Strategies

For your first year of farming, you have two main objectives:

### Repair your farm.

* This is presented to you as a quest. Not only do all these buildings **need to be fixed to function properly**, but each building you fully repair gives you a sizable chunk of **Social Points**.
* Social Points represent your standing in the community, and can be spent in place of money to give you discounts when buying fields or farm equipment. However, using them up for discounts is not always your wisest choice! You are advised to try to reach and maintain at least 55,000 Social Points, because being that well thought of in your community will allow you to hire Helpers who can work fields FOR you (for a fee, of course). Since you are only one person, and can hire up to four Helpers at a time, this becomes almost a necessity once you own a lot of fields.
* You don't need to repair everything all at once, however (it can get a bit monotonous trying to do the entire property at once). Recommend you start with the **Chicken Coop** first, so you can buy some hens to make eggs every morning, for quick and easy canned food (to both eat and sell). The **Greenhouse** would probably be 2nd priority, so you can start their month-long growing cycle as soon as possible. The **Cow Barn** can wait a while; cows are a fair bit more expensive than chickens, so you'll need to save up some money to buy all 9... and if the cow barn has no cows in it, then who cares if it's full of holes for now? The **Silo** and perhaps also the **2nd floor of the Garage** probably should be repaired before you start harvesting any crops, so you have a couple places to store and accumulate the crops. The **house** and the **Straw/Hay Barn** are the lowest priority, as (to the best of my knowledge) none of their functions are affected by their unrepaired status. You still ought repair them for the Social Points, and to complete the quest, sooner rather than later. More details on all of these buildings are found on the Farm Buildings page.

### Acquire a complete set of old farm equipment.

* There is an individual quest for each piece of old farm equipment that allows you to acquire it for free, beginning with the one your tour guide Oliver offers you, to repair some of his buildings in return for a tractor. Since most of the equipment requires that tractor to pull it around, it makes sense to do this one first.
* To find the other quests, open your map and look for markers with a person icon. Use your Old Pickup Truck to drive out to these people and see what they want. Each of these people has some old farm equipment they're not using, and they'll trade it to you in return for some work. Often it's repairing buildings, as you've already done. One lady will want you to plow her field for her. There's even a very shy lady who will trade you a piece of farm equipment worth thousands just to get the man she likes to take her out to a dance!
* You'll be alerted when you approach the area where a quest-giver is. You can also use your Engineer's Sight to show you the person with a (!) hovering over their head (very handy if the quest-giver is standing with a group of other people.
* Once you have them all, there's no stage of farming a field you can't accomplish! Just uh... maybe not as fast as people who own modern. more efficient farming equipment, but once you've harvested and sold a couple fields' worth of valuable crops, you can look into buying yourself a brand new (faster and more powerful) tractor, and continue from there! Your old Jack Bear tractor most likely doesn't have the horsepower to pull modern farm equipment around (and it's so damned *slow*!) So you should probably look at a new tractor as your first upgrade.
* Although, if you're patient/clever/good at math... **Before** you blow all your money on fancy tractors, you ***might*** want to spend the money from the harvest of your two starter fields to buy one or two *other* fields nearby that are already full of grown crops you can harvest and sell ***this*** season, and repeat...

### **Additional goals and projects:**

These are a bit less urgent and/or important than the primary objectives above, but you may want to get started on them. You'll have time; it's hard to see the fields well when the sun goes down, so work on something else until bedtime.

### Develop your farm.

1. Buy some hens to lay eggs, maybe a rooster to make more hens (max of 20). Eggs are an early, cheap, and *plentiful* source of both food to eat and some quick money. Be sure to cook and can them in your kitchen before doing either! (more details on the Animals page)
2. Get that greenhouse producing! Greenhouse veggies take about a month to grow, so you can have several harvests a year. A month goes buy pretty slowly in this game, so you may as well get them started as soon as you can! Seedlings are sold at the Agriculture Store. You are given 10x tomato seedlings to start, but you will have to buy the rest. Tip: There are 70 spots for planters in your little greenhouse, and 7 varieties of "veggies", so make 10 of each. More details on the Farm Buildings page.
3. Buy some cows to make milk... and lots and lots of poop! Like eggs, milk can be quickly produced (although the cows are not as cheap) processed into cans in your kitchen, to be either eaten by you or sold for money. Cow manure is used to fertilize fields... **but** they don't make it very **fast**, so the earlier you can fill your cow barn to the max, the more poop they can make! Yay! (more details on the Animals page)
4. Find yourself a dog! Rex is hanging out by the bus stop near your house. I bet he'd like a yummy sausage like that general store owner John sells. (more details on the Animals page).
5. Pick some apples! There's a whole orchard of 20 trees in the NW corner of your farm! When life gives you apples, make applesauce!
6. Build bee hives! Use the Engineer's Sight to find 4 good spots around your farm to build 11 hives. You like honey, don't you? Sure you do! Don't worry, they don't sting.
7. Fish! John sells a fishing pole. There's a pond right here! What more could you ask for out of life?
8. Mow the lawn? I guess you can, but expect it to grow back. More useful might be...
9. Plant a garden! John at the general store sells tools and flower seeds. Your neighbors will admire your garden every day and give you Social Points. Gardens need watering every few days if it hasn't rained though. Some might just see it as a lot of extra work for a small benefit. Up to you.

## Start looking for a **wife**!

* Now marriage isn't something that should be rushed into, but it can't hurt to run around the entire county trying pickup lines on everything female, can it? (Well, you might think so, but the game doesn't seem to have a jealousy mechanic, so go nuts!) Apparently, even though the population of the county is roughly 50/50, and all adults, *every single women here is single*! The only ladies you can't flirt with are vendors like the coffee shop girls.
* When you find a lady you like (no apparent differences between them other than their appearance) start paying her compliments once a day, for about a month. That should open up a dialogue option to give her gifts (most bought in general store, though some can be found in Treasure Chests) again, every day for a little while (Seems to be about 8-10 gifts? Might vary based on the value of said gifts)(**Confirmed**) Persistence is key! Show her your unwavering dedication, your sexy ability to follow a routine and your attractive mountains of disposable income!
* Once you've bribed (cough) courted her enough, the gift-giving option is replaced with a proposal option. A wedding will immediately take place "that evening..." After the ceremony cinematic, you will skip ahead to the next morning, waking up beside your lovely wife, who still snoozes... a rare morning which, unsurprisingly, you are NOT very well rested! Who sleeps on their wedding night? Rawr!
* Using any raw food you've stored in your pantry, your wife will cook several "Tier 3" meals a day, which will then appear down in the pantry. Perhaps we should call them "Tier 3.5", because your wife is apparently a better cook than you are. She knows different recipes than you do (even if you've collected all 3 recipe books) and her food restores +100 food condition, while your own nine Tier 3 meals restore between +75 and +90.
* By the way, now that you're married, STOP flirting with other girls! It's a small community where everyone knows everyone else, and people have known your wife longer than they've known you! Flirting with other women while married will result in a small penalty in Social Points, as the entire county collectively shakes their finger at you! ...Oddly enough, even though she scolds you, the girl you flattered will still find her fondness for you increasing. (Women, amiright? Who can figure 'em?)
* Talking to your wife (novel concept that) and asking how she'd doing, will get her to tell you things about the farm. Presumably if somethings going wrong, like the cows are starving, she'll tell you that also. Would take me a very long time to confirm that; I've topped up everything. :S
* **NOTE**: Don't spend to long watching your wife sleep in the morning. A) that's a little creepy, and B) the game developers haven't programmed a "rising from bed" animation, to say nothing of a "getting dressed" animation, so as long as you're in the room ***watching*** her, she won't move one inch from that bed (which also means none of the following list of chores get done either) until you move a certain distance away from the house).

### Things your Wife ***might*** take care of on the farm for you (updating as we learn more)

* Collect all the eggs (hens, ducks, and geese. Eggs presumably end up in your pantry) (**Confirmed**)
* Milk the cows (**Confirmed**)
* Gathers Honey from bee hives (**Nope**)
* Water the Greenhouse if needed (**Nope**)
* Harvests from your Greenhouse (Nop--**... wait a minute**... where did ALL my greenhouse veggies, from *ALL THREE* of my greenhouse complexes, disappear to sometime during the morning of April 1st? O\_O I... I can't tell by the pantry counts; I had a lot in there before and I wasn't really keeping track because I had already decided she *didn't* harvest the greenhouse, based on her leaving R.F.H. veggies alone for several days during the year. Hmm... maybe she doesn't try to harvest them until the day before they rot, but the winter-time-skip (which brings them all to fully ripe state at once) catches her attention? Huh... I'm going to have to leave some veggies to rot on the vine from now on just to see if she collects them. Honestly I'm more surprised she got ALL the greenhouses; I was only expecting her to harvest from the small one on our farm. She definitely doesn't re-plant, however.)
* Cut the grass (Looks like "no", though possibly just a limited area. I'm going to leave it grow for a couple seasons and see what she does, or doesn't)
* Tends your garden (Looks like a **no**. She WILL stand around in your yard cycling through gardening animations, but she doesn't seem to actually do anything, even if you plant a garden near where she usually stands doing her performance. Going to try leaving my roses to die unwatered to see if she waters them.)
* Feed the cat and dog? (Looks like a **no**.)

## "What's the order of operations to work a field?"

A more detailed description of each step is found on the Farming Attachments page, together with the equipment used in each step, but here's the short version for your reference:

### Harvesting a field of fully grown crops (which is how they tend to be when you first get them):

1. Harvest (use the Harvester/combine)
2. Accumulate the harvest into Silo/Storage/Grain Wagon. (Silos/storage becomes unnecessary once you have larger grain trailers)
3. Fill the grain wagon (or modern trailer) and drive it to market to sell. Empty it into the grate.
4. Bale the straw (use the square baler machine. Only used on fields of grassy grains like wheat and barley, which leave behind grey lumps after harvesting)
5. Gather the bales (use the bale wagon. These should fill up your cow barn, and the excess can be sold at the Agriculture Market)

* (Note that **once your cow barn is full** or nearly full of straw, steps 4-5 become ***very*** optional. The bales aren't very valuable and don't sell for much, plus it's a lot of work to collect them, so unless you're really *really* broke...

### Preparing a field for new crops:

1. Plow (use the... well what do *you* think?)
2. Cultivate (use the Harrow or a modern cultivator)
3. Fertilize (use Fertilizer attachment to spread *artificial* fertilizer, which is bought from the Agriculture Store)
4. Spread manure (use the Manure Spreader to spread *natural* fertilizer. Stacks effect with the other kind. Fert-ex(R) is a 2-in-1 product.)
5. Sow seeds (use the Seeder. Seeds are bought from the Agriculture Store. You'll have to decide which month you do this step in carefully!)

## Helpers? What are they good for?

Absolutely... everything! While you won't be able to use Helpers right away, they become crucial once you own a large number of fields. They require you to be well-regarded by the community (represented by having at least **50,000 Social Points.** These points will not be *spent* by using Helpers; it's just a *threshold* you need to remain over.)

* To employ a helper, open your map, and click on a field you own. A panel of choices will be offered you, for each action that can be taken in a field, and the price in currency it will take to hire them.
* You can employ a maximum of 4 helpers at one time.
* Helpers use their own, modern equipment, and provide their own materials (seeds, fertilizers, etc) at no cost beyond their hiring price, so some of their tasks are actually quite cost efficient to you. Fertilizing is a great example. Helpers will fly a crop-dusting plane full of Fert-ex(R) over your field and finish in just a couple minutes. Harvesting is a less efficient example. You are paid for your harvest in a trickle ***as*** the Helper harvests the field. You are presumably getting the Agricultural Market price, which is not the best price for Wheat or Barley. If you especially valued money over your time, you would pay Helpers to Fertilize and Seed your fields, but plow, cultivate, and most especially harvest yourself. If your time is more valuable to you, but you still like getting the best price for your harvest, you would harvest Wheat and Barley yourself, and let the Helpers do the rest of it (all subject to your ability to PAY them, of course.)
* On the whole, paying for Helpers to complete every stage of Field Work *should* still allow you to turn a profit on a given field, but the more you pay them to do, the smaller that profit margin is. You yourself, however, work for *free,* which means you get to *keep* all the money that field makes! Helpers are intended to allow you to work a much larger number of fields, *while you are **still** busily working some of them yourself!*
* Helpers do not make their own intelligent decisions; they just follow your orders. If you order them to plow a field full of valuable wheat that still needs harvesting, they'll get started (the game will give you a warning message that you are destroying crops). If you want to pay them to plow the same field twice, well heck, it's your money, smart guy! Make sure you look carefully at your field's status before you give a Helper an order.
* You can cancel a Helper's task by clicking on their marker on the map.
* Helpers can be **imperfect**. It looks like the AI uses the same patten of motion over fields that seems to be optimized for symmetric rear attachments. If told to harvest a field (Front Attachment) They can leave little spots at the center (It's probably not even worth your time to go grab it yourself). Plowing is the worst (non-symmetric), because even though they use the plow that can change sides, the AI can plow the wrong way round, leaving chunks unplowed when it turns a corner. Cultivating and sowing however seem to be reliable, hitting 100%, as these tasks use symmetric rear attachments
* While this is certainly a glitch/bug, sometimes helpers will quit their job without finishing (possibly at log-off). This is not the same thing as them only plowing 99% of a field; this is, you load a save file and your field is 32% plowed, and the worker is gone! You'll have to re-hire them to finish the job (or do it yourself, I suppose).
* Helpers do not do the one job I'd be happiest to pay them for: Baling straw and gathering up the bales. It's a ton of work and bother for very little benefit...which is probably why it was excluded. (...that or the Devs thought deciding it was to complicated to program) Honestly it is probably more cost effective to buy cow feed from the Agriculture Store. I'll still recommend players do baling at least once, both to load up the cow barn, and to experience that part of the game.
* Be aware of your Social Points! If you use them to discount a field or equipment purchase and they drop below 55,000, you may suddenly find yourself unable to hire workers anymore until you can regain that 55,000 threshold. Then you're back to doing every single thing yourself for a while!