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I recently purchased and played Farming Simulator 18 on the iPad. It was my first time ever playing a farming simulation game, although I have played other games with farming elements in them. What surprised me was how entertaining it is. Also, I was blown away by all the detail that went into this representation of farming. I went in thinking that I would pick up some tidbits of information about farm implements and agriculture practices, and maybe have a little fun driving a tractor. But, in the end I had a blast, and I think it made me look at farming (and farmers) in a completely different way.

 

This is the main screen that shows up when you start the game.

 

The beginning of the game starts you off already with a working farm - you have three fields, two tractors, a combine harvester, and an assortment of attachments to go on your machines. You also get a few cows and sheep. One of the fields that you originally have is a meadow, which means it has grass growing in it that you can mow and feed to your animals. The other two starter fields contain wheat. One of them is ripe, so you can harvest it right away, and the other has just been harvested, so it is your job to cultivate, sow, and fertilize it.

 

First thing I did was harvest some wheat. The grain collects inside the combine until your meter reaches 100. To empty it, you park a trailer on its left side.

 

Driving the vehicles isn't easy, but it's not too hard. I thought they did a good job with the physics (especially while you are towing trailers). You can steer either by tilting the iPad or with a horizontal slider that appears in the bottom left. Your gas pedal is a vertical slider that appears on the right, which stays at its maximum setting once you take off your finger. This led to me occasionally almost crashing, because I would set it at max and forget that I needed to eventually slow down. You spend all of the game inside vehicles, and the camera provides a third-person view. I wish that they would have added a first-person option, so you could check out all the different cabs, but it being a mobile game I can understand how that may have been omitted for space-saving purposes.

 

Here’s what a tractor pulling a trailer looks like. With this you can bring crops to the different selling points, or buy seed and bring it back to your farm.

 

One minor complaint I have is that, to change between using the accelerometer and the slider for steering, you need to go into the settings menu and then back out. Doing so is not too onerous, but since I was using the accelerometer for some things and the slider for others, this meant that I was having to jump in and out of the settings menu a lot. I wish that there would have been a button in the HUD, so that you could easily switch between the driving modes while playing the game.

 

The game has a handy GPS feature. There are other vehicles driving on the road with you, which I don’t believe can hit you but they do add realism. I am headed to the store to pick up a mower I just bought.

 

Once I am done mowing this meadow, I am going back to the store to buy a tedder (which will turn over the grass to make it dry and turn into hay).

 

To get money in the game, you need to sell 'fruit.' (This is what the game calls the various crops you can grow.) Here, in the selling fruit portion, is where an interesting mechanic comes into play: the map has several spots where you can sell fruit, but each of them offers different prices. Furthermore, their prices change depending on how much of a single crop you have sold to them in the past. So, if you want to maximize your earnings, you need to weigh driving times and to plant crops in a rotation. Money plays a huge role in the game; you need to buy gasoline if you want to keep running your machines, and the only way to grow new plants or raise new animals is to buy the necessary equipment. When you start out, you have enough cash on hand to buy a couple of things, but also some fruits in storage that you can sell.

 

That other person is a helper I hired to operate my new tedder. Plainly, as you can see I did not take full advantage of this opportunity to get other chores done.

 

The trailer with a green ring around it is part of a mission I am on. I have to bring it to a place before the timer runs out in order for someone else to buy it. After it is hooked up to your trailer, you get a dotted line to follow on your GPS.

 

Another mechanic that I thought was interesting was the ability to hire helpers. Say you want to cultivate a field and get it ready to grow fruit. You could get into a tractor and till the rows yourself, or you can simply push a button that's shaped like a steering wheel and hire someone else to do it. (The helpers are NPCs - in other words, they are AI's and not real people.) This part of the game is cool because it lets you get multiple tasks done at once. As a side note, watching a computer drive a tractor around felt satisfying, because it makes no mistakes. You should beware hiring helpers too often, however, because they cost money.

 

A full harvest cycle (with no fertilizer) takes about twenty minutes from beginning to end. If I could go back in time, I would have planted something in this field other than wheat, as I had already sold a lot of it so its price was going down.

 

Every so often a notification pops up and an NPC offers you money, in exchange for labor. Maybe there are other 'mission' types that I am not aware of, as I was only playing the game for a couple of hours, but I got asked if I would deliver some pre-loaded trailers of fruit and also was given tips on buyers who were paying exorbitant prices. All of the missions I had had a time limit associated with them, so fast driving was required.

 

Here’s where you can see the prices for all the crops. You can also touch the icon for a selling point on the map and find them that way. Or, when you hire someone to drive your trailer there for you, the first thing it asks is which station, and on that screen it gives you all the prices too.

 

I could tell that a lot of work went into this game. Every machine and attachment was rendered in lots of detail, and the gameplay dynamics were very well-thought-out. Plenty of care went into it, too, in my estimation. For example, it has an in-game playing manual that is written very well for letting new players know what to do. All of the pieces of machinery are based on real-life products. That is to say, I don't think it's unlikely that the game's developers had a network of agriculture and agribusiness experts to tap into.

 

In the background there are the multiple silos for holding all the crop you have harvested. Filling them is easy; just drive a trailer over that grate you can see between them and it tips up. To get crops out of the silos, you simply park a trailer next to them and they pour right in.

 

After playing FS 18, I think I can appreciate how hard being a farmer sometimes is a bit more. In addition, I feel that I learned about an important distinction that exists between the business side and the actual working side of running a farm. The game showed me that, on the business side of running a farm, you need to constantly be aware of your options. This is in terms of the crops you can grow, the risks you can afford to take, and the hard balance between short-term opportunities and long-term goals. I remember thinking at one point, "oh no, if I don't make enough money from selling the rest of my wheat, I'll have to wait a full harvest cycle before I can invest in new machines and grow my business...." (As luck would have it I got a delivery job which netted me the cash I needed.) On the working side of running a farm, I learned that it is simultaneously satisfying and anxiety-provoking to operate ag machinery. The game doesn't let you make some of the mistakes that would be devastating in real life - it kindly stopped me from driving a tractor off of a cliff, for example - but you can ruin a field and make it harder to harvest, less profitable, and less beautiful if you don't drive your tractor straight. I found from playing this game that part of the satisfaction that comes from farming is doing a large amount of work in an efficient manner.

 

My first vehicle purchase was a black truck, which I used to transport trailers. The reasoning behind it was that now I wouldn’t have to utilize my tractors, which could be doing more crucial work on the farm, to bring crops to selling points. This thing can do 80!

 

And finally, this is proof that the game won’t let you drive off of a cliff. John Deere should copy that feature and add it to their real-life tractors for sure.

 

I give Farming Simulator 18 high, high marks. It is educational to a tee, and it offers you a tough financial puzzle to solve. I definitely don't think I could jump in a tractor and start producing food, now, but I do think that the game gave me perspective on farming and the people who do it for a living.