2023-09-24 Getting Started
2023-09-24T08:46:00Z Created mod directory and savegame for "Animal Game-mode #1" which is first trial to get animal focused game-mode running. This is NOT a Start From Zero - Getting Started and Rules, I want to avoid doing contracts as much as possible, in fact on the first mod directory bat file I didn't even have BetterContracts symlinked but decided to add it later as unfortunately I might have to do some emergency contracts. I created new career savegame on farm-manager game-mode, this gives no land, no vehicles but 1.5m in budget, also there are no other playing rules so I can use FS22 AutoDrive, FS22 Courseplay and GPS right from the beginning, also I could consider taking a bank loan but prefer not to as credit in-game as in real life is just loosing money, only losers take loans and credit.
So now I have nothing but 1.5m in cash, what do I buy first? Oh my... 
Okay as the goal is to get animal farm going, cattle, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep and bees, that means I need basic set of equipment. However I don't think 1.5m budget allows me to buy all the animal placeables, land and vehicles at once, or at least the vehicles part would be completely useless crap vehicles then. So I'm going to start with bees and chickens, bees require nothing but the placeable single purchase plus obviously autoloading trailer to haul honey to sell points, chickens require barley so I need small scale grain farming equipment and land with field on it, plus obviously farm yard for the bees and chickens.
With bees and chickens the goal is not to just time accelerate spam until enough honey and eggs is produced, well I mean for chickens I have to harvest barley to feed them but bees require nothing, I could just spam bee hives and time accelerate 10 years while selling honey to make money but that is not realistic at all, so I will not do that, the farm has to start operating as soon as possible without any "lets make money by time accelerating" gimmicks. Main money maker would be chickens with eggs I think, so barley harvesting for chicken feed and yes then time accelerating. This is assuming 1.5m budget will not allow me to buy sheeps as well, at which point I would need grass mower and baling equipment as well, no the initial goal is bees & chickens to get started.
Okay time to make a list. Bees and chickes require:
- combine harvester
- combine harvester regular grain header
- farm grain bin silo for barley
- farmland farm yard for building placeables
- farmland field for barley grain harvesting
- grain trailer
- seeder for barley (if direct drill then no need for cultivator)
- tractor small
- trailer autoloading strautmann 802 sek to haul animal product pallets for selling points
Those are the required equipment, as bonus equipment fertilizer spreader and herbicide sprayer, but those are not critical to harvesting some barley for chickens.
Okay enough planning, time for action, firing up FS22 (shut it down for some mod removal just prior) and starting to buy farmland and equipment, this will be fun 
2023-09-24T09:12:00Z Was checking out farm yards, didn't want to buy the ones which have buildings on them as that removes space and its kind of cheaty as the farmland price is not taking the buildings into consideration, if you buy such farmland and sell off the placeables, you make few hundred thousand dollars
So decided to buy farmland ID 2 which is nice and cozy without any buildings. Farmland ID cost me 20.1k. Then bought a field, oh man these fields are big and expensive in PMC Super Six 6km, anyways I bought farmland ID 25 for 203.5k which has grass F13 in it. Okay now I have farm yard and field, budget now 1.276m, still plenty of money left.
Purchased 2 * beehive (33 langstroth hives) and beehive honey pallet location 7.4m x 4.8m - 32 pallets. Then purchased chicken coop (360 animals) for about 79k. Placed these to the farm yard. This is now named "Chicken Coop 1".
Then purchased meridian flat bottom bin 3608 for 72.2k, yes this needs an auger pipe to operate but I just felt like this would fit nicely to my animal farm starter equipment.
Purchased convey-all 1690 auger pipe for 25.5k.
Then purchased strautmann 802 sek autoloading trailer for 9k. Welger dk 115 trailer for 11.5k. Kuhn espro 6000 rc seeder for 120.5k. Massey ferguson mf 8s with wide tires and GPS for 260k. New holland varifeed 28ft header for 48k and new holland ch7.70 harvester with GPS for 282.5k.
Budget now 329.6k, okay, time to start driving my new equipment to the farm yard
Purchased 4 * big bag of seeds for 3.2k times two, first refilled seeder then purchase the second set.
2023-09-24T10:02:00Z After being taken convey-all auger pipe and kuhn seeder to my farm yard and now returned to pickup next batch of implements... I already start to regret this distance from the dealership to my farm yard and not using store deliveries mod
Its now in-game aug (one day months) so barley planting season begins next month aka tomorrow. Time accelerated to the next day, its now sep in-game 0936hrs and barley planting season is here, perfect, I can get straight to work. Still got 322.9k money so was wondering if I should buy some cheap fertilizer spreader and well maybe even herbicide sprayer although I cant recall how much those cost. But with my fields size there should be no problem to get plenty of barley for chickens to feed on.
2023-09-24T10:28:00Z Started seeding barley F13, courseplay ETA 2hrs 50min.
Whoah dude, three hour field work with this puny seeder?
Oh well, small scale stuff in the beginning, or well guess this is NOT small scale as seeding a field takes duration of two movies hehe. But yeah, I'm going to let this run, do all kinds of ALT-TAB stuff, planning, watching videos etc, but yeah not going to lie, this is quite bad right off the bat three hours, I can only imagine how many hours this field takes to harvest oh my!
Hmm smarter guy might have split this field to several smaller sections, plant maybe different crops so could have only seed a small portion, then get to time accelerate until harvest season. Hmm.
Thinking more about this savegame progression, I now have bee hives and empty chicken coop, with my 322.9k budget I could easily purchase some chicken feed temporarily and then buy chickens, they would start to grow and if I bought few adults then already produce eggs. This would be especially useful for time accelerating until barley harvest season, I would get plenty of eggs in that time.
Hmm yup, that is what I'm going to do, most likely will do some mod maintenance as well, add my missing autodrive network waypoint routes, store deliveries mod and GPS lines configs too. This current FS22 install and mod-set is quite basic, I am playing this on PMC DevSurf computer on 4k triple screen desktop with FS22 video preset LOW to be able to run it with nvidia GTX 1060 3gb GPU. Hmm I might migrate this savegame and mod-set to PMC Gaming computer for proper 4k, heck maybe even trackir5 and saitek heavy equipment precision bundle wheel action
But for now, just going to play with mouse and keyboard video preset LOW, its fine for me, getting rock solid 60FPS, I don't need the pixel porno (over performance).
2023-09-24T11:42:00Z Ran out of seeds
2023-09-24T11:44:00Z Refilled all the 2.5k liters of seed big bags from strautmann 802 sek autoloading trailer and now seeding barley continues, I really hope I don't run out of seeds again as then I have to run to the dealership to buy some more. Probably at that point I'll restart FS22 with store deliveries mod and get it to my farm yard, don't want to drive back and forth anymore that far.
Still one and an half hour left, uuh, this first field work course was kind of mistake, I should have just done a small snippet of the field instead of full, hmm was it over 18ha or something. Oh well, next time I know better.
2023-09-24T11:47:00Z Lunch break ...
2023-09-24T12:12:00Z Feeding time is over, back to seeding.
Uuh seeder had 740 liters of seeds left, argh most definitely will run dry again before this field is done. Actually there is no reason to even fully finish this field, makes no difference, only nasty thing is that I used courseplay field work generator skip lanes feature so there are those ugly empty rows now, so yeah need to get more seeds and finish this field properly. As said, next time I wont make the same mistake again.
F13 in the early stages of this savegame, before getting better equipment, could be split into maybe 4 smaller sections, much more focused farming with shorter field work durations. Or maybe I just do one more soybeans planting, sell that grain off and then buy better equipment
Nah not really, don't feel like planting crops for profit, this savegame is all about animals now.
While courseplay was running the tractor I already added FS22_storeDeliveries.zip to my Animal_Gamemode symlink bat file, once seeder is empty I'll restart FS22 with that mod and get some seeds and chicken feed delivered to my farm yard. I doubt autodrive files are available on this computer and don't really want to boot up PMC Gaming computer just for that, dunno.
2023-09-24T12:24:00Z Reached end of the current row and only 86 liters of seeds left, ok driving to farm yard and getting ready for FS22 restart...
2023-09-24T12:36:00Z All done, back in FS22 and store deliveries mod is active (no autodrive network files yet though).
Purchased chicken feed (wheat) 8 big bags for 11.2k, should last a while. Used strautmann 802 sek autoloading trailer to pickup the big bag's of wheat and refilled chicken coop, its now 7.9k basically 8k liters of chicken feed.
Then purchased chickens, got 60 * 6 months old chickens for 3.3k total, 60 * 0 months old chicks for 360 total, this is good enough for now. Chickens are quite cheap that I could have bought more, but 120 / 360 capacity is fine for now, those 60 adult chickens should reproduce soon and then I'll get more chicks (chicken babies I mean hehe).
Okay, then purchased 4 * seeds big bags for 3.2k total. Refilled seeder.
2023-09-24T12:46:00Z Back seeding, time to finish this first field of barley!
I already have seed production plus mod on but not yet purchased in-game, so once I get this barley, then hmm I need to buy lizard MKS8 liquid tanker trailer and transport some liquid fertilizer and herbicide into that seed production placeable, then with barley it can start to produce seeds for me. Hmm wonder if I could transfer just liquid tanks on strautmann 802 sek, would they refill into the placeable, I don't think so, I must have tried that on my PMC Farm Lab Animal Studies savegame and it didn't work, hmm yeah so need to get that small tanker trailer.
2023-09-24T13:01:00Z Must say, I'm really excited to playing FS22 again, this specific savegame to test out how animal focused farm would work with small starter kit, if you can call farm-manager 1.5m budget a small, it really is not but yeah there is Start From Zero savegames and then others, this is the latter hehe. Anyways I'm loving my time farming here, cant wait to get farm fully running, buying more animals and vehicles, will be great
Its also fun that I get to compile animal focused vehicles and implements purchase lists, for example I have no idea how much a great grass mowing pack of implements or full corn chaff silage harvest setup costs. Actually that corn chaff silage setup will be quite expensive because it needs silage bunkers, forage harvester and a heavy tractor etc. Definitely will be fun the compile that list.
I just started my animal farm, only bees and one chicken coop not even half full of chickens, but the next step is of course sheeps and those require basic mower and baler, bare minimum so can do grass bales for sheeps. But once that is running, then its very easy going with chickens and sheep as they require so little maintenance, just dump in barley and bring in grass bales, all done
2023-09-24T13:27:00Z Finished seeding barley F13, first field done! 
Drove massey ferguson and kuhn seeder back to my farm yard, parked them there, no vehicle sheds yet I have no money for such things hah, now... well now what, guess its just time accelerating towards next years barley harvest. I do wonder if honey or eggs start to pile up before that, I doubt it but I don't have much experience on the production rates here.
Also time accelerating, on my previous savegames I noticed that with 6000 speed production chain buildings freeze up, nothing happens. Fastest speed that works is 5000 which is the same as giants farm house sleeping speed (watching the sky with Zzz icon). On my animal studies savegame I only used 1000 speed because even the five thousand speed caused production chain buildings to freeze up which was really odd. But for now I don't have any production buildings, so I'll just monitor chicken production inspector stats with the 5000 speed and continue day by day.
Its now sep in-game 1245hs.
Oct in-game 0940hrs, overnight got -261 maintenance fee. Chickens average health went to 100% and average re-production is 50% now. Farm company statistics: august -1.177m, september -18.7k... hmm this is scary reading as I just burn through money with maintenance fees while time accelerating towards next years barley harvest season. Honey pallets start to accumulate on the bee hive spawner and first egg pallet appeared at chicken coop too.
Also I could do contracts, but as said this is not the savegame for contracts, I would be happy, lets say its one of my minor goals to never do any contracts in this savegame, I'd have to have some sort of emergency money situation if I'm driven into doing fertilizing contracts. Of course if I somehow get so bored that I want to do recreational tillage or harvest... then sure, that can be done, but for money making, nah go play Start From Zero if you want to struggle with money and do endless number of contracts.
Nov in-game 0935hrs, overnight property maintenance -262, its increasing. I had to disable pretty much all but eggs and honey sell price triggers as it spammed so much of those notifications, even after finishing time accelerating it was cueueing those notifications for over a minute heh. Also makes no sense to have the notifications on as I have no such products to sell, will not have for several more months, probably years
Oh and now first chicks were born, chicken coop 1 is now 180 / 360 animals.
Jan in-game 0912hrs, chickens keep getting born, chicken coop 1 now 240 / 360 animals. Soon I'll be getting so much eggs heh. Actually hmm wonder if I'm going to buy second chicken coop once this first one reaches full capacity, hmm hmm. I don't have animal trailer which to use transfer these chickens so I'd have to do the semi cheaty savegame XML move, hmm not sure. Maybe I'll buy cheapest animal trailer and pull it with my massey ferguson, dunno. I mean growth, I want more animals, I want this farm to grow, no reason to keep it stale.
2023-09-24T13:57:00Z Dunno feels kind of dumb to repeat myself, but man am I excited about farming, to grow animal farm heh, the thing is that without been on holiday since 2016 I'm burnt out for computer stuff most of the time and anytime I get excited about something its alone worth to be happy about... if you know what I mean here
So yeah farm on dude, lets get some animals growing
Barley F13 is full grown large weeds now, yup I didn't do any herbicide stuff. Dunno if its even necessary as this is a relatively speaking huge 18.9ha field and for my chicken and seed production needs its way more than necessary. So no problem if there are a bit weeds, maybe next harvest could be herbicide sprayed, will have to see how budget goes.
Mar in-game 0924hrs, alright year 2 has begun in-game crop calendar wise. Chicken coop 1 now 300 / 360 animals. Food is running low, only 2.3k liters left, I wonder if it lasts until barley harvest season begins at jun, it should. Today is honey highest market price day as well, hmm there are plenty of honey pallets by the bee hives so hmm maybe I'll grab a strautmann 802 sek and go haul some for sell...
Honey price is 3325 at Six Global AG Corp, time to go sell my batch. Loaded it all up on strautmann 802 sek trailer and its total yield is 6.1k liters.
2023-09-24T14:20:00Z Sold and got 20.4k profit, my first animal farming profit, nice
Apr in-game 0907hrs, chicken coop 1 now full 360 animals
Also its just about to run out of wheat, only 699 liters left. Yep its not enough until barley harvest, I doubt a large amount of damage would be done if I'd just wait until barley harvest, but its easy to buy one big bag of wheat and feed the chickens, day after tomorrow I'll get to harvest barley (I hope) and then chickens have all the feed they ever need.
Purchased one big bag of chicken feed (wheat) for 1.4k, delivery fee was 35. Then fed the chickens.
Was just thinking that the honey profit was 20.4k so that paid the first bee hive placeable now, another one of those batches of honey to sell and the bee hives have paid themselves. Looking good so far.
May in-game 0910hrs, barley is still not ready, its 6/6 (forage) but chickens ran out of food, 0% food left, yikes! Alarm!
Purchased one big bag of chicken feed (wheat) for 1.4k, delivery fee was 35. Then fed the chickens. Again
I'm tempted to buy another chicken coop, but because the animal transfer would require either savegame "cheat" or buying animal trailer, I'll wait until barley harvest is done, or at least started.
Jun in-game 0925hrs, barley is ready to harvest and chickens are out of food again
Additional field info shows potential harvest quantity 323.1k liters, oh my, my grain trailer is hmm 8k liters capacity I think, man if I have to haul THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND liters with it... yeah how many trips does that make 
2023-09-24T14:43:00Z Started harvesting barley F13, courseplay ETA 3hrs 20min.
Goodness gracious that ETA
Did three headland lands field work course, not that there are much objects near the field edge but yeah three headlands felt about right. Ooh maan, three hours of harvesting, this will be fun 
2023-09-24T14:47:00Z First welger trailer is full, this is a joke... what was I thinking when buying 8k liter grain trailer? 
Sold welger dk 115 for 8.8k, purchased brantner dd 24073/2 xxl with extension for 44.6k, budget now 282.7k.
2023-09-24T14:55:00Z Chicken coop 1 is now 100% food status, now begins the long haul of that 3hrs 20min barley harvest
While waiting for the puny new holland ch7.70 combine grain tank to get full(er) was thinking about priorities, hmm harvester is now discharging straw, but I don't have any animals yet which need straw... but would love to bale it already for storage so its ready to go once I buy cows or pigs which require straw. Hmm just wonder how many barley harvests I can go through before get to buy even pigs (I believe their barn is cheaper). But this harvest will take hours so I have plenty of time to think about it.
BTW there is fendt 700 vario and arcusin square bale collector for sale, tempting... tempting
2023-09-24T15:10:00Z First brantner grain trailer load of barley dumped into farm grain bin silo.
Brantner dd 24073/2 xxl trailer is difficult to back into convey-all 1690 auger pipe as its got that front axle thing, so its really tricky. Can be done but needs some 3rd person perspective watching. Hopefully wont have to do many harvests with this hardware.
2023-09-24T15:57:00Z Quick shower break...
2023-09-24T16:11:00Z Back, harvesting continues.
2023-09-24T16:20:00Z Another grain trailer load into farm grain bin silo, its now got 133.8k liters, nice.
2023-09-24T17:43:00Z Getting a bit tired and 17hrs been awake alarm went off few moments ago, time to call it a night, more animal tending tomorrow, nites.
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