I now have enough money to buy a large horse paddock, and with it, a horse to trot around it. This starts me with the lumpiest of lump sums. I exit ‘new farmer’ mode and load up ‘farm manager’ mode. The only problem? It would take about 40 seconds to generate the funds needed for my fleet of machines. Better still, if you continue to click the loan button you have an easy source of income, no matter if each loan is more financially irresponsible than the previous one. You can take out a small loan of $5,000 on the finance menu screen. And that strategy is to stop thinking about ever owning one. But costing several million dollars I better rethink my strategy. We’re talking none other than the Grimme Varitron 470 Platinum Terra Trac, which does potatoes. We’re talking the Ropa Maus 5, which I’m told is an exquisite beet manipulator, and trucks with names like ‘Man’ and ‘Hulk’. Travel is instantaneous, which makes everything a lot easier, and your avatar can sprint infinitely too – probably due to that healthy farmer’s diet of meat and dairy.Īs I select the small horse paddock, my eyes are drawn to the shopkeeper’s other wares: a decorative sandcastle, a big grain bag, a shed (officially licensed by Easy Shed). You can keep up to 16 neigh-sayers and raise their fitness level by riding them around before selling them on for profit.Īfter trading with the animal dealer I visit the shop to buy my horse a home. This game puts the ‘culture’ in ‘agriculture’.
That’s right, you can finally ride beautiful steeds. Pony riding is new to Farming Simulator 19.
Hour 3: stop everything because I want a pony I don’t, however, have the one thing people with money truly want: a horse pen. I picked ‘new farmer’ mode so I begin the game with a cool $100,000. I’m willing to trade all my vegetables for it – a plan that’s soon foiled as, annoyingly, vegetables are not currency like they are in Skyrim. I scroll down the menu and see mottled pigs, brown cows, and best of all, horses as black as night. A comfortingly literal application of the business’s name. This place, I quickly learn, deals in animals. With my head spinning like a spinnery, I head to the animal dealer, because animals have never steered me wrong before. I didn’t get my bearings at all! In actual fact, I lost some of my bearings, and now I’m questioning the very concept of a farm. Wait, I don’t recognise any of these things. There’s the spinnery, the animal dealer, the biogas plant, and of course, the lime station. Is this normal for farmers? I thought they slept in beds? Anyway, I bring up the map screen to get my bearings and see everything you’d usually associate with a farm. I go for Ravenport because it feels more Hollywood and, in my opinion, farming could do with a bit more glamour. It’s a good job location and climate isn’t an important factor when it comes to farming or I’d be screwed. America or Europe? That’s all I have to go on. You only need to have seen Europe on the telly to know that. Felsbrunn is the second, and with its nondescript castle and left-hand driving, it’s very clearly somewhere in Europe. The first is Ravenport, a farm so American I’ve actually called it Eagle Base USA in my head canon. And, even then, hats might just be more convenient. At least, until one of them invents a machine to block out the sun. Hats are clearly a big deal in the farming community. There’s a lot! And all of them bear official manufacturer logos. I’m surprised by the sheer number of hat options. With his loud pink shirt and delicately gelled hair, he’s the archetypal farmer – I think – a man who could deftly navigate one of those annoying one-in-one-out metal turnstiles you see in the countryside. And it’s here that I’ll grapple with the question that has plagued us for millennia: what do farmers actually do? They’re battlegrounds for colourful machines that have more in common with Transformers than tractors.
This is the incorrect way to run a farm.įarming Simulator 19 aims to teach you the ideal way. There’s no clear financial gain to be had out of any of this. If I owned a real-life farm, it’d just be me strolling around and pointing to all the land I own and laughing really loudly, and occasionally rounding up my sheep so I can stroke them. I think clucking chickens and the big sun baby from the Teletubbies because I got bored of thinking about farms. I think of squeezing milk from a cow’s udder right into the mouth of a grateful hound. When I think about farms I picture rolling hills and big breakfasts. No, I’m confining my new life as a farmhand to Farming Simulator 19, despite having a very poor grasp on what a modern farm actually is or does. Not literally, of course – Mother Nature deserves better than to have me buried in her face. Cow… graduation? It’s here that I have decided to plant myself.