Farming Simulator 22 - Want To be a Virtual Farmer ? I Do

I have always been intrigued by farming and the equipment it needs. Basically, I have grown up on a farm. When I was a child I spent all of my summers in one of my country houses and this is a legit farm with fields of growing crops and animal husbandry was a thing too ( chickens, cows, horses, pigs, you name it). This is probably the reason why I love being in nature so much and in the countryside.

This is also the reason why a game of Farming Simulator has caught my eye. Even though I like the idea of being a farmer in real life, I still think I am not the right person for it. Playing Farming Simulator and being a virtual Farmer, hell yeah!!.

I didn't find out about this game now, I have played it for many years already. Farming sim 17, 19 and now 22 which I bought at the end of 2021. My friends can't understand what the hell is wrong with me, how can you possibly have the patience to harvest fields all time long. Well, there is MUCH more to this game than only harvesting a field. I don't bother myself much to explain why I love this game to others who clearly are unable to understand anyway. Farming sim 22 was by the way the highest selling game on steam for a week when it came out and overall it has been selling exceptionally well. Like all the new games today, they are all released broken or with countless bugs and glitches. Believe it or not, FS 22 actually worked well on the release, with only minor bugs that didn't ruin the experience.

Of course, all the photos are taken by me in-game.

What can you do in this game?

Well, you can do almost anything that farmers do in real life. Buy property, prepare fields, grow crops, harvest, and sell it for profit. Also, animal husbandry. Of course, the element of slaughtering animals and them dying is not part of this game so the game could remain as child friendly as possible. The animals produce products like eggs, milk wool, etc you can sell them for profit or use it further in the production line and make cakes, clothes, etc if you have bought the production facility, I have not yet. I only have bees and a chicken pit right now.

There is more you can do. Mow and harvest grass or hay. Feed it to animals or sell it for profit. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. In farming sim 22 you also have greenhouses where you can grow strawberries, cabbages, and tomatoes. I own 3 greenhouses and I can get a quite good profit for it. Greenhouses are also low maintenance, I just need to provide water to them regularly. The greenhouse itself manages the watering process. You also have the possibility of erecting wind turbines on your property that generate electricity, you get income on that too.

Then there is also the forestry business that should be heavily profitable but requires equipment that is very expensive. I haven't done it just yet but I have chopped trees on my property with a chainsaw to make room for grassland on my property because I need the space.
So as you can see there are so many different possibilities what you can do or what farm you prefer to manage.

If you don't have anything to do on your property at any given time and really need money then you can also do contracts for other farmers. Prepare fields, fertilize them, and so on, of course, they pay you money for it. I usually do all of the fertilizing contracts because the pay is really good and it doesn't take a long time.

Most of my time goes to my own fields cause I grow different crops. I got 5 fields and one of them is very large that I recently bought. I took out a loan because I didn't have a free 420k dollars on me to buy the land. Now I'm working on paying back the loan as fast as possible because I pay a good amount of interest on this loan.

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Here you can see how much equipment I have. This is a small field that I recently converted to tarmac so I have a place to house all this machinery. Equipment costs a lot of money so for most of them I have also taken out a loan to get.
Surrounding this area are my fields.

You can also landscape your property however you want. Make hills, flatten, make roads, rivers or delete them. Basically, you can make the farm look exactly like you want. You can also build houses, and silos and place decorative stuff like flowers, trees and bushes.

Mods

The game has an insane mod community. You are not limited to the equipment or gameplay elements only FS 22 offers you. You can find so much stuff on the web. The developers also support game mods so you also have an in-game mod selection where you can download a lot of stuff.

For example, I have a faster time rewind possibility to make time move faster when I don't have anything to do, the base game time forwarding is too slow for me. I also got a bit more realistic dirt effects downloaded and mowed hay and grass textures. Quite a few equipment pieces too, you still have to buy them for in-game money, you don't get to buy equipment for free.

I also have a trailer that has autoloading of pallets, euro-pallets, bags, and so on. Loading them one by one is something I am absolutely not a fan of doing. Here I have auto-loaded tomato pallets going on a sale.

I also use this trailer for vehicle transportation. For example, towing my tractor and a harvester with it 🤣. This is something that you never do in real life. The harvester barely fits on this trailer. In this instance, I towed the two to the gas station for refueling. The gas station is not exactly next to my property and refueling two in one go is faster. The harvester is also insanely slow to drive there. So here it is 😂. I need to get that fuel tank on my property.

A couple of more shots from the fields.

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Graphically the game is beautiful. The environment and the plants look beautiful and detailed. In the distance from you, the detail is reduced because rendering every crop, leaf or grass is going to kill even the best graphics card out there right now. This is usually not a problem because when you play you usually do not view your fields several hundred meters from above.

Making ends meet

This is a hard one. You can choose a difficulty at the start of the game. You either start with some land and money, start with money but no land, or the hardest: start with nothing. With every difficulty level you also have an economic difficulty, how good are the prices. I chose the middle ground. I started up with half a mil of capital but no land. This really is not much so I have slowly made my way from there.

Of course, there are also money cheats to get all the money in the world but this is not the point of playing this IMO. I play it to achieve something, to feel the enjoyment of purchasing a new or better piece of equipment, to buy a new patch of land, and feel the hard work pay off finally. Trust me it's a good feeling. If you use the money to cheat then what there is to achieve, you have everything right away + why would you even bother to harvest your fields. You get no joy of finally being at this point when your crops are ready or look forward to the profit to come.

On top of all the new machinery and land you need, you also need to pay daily farm running costs, pay for fuel, pay for seeds and fertilizer( if you don't get manure from animals), and animal feed if you don't produce it yourself. All this is expensive, also add the daily interest if you have an unpaid loan. That's why getting some profit feels so damn good.

The Weather and seasons

Yep, the game has the aspect of weather and seasons. It's always a big factor for farmers everywhere because it affects the crops.
When it rains, for example, you cant harvest crops because your yield is drastically reduced. FS22 has a weather prediction screen and when the harvest time comes you need to check if the rain starts or not.
The game lets you choose how many days in a month you want to have. I have it set to two days in a month right now, when my workload increases I might need to increase that too. You can pump it up to 28 in-game days in a month.

There are also seasons. This is important because you need to know when to sow seeds and when to harvest it. Every crop has its own time. For example, if you don't harvest in a needed timeframe, your crops will be withered and all harvest is lost. It has happened to me, I just forgot to harvest one field.
I use a midwest map In the USA, I also get some snow in the winter.

When you have crops harvested you need to know when to sell them for a maximum profit. The prices are never the same and every crop has a different one. Certain crop prices tend to be higher in a certain season when demand rises. This is why I keep my crop in a silo after harvesting and selling when the price seems good enough.

On this screen, you see the price of the straw. This is leftover produce from wheat and barley. You can see that the price tends to be highest in December and January this is where I aim to sell it.

I also wanted to show you the machinery store. This is on the categories you see here. In every category, you have loads more vehicles. You can also customize them. Stronger engines for trucks and tractors, change wheels, etc. Prices vary drastically too. For example small tractors are affordable but high-end large tractors can have astronomical price tags.

Here is the screen of different equipment categories. This is not all, the list goes on for a while more you don't see here.

Conclusion

So yeah, this post has gotten absolutely long, should wrap this up.
I'm not a big gamer in summers because I spend so much time outdoors but if I do gaming then FS22 is perfect to play when I have some time. I have played FS22 more for the past several nights. You might think that this game is boring but no. It has so much to do, so many different ways to make your farm and make it profitable. FS22 is a huge grind yes, but there is no other game that feels so exceptionally rewarding when hard work pays off. Since I like the game how it already is and I myself am intrigued by farming so it's a no-brainer that I want to play this.
From Reddit I have read how even die-hard FPS shooter guys wanted to try out something more chillaxing and found a Farming sim, they got hooked and never left.

I am looking to do more posts on this game. This was more like a review but I want to show you my farm in detail and what I do and have there. I should also do a post on the progress of how I grow some crops on the field and how much work really goes into getting a successful harvest. Progress from field prep to final harvest.

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