Ten Things I Hate About Farming Simulator

I bought this game because I was bored, fancied a simulation game and this was on sale. The Sims 3 didn't work at the time, so this won. Now I've played it for over ten hours, I've made a list of the things about it that have made the game a little less than enjoyable. I may have gotten more enjoyment out of writing this list than I have playing the game.

1 - This Game Does Not Understand Tutorials
Oh suuuuuure, there are tutorials in the game. Er, I mean, accessed from the main menu. And they have nothing to do with your actual game. You complete a series of ultimately boring activities one by one. Integrate them into the game, you say? Why the hell would they want to do a thing like that?
I mean, yes, it's great that the tutorials are NOT in the main game and are therefore optional for farming simulator veterans (did I really just type that), but they could just as easily be put into the main game and made optional. Running a farm for the first time? Hey, follow this tutorial. Don't care? Hey, click this button to carry on with whatever you were doing. The tutorials don't add anything at all to your farm because they're separate, so you're just driving a tractor around for no real gain when the controls are shown on screen anyway. But when you're in your game, you're told absolutely nothing. You own field 16, by the way. It's wheat and it's ready to harvest, so that's where you start. Your harvester is the red one. You can turn the crap left all over the ground into bales if you have the right equipment (you don't, it's expensive) or you can run over it with the cultivator and it'll disappear so you can seed the field again. The grain symbols mean this, this and this. Other stuff the game doesn't mention, blah blah blah. You're welcome.

2 - This Is Your Next Purchase, By The Way

Every so often, a notification comes up saying that a field is going up for auction that day. So far I've only had it happen twice. For field 15, I didn't have enough money. The field sold, and then I later bought it anyway for the price that it was before the auction. Field 19 I'm currently bidding for, because I have enough money and I really don't know why these auctions exist unless they give you a chance to buy up the land at a discount. Still, though, I didn't think that the game was going to be shoving my next potential purchase in my face. If these auctions don't exist purely for discounts, then why do they exist at all if I can still buy the field afterwards? Even if they do exist for discounts, there has to be a better way of doing that than making you panic because the only field you can almost afford is selling to another farm that doesn't exist.

3 - I Don't Have A Front Loader And A Pallet Fork

The game has little missions that you can do for extra money. 95% of these require a front loader and a pallet fork. These things are very fucking expensive. They're not something you're going to be able to afford for a while. The other missions require a lawnmower of some form, which isn't so unattainable, but these missions are few and far between. You can set how often you are offered these missions or switch them off altogether, but you can't do anything about having missions you can't afford to do thrown at you while you desperately wait for a lawnmower mission to come up, because you've just started the game and you need the money, dammit.

4 - Friendly Neighbour X, Otherwise Known As The Farming Simulator Zombie Apocalypse

There's a little village on the map, probably the shittiest village I've ever seen, where the farm shop is. There are people walking around it. They're essentially nameless drones whose sole existence is to make the village look more village-like, but as you can't interact with them, they consist of the same set of people sticking rigidly to their set paths, you can walk through them and they really don't appear to do anything, the effect is somewhat lost.

Not so the motorists, oh no. Motorists like to stand out. It's perfectly okay if you accidentally go up the curb and crush a pedestrian because they'll just walk through your vehicle without a care in their robot world, but if you happen to hit a car you're in for a proper crash. You can't drive through them. This kind of realism is all well and good, but at the same time, it really really isn't. Like the people, the cars consist of the same lot endlessly driving around on their set paths. They will not deviate from these paths, no matter what. They don't care if there's a massive tractor and trailer in the way, they'll just drive into you, and there is no real way to avoid it. If you stick to the right side of the road, you still get them pulling out and driving into your side. Even when that doesn't happen, remember you're driving farm equipment around. It's not the fastest thing you could be in. By and large, the drone cars are faster than you. So if you're in your tractor pulling your trailer along, prepare to be rear-ended by one of the locals. 

Your best bet is to drive on the wrong side of the road (the left, in this case) and then just dodge them. It won't completely eliminate the possibility of you being driven into, but at least you can see when a car is coming and move out of its way.
If you can't manage to avoid a crash that results in your vehicle being stuck, don't worry, there's something to fix that that can be equally irritating.

5 - Tractor Teleportation

In the save menu, if you scroll through the pages there's one showing where all your vehicles are on the map. If they're stuck, you can click on them and reset them... but you can't choose where that reset sends them. If it's equipment that you use to farm fields in any of the corners of the map, you're in for a very long drive back from the main farm in the centre, because that's where it sends everything. There's no option to teleport your vehicles to specific places on the map to make your farming easier: you have to drive whatever it is all the way there. Then, when you need to refill the fertiliser or seeds or whatever, you have to teleport it back to the main farm, refill it, and then drive aaaaaaaall the way back again. It's almost as much fun as it sounds. 

6 - Farming Simulation Of This One Map Here

I have the Titanium version, so I have two maps, but the game starts you off with only one map if you get the regular edition. A bit of variety wouldn't go amiss. It's also a set map: your farm is where it is, buildings are where they are, fields are where they are, blah blah blah. All you can do is buy what's there on the map already if you want to expand. You don't get to build anything at all.

7 - Speaking Of Maps...
You can't see it. No, really. You can view a full map of your farm twice from the save menu. One shows where all your vehicles are and the other shows the status of all your crops (growing, ready for harvest, blah blah). You cannot see the map in any way as it is, showing all the fields and all the buildings and locations etc in full. You can view it in little sections on the PDA thing but you can't see anything on that that isn't in the immediate vicinity. Don't know where the inn is, but want to sell your harvest there? Tough shit. Drive around and find it.

8 - Old MacDonald Had Fuck All, E-I-E-I-O

You can buy chickens, sheep and cows on the game. There's one pen in the main farm area for chickens. There's one field in one of the corners of the map for cows. There's one field in another corner of the map for sheep. You can't expand or move any of the animal pens. There's about 40 crop fields you can buy.

You start the game with only the ability to keep chickens, as the equipment for dairy and wool farming is expensive. You are therefore stuck with farming crops whether you wanted to be an arable farmer or not. If you wanted to play the game as a cattle farmer, you can't. If you wanted to be a sheep farmer, you can't. If you wanted to be a pig farmer, you definitely bought the wrong game, because they don't exist at all. A bit more freedom would be nice. I haven't got any sheep or cows yet, but a cow is a cow and a sheep is a sheep and a chicken is a chicken. There are no breeds or anything like that. I'm told you can breed cattle, but when they're all the damn same I don't really see why. I'm pretty sure that if I get to the stage where I can afford the machinery to have cows in my game, I'm not going to need to care as much about saving money by breeding instead of buying.

9 - Run, MacDonald, Run

Nowhere in the game is meat farming possible. Chickens = eggs, sheep = wool, cows = milk. I can only assume that that's why pigs don't exist.

The chicken pen is a little patch of grass with a couple of coups in it and a cockerel whose purpose in the game utterly baffles me. The chickens just wander around the pen. Only a few of them show up in the pen, but apparently you can buy as many as you like and they'll all contribute to egg production. Do you collect eggs from the chicken coups? No, of course you don't. Eggs are laid randomly all over the pen. You have to run around and pick them up individually, and, to add to the egg hunt fun, the perimeter of the pen is mostly shrubbery, which eggs like to hide in. If farming sheep or cows is as irritating as this then I'll stick to my fields, thanks.

10 - Retro Sound, Graphics and Other Irritations
The graphics are terrible. Pixel trees. Generally awful textures. The sky looks the same every day. Yes you get sunsets, but it's the same sunset. Then there's the zombie apocalypse of emotionless and silent drones in the village, and weather exists only to stop you from harvesting - in rain or hail you can't harvest crops. There are no seasons (ON A FARMING SIMULATOR, REALLY!?) or other kinds of weather.
The sounds are not much better. Chickens apparently only make one noise, over and over, and I can hear it whenever I'm in the main farmyard. I'll have to assume that sheep and cows are on the same level. The rest of the sound is cars on the street and the noise from your tractors with the occasional birdsong, but after a while it all just blends into dull. True to the game's fuck-tutorials attitude, there's nothing that says how much it costs to hire workers, so I've never bothered, but since the character you're stuck with otherwise doesn't make a sound, it's safe to say that the farm workers won't either. God forbid anyone in a simulation game behave like an actual human instead of a robot. There's a farmhouse with laundry out to dry and other "real" things on your map, but it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, so, like the village, it's just there to make things seem more realistic. When it doesn't have a use and the graphics are crap, the effect doesn't really work.

In all, this is a Farming Simulator for robots. If robots had farms, it'd feel like this. It's okay for passing time with and sometimes it's almost fun, but I wouldn't say I found it addictive and I doubt I'll see it through when I have so many games that are so much better on that list (and The Sims 3 is now working). It hasn't reviewed very well, and I'd say it deserves it. There are so many obvious improvements that could be there and aren't. It's worth a sale price but I'd never pay full price for it. I may go back to it, I may not. Field 19 could well end up being in limbo forever.

Because working on one thing at a time is boring.

News - I've added a contact email to the "About" page.

First of all, some finished scribbles from ages ago.

And now for more WIPs to add to the WIP collection (if anyone is keeping track, please don't tell me how many there are).

This is the third sheet of watercolours that I keep talking about. It's progressed quite a bit since this photo, but it's still in progress. Convincing purple and green to blend together can be quite soul-destroying.

This is part of the latest thing to be added to the WIP pile. I finished the skirt and her hands, plus it's had a few light washes since this photo. I'm using this book as inspiration.

Then there's also a male character design that I haven't photographed, but I might scan that and try doing it digitally. I can't get the level of detail that I want into the drawing so I'm having to draw details enlarged at the side with arrows pointing to where they go (his necklace for instance). Digital painting is proving very difficult without a desk, though, so if I did do that then I'm pretty sure it'd never get done. How people do traditional character designs on A4 I will never know.

EDIT EDIT EDIT I almost forgot: the little A6 sketchbook that I was using for horrendous plein air paintings and ONLY horrendous plein air paintings has had a change of purpose, starting today. It just isn't possible for me to do plein air paintings here - I don't have a car to drive myself places or to shelter in and paint out of during horrible weather (like it will be until summer, pretty much) so if I leave that book as wanderings-only it'll never get used. It's going to be for daily disasters instead, of whatever the hell I like. I may or may not post them here: I've never posted the plein air ones, so don't hold your breath. Plein air was a brilliant exercise and I wish I could do more of it but it just isn't going to be possible while I'm staying here. I'm hoping that regular little paintings and sketches will help me to improve

Jewellery!

Ages ago now, I used to make jewellery and I really enjoyed it and then I stopped. I've recently started again after unpacking all my supplies from moving and remembering how fun it was.

I can't do silversmithing anymore because I don't have the equipment or the space, but I had an unfinished bracelet hanging around my room and Vicky from Raindrops on Roses let me steal her workshop and her solder to finish the clasp.

I made this ring with the leftover silver. Thank you so much to Vicky because I was seriously rusty! I haven't done silversmithing for eight years!

I may not be working with silver any more but I can still work with beads, so I dug those out and started playing. I had to get a few more supplies before I could use some of the beads (and I still do), but here's what I've done so far:

It was getting dark when I took the photos, so they're a bit grainy I'm afraid. Here's the bracelets in smaller groups:

The clear elastic gave me a lot of problems, so I haven't cut the ends off yet. I'm going to glue the knots so they're extra secure and then cut them. The black elastic is fine without the glue so they're cut but I think I'll glue them as well just in case.

I'm on the hunt for wooden beads and gemstone beads because they're what I prefer working with, although none of the bracelets pictured have gemstones in them; I'm too nervous of using them in case I can't find any more. I also want to do jewellery with leather and waxed cord instead of just elastic.

I started working on these for myself, too. They're going to be hair ties - I have VERY long hair and I'm finally bored of having a plain elastic at the end of my braid, so I'm going to wrap these around it instead. They're made with wood, bone (I think) and waxed cord. If I have extra cord left over then I'll make a few more. I've only knotted the beads on the first one at the top, I haven't done the others yet. It's hard figuring out how much cord I need between the two - it's difficult to pull the large bone beads through a knot.

Which leads me to the point of this - I'm going to start an Etsy shop for this blog. Initially it will just have the bead jewellery on there but eventually, maybe I can put paintings and photo prints on there too. I'll make another post when it's all set up.

AND. Since I started writing this blog post, I've made 15 more bracelets. The two on the top row on the left are mine. I've kept three of the rainbow bracelets for myself.

There are 38 bracelets in total now, so that's 35 for the shop!

Art Dump plus one WIP

I was going to make separate posts for all of these, but then I decided that I couldn't really be bothered to.

First up is the sheet of flowers done with Copic markers. I put a preview of this on Instagram with just the lines drawn, so here's the "finished" version. The first one I couldn't really be bothered with. For its size, it was too detailed. The second one is probably my favourite: I like the colours and I like the way they blended together. The third one is too dark but I used the lightest colours so there's not much I can do about that. The fourth one needs Copic white and I don't have any, so that isn't quite finished, and the fifth one looked perfectly blended until it dried, otherwise that would've been my favourite instead. I could probably have played with it more but I didn't want to go back to it. These were completed ages ago - the date is written on the sheet.

Next is the watercolour sunset I previewed on Twitter. It was completed the day after the painting in the last post but I haven't had the chance to upload it before now. This is one of the most relaxing things I've ever painted - I loved every minute of it. I'm definitely going to do more skies!

Then there's a Copic multiliner brush pen scribble of Wish from one of the photos I took of him years ago. I couldn't be bothered to do his markings, especially with a brush pen (he's an Appaloosa) and I didn't want to ruin what I'd done as I was happy with it like this. It practically matches the photo and I couldn't erase anything because it was pen, so I was very happy to get the anatomy done. It's in an A5 sketchbook that I have solely for use with pen and ink and it's the third drawing in there.

The fourth drawing in the pen and ink sketchbook is this one of a (sort of) Rainbow Cobweb Delta Guppy. I bought a dip pen and drawing inks and this is my first try at using colours and doing a "proper" drawing with them. I got a bit carried away with it but the paper held up quite well and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I'd rather not know how many times I had to dip the pen.

Last but not least is a watercolour WIP with horses and stuff. I don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing it. It's been quite boring to do so far, if I'm being honest. I am extremely sick of seeing and mixing the colour green and the masking fluid tore the paper in several places so it looks a mess anyway. I don't know. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

I'm going to return to the other watercolour flower soon so I can get that other sheet posted, then I'm going to try a few watercolours of people. No green there!

Watercolour Wednesday

(Although by the time the paint has dried and the internet has stopped being a bitch, it's Thursday.)

I've been following @charlesevansart on Twitter for a little while now and his paintings made me want to destroy more of my paper collection, so I did.

I ended up using different brushes and the whole-pan studio set because it's a bit stupid of me to waste travelling supplies when I'm sitting in my room. I struggled with them a little because there are lots of colours I'm not used to using and none of the colours are labelled. My half-pans have the colours written on the side of the pans but these don't. I'd guess the blue that I made so much use of was cobalt blue. Larger pans, larger brushes and larger paper was quite nice, though.

The paper has buckled a bit but it's had a LOT of water thrown at it. I can definitely tell it's better quality than the ancient paper I'm using for the practice sheets (I still haven't posted the last one, gulp). It didn't dissolve under pressure either, so that's good. I'm going to use the pad as a watercolour sketchbook of sorts. There's eleven sheets left for me to ruin/play with.

It's quite the landscape disaster, but I don't think I care that much. I used my own photos for reference and the location is one of my favourites.

WIP Wednesday - Watercolour

 

This is the third watercolour sheet - one finished painting and the lines for the next one, which I'll hopefully be able to start painting at the end of this week. 

New watercolour goodies!

I've been doing a bit more work on my current painting between typing up university work and the paper has absolutely died, so after a few Twitter conversations with Pullingers, I ended up going out and buying this:

The book is no longer sold on Amazon but they had one in the store, so I jumped on it :D The black portfolio is to keep finished art things in, because otherwise I tend to not be able to find them again, and the mini canvasses are for acrylic fun that I will try later.

The Winsor & Newton case is the Sketchers' Case that is now discontinued - I ended up with one of their last two for just £18! It came with a Cotman pocket sketchers' paint box (the one I already use), an A6 hardback sketch book, a paintbrush, a pencil, an eraser and a water bottle. I harvested the paint pans from the set and put them in my surplus paints box, then used the empty box for my 12 homeless artists' watercolours. When I go out I take the paint box that I've already used with me - I tried one watercolour sketch on the day that I got it and it looks so awful I don't even know if I'll blog it. I'm gonna need to read that book quite carefully I think!

The rest is for stretching paper so that it doesn't end up as dead as my current sheet is. I've never stretched paper before so that's going to be quite messy. I got an A3 MDF board and an A2 MDF board, plus tape and a knife. Soak paper, lay on board, tape down, leave to dry, paint, cut off board? As far as I know. I have books that have paper stretching tutorials in them so I'll give those a read before I destroy a piece of paper. It's really gonna annoy me not to have paper the exact size anymore due to what I'll lose by cutting it off the board, though.

I also did a bit of Googling and found this!

It's a Cotman Field Brush set. It arrived after my disastrous sketch, so I'm yet to use it, but it's a little case around A6 size with a pencil, a number 10 field brush, an eraser and a sponge, plus three reversible brushes: size 5, size 3 and size 00. Once the lids of the reversible brushes have been removed they can be put on the end of the brush to create a longer handle and therefore turn them into full-sized brushes. They DO fit in the pocket sketchers' boxes - it's a very close fit but they do go in there and the box opens and closes just fine. So this combined with the Sketchers' Case means that the only thing that sucks about outdoor watercolour sketching is me. Still, practice makes perfect and all that...

Watercolour Disasters - Volume 2

Nearly a year after the last four, here's the next four! This involved introducing my scanner to the new laptop for the first time, so this blog post has been fairly traumatic.

I started the horse in May 2012 and then went back to stay with family for summer and didn't take the reference with me, so I had to leave it alone. Prior to continuing with it, it looked like this:

The dappling was purely accidental. After I'd left it for so long, I didn't really want to go back to it, in case this version ended up looking better, and I wasn't 100% sure about this no-black rule, because mixing dark colours was a bitch to do. I really wish I'd just left it now. The "finished" version resembles a peat bog on legs. Oh well. The "black" is burnt umber and ultramarine, as usual. I suppose I could do a burnt umber wash over the pale grey parts, but I honestly never want to touch this again.

The beach I painted while back home in summer 2012 - it was the only bit of art I did the entire time I was there, which is never good - and it was just supposed to be a stupidly simple picture that took less than ten minutes to do. It looks like one, so I guess that wasn't a total failure.

The flowers were both done recently using my own photo references. The purple one just would not do what I wanted it to do. I also learned, perhaps a little late, that you can't really paint veins on petals when you're only using one brush. A bigger selection of brushes would probably have served this one better. Still, it's a marked improvement on the flower painting from the first sheet I think. I left it alone before I killed it, but I'm not sure I'd say it was finished. Still, I'm not going to go near it ever again.

The tulips I just did because I quite like flowers - I know I said I was going to do other things for this sheet so I suppose doing two flower paintings was cheating. I also cheated on colours for this one - I used a colour that isn't in the palette of 12. I took it from the full set of 45 and then put it back when I was done with it. Mixing pink just isn't something I can do though, so without it they would have been red. I used Rose Madder Hue. In the photo, the flower on the right is in focus while the one on the left is completely blurred and the one in the middle is, well, in the middle. This didn't come across too well (or at all) in the painting. I actually like the middle flower the best, possibly the best out of all eight watercolour disasters so far.

The original plan was to do the two sheets of four and then move on to sheets of two, to give myself more space and practice with larger paintings. I'm not sure whether to stick with this plan or not though, because I think I still need more practice with the A6 sizes. I suppose only two paintings per sheet might inspire me to actually put more time into them - a large problem has been rushing - but I'm still undecided. I won't say what I'll be painting because I didn't stick to it last time.

Here's the obligatory beauty shot of the paints, after the second sheet. It's a fairly shitty photo, but there's a huge crater in the ultramarine and smaller craters in some of the others - my paint is looking used at last. I can't dig the paint blocks out of the pans anymore.

A note though, the brush is starting to look very used. The bristles are starting to lose their shape and I have a feeling that the paint box will outlive the brush I have for it, which is a slight problem because W&N don't seem to sell the tiny brushes for these boxes separately. I could probably take a brush from a different box when this one dies - I think I have a box with a brush that's the same - but then that box won't have a brush either, so I don't know. I have a mini artist quality brush, but I think it's too thick to fit in these boxes. Hmm. Points for the paints, minus points for the shitty brush.

Here's to the next sheet of watercolours kicking my ass :)

WIP Wednesday - Aquarium

I've been working on this while my computer takes forever to reinstall absolutely everything. This is a combination of Photoshop and Painter - I'm using Photoshop to add the textures and I'm using Painter for the rest (mechanical pencil, cover pencil and soft blender stump).

This is my first time using textures. I still have a bit of work to do on the pebbles/rocks but I am so happy with how they look so far and I can't believe I haven't tried textures before. I'm going to add gravel to the left of the image because I think that blue patch at the bottom looks a bit too empty, so that's not in the image yet, but the fish are scribbled and the grass is scribbled. The grass will have to be drawn blade-by-blade because as you can see, the ends of my brushstokes aren't very grass-like.

Stone and granite textures came with an Imagine FX DVD and are from Vyonyx. I've used two textures for every pebble/rock.