What Did We Play Yesterday?

I've held off picking up Farm Together 2 while it's in Early Access, but the devs recently announced there would be a price increase soon so I went ahead and snagged my copy. In EA the game is $20 though it has dipped down to $18 a few times.

Farm Together 2 is definitely a More Of That Sequel, which is exactly what everyone wanted, but one significant change is that instead of building stalls to convert your crops you visit the in-game town. Once you've built a storefront, you can trade goods in a limited capacity (shops can run out of diamonds, for instance) and you can upgrade the shops to increase your good capacity, the diamonds they have, and so on.

I do like how this takes the first game's end-game Factory and combines it with the trade mechanism, and aesthetically it is nice to not have to build a bunch of stalls all over the farm. They have used the opportunity to create an artificial bottleneck so you can't just powergame your way into diamonds early game. The limited shop budgets force natural breaks.

The town also contains citizens who sometimes have quests. This part is a bit half-baked, and maybe a little buggy. There were a few quests the villagers would not let me fill, even though I had the items they wanted. I think there's an opportunity to really do something here in terms of an emergency story or even giving these characters some life, if the devs truly want to, but part of what makes this series great is the laser-focus on having the core farming mechanics be as satisfying as possible. So doing something with these NPCs beyond having them offer random quests might honestly be a bit outside the scope of what this game does.

The starting farm plot has a lot more STUFF on it, and the additional plots seem to have more diversity in terms of existing crops and animals.

Right off the bat, I planted a bunch of corn and then realized I had no way to offload grain (this happens in the first game, too). Down the road, I unlocked the bakery, but just a shout-out don't fuck around with corn until you have something to do with it (unless you just like the way it looks, large cornfields are definitely satisfying).

Another change is they've added some tractor automation. If you press shift (which I accidentally keep pressing, because on-foot it's the run button) the tractor will automatically process whatever it's doing forward in a straight line. This may be the dev's response to people utilizing tools like Cheat Engine late-game. I got into the habit of using a CE script whenever there was a holiday crop because the unlock numbers were extremely high and way beyond what I could or frankly wanted to invest. The auto tractor is technically faster than the player because it does not run the planting animations. I haven't tested it it much, but I will be thrilled if this ends up being a replacement for rigging up some nonsense with CE and auto-mouse.

Anyway, I played a few minutes and was like, oh, cool. More Farm Together. I already put like 100 hours into the first game, so I'm sure I won't get too weird about it this time.

A few hours later... as you can see from the screens, I definitely started getting weird about it. I'm here for it, though.

Progress is swift and satisfying at the farm. Just chillin out with my wheat. Built a house.

Not so sure about these NPCs, though. Their dialogue sounds like it was written by a robot. The good news is they offer little quests, and these reward you with green thumbs up things that you can trade for other resources.

Also, it turns out there IS a warehouse! The warehouse offers additional resource space on top of whatever you get from upgrading various stores.

Big things are happening. I unlocked the ability to make jam. This time around, you dump a bunch of pears and apples into a pot and jam comes out. What's neat is you can dump in enough for multiple batches. This is a way to convert crops to ribbons. Speaking of ribbons, I've unlocked a terraforming store but at 20 ribbons its a bit rich for my blood right now. I'll build it soon, now that I have an easier way to get ribbons besides doing random quests.

I'm increasingly fascinated by the secret lives of the villagers. Patrick is current my favorite. I also got around to decorating my house. Decorations will be pretty limited until DLC comes out but you can still make it nice and cozy. I was a late adopter of the previous game and ended up getting most of the DLC in a big bundle, and had a very good time with it.

Finally, I realized I could make waterfalls and lost my mind. Amazing. Beautiful. I have my fish in a non-ideal place, but I've been working on making it cute so now, that's just how it's gonna be. Aesthetic over efficiency, at least for now.

Keeping tabs on Patrick. Also continuing to do the thing. I've put aside my organized crop rows in favor of rotating crops based on whichever ones will unlock additional crops at higher levels. I also connected all my fish ponds, which is less aesthetically pleasing but it means you can harvest once instead of having to do each individually.

The terraforming feature is neat once you unlock it. It costs a few diamonds for each plot, and I used it to even out an uneven slope to make a nice flower garden. I've also taken to adding fences to my crop fields to help stop the auto-tractor if I'm not paying strict attention.

I continue to dislike livestock in this game, just because of the sheer volume required for quests, but this time they reduce the number of actual animal sprites per cluster which helps a lot. So instead of having 20 cows on 20 cow plots, you have like 10 cows on 20 plots. This game also has feeders but again, I'm not using them.

I did figure out sprinklers actually cover 9 tiles this time, which is AMAZING. So I've begun implementing those in my flower beds. At some point, I'm going to set up a large rotating crop bed and fill it with sprinklers for the random quest crops I don't already have fields for.

NNeed diamond

Decided to take a leetle break from Farm Together 2 after hitting level 36. There's still loads to do, I've only unlocked a fraction of the farmland and the town has tons of empty shops to fill, but I'd like to pace this one.