the lambing season, and spring is shearing season, so right as summer starts I take stock and decide which animals to sell and which to keep for next year. The wool all gets loaded onto my flatbed and goes off to the spinnery. Eventually I earn enough to buy a planter and corn header for my harvester, so I thought, why not try raising hogs? So now I?m a hog farmer, raising crops entirely for feed and taking yearly hogs to market. Throughput proves too much, and soon I?m selling some off as soon as they appear just to keep from pop capping.
The hogs opened up a new avenue; manure. I downloaded some Global Company mods and built my own biogas plant. The manure goes right in, earning me more profit and giving back free fertilizer in the form of digestate. I end up cutting back on unneeded hay baling and instead move the grass into silage bunkers, and sell the silage to the biogas plant. I?m basically not buying fertilizer anymore now, instead using two feeder fields just for hay, silage, and digestate for my cash and feed crops. I?m even selling it to other farmers in the form of field fertilizing contracts.
Then Courseplay got involved. It?s the mod that lets you setup routes for hired drivers to take automatically to do lots of jobs, like carrying grain from harvesters to a silo. Now it?s a train set as well as a business sim. Courseplay proves a godsend, as there?s no way to get through a single day on my own at this point without blowing a whole Saturday, especially when I?m baling straw from winter barley before getting the cotton crop in. I?ve got trucks taking grain to market and mowers mowing hay while I tend to animals. Dairy cows entered the mix at some point, so now I?ve got milk runs to do. Still had to feed the dog myself, but that?s more of a get to than a have to.
Eventually I felt I had explored everything Ravenport had to offer, and sold off my assets. Total came to about twelve million, so I figure I?ll start out a new map sometime with that figure. Maybe I?ll try a map further south so I can grow sugarcane, like the Estacia Lapacho map the devs ported from the FS17 DLC. They do that a lot I find, take stuff from the old version?s DLC and stick it on their modhub for the next game as normal free mods. I didn?t even get into horses, which are treated as livery stabling in Seasons. The only forestry I did was some tree removal to make rooms for buildings. I don?t expect I?ll manage to even try everything before FS21 comes out. I?ll eventually get the itch again, though. It?s as inevitable as spring.
