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.

I'm supposed to be taking a break from Farm Together 2 but whenever I'm tired or don't have much time I'll jump in and grind out a few medals.

I recently learned many of the tiles and objects have color variants, which is very exciting and unlocks many decorating possibilities.

I'm currently in the process of reworking my flower gardens. I keep flowers with unlockables close to my house, but when they stop unlocking things I move them farther out to be harvested whenever there's a quest.

It's special event time! Yay! They look cool when you harvest them!

At first I was annoyed because I hit a 16,000 solo harvesting tier which is obviously prohibitive, but I then realized the daily goals reset. It's set up this way to prevent people (not mentioning any names, aka me) from setting up autoclicker unlocking everything in a day. So if you check in each day and harvest a bit, you should be able to unlock a decent amount of stuff over the next two weeks, maybe even all of it.

I opened my farm so other people can visit, but I think I'll see how long I can ride solo. There's a probably outdated cheat engine table floating around (and there's a malware pretending to be cheats on github so don't download that). I don't think it's a coincidence the malware popped up shortly after the event started.

FT2 is all I have the bandwidth for right now. I've been playing a few minutes every day but I keep forgetting to take screenshots.

The littlest discovers make me disproportionately happy. Yesterday, I unlocked garden boxes and discovered you could put tiny trees in them.

Progress on the special event continues. It looks like I'll be able to unlock everything doing a little bit each day, which is awesome and a welcome improvement over the grind of the previous game.

I'm continuing to putter around in FT2 and play around with landscaping. I finished the holiday questline with days to spare by achieving several of the lower-quantity milestones every day after they reset. This really worked for me, as it was non-grindy and I had a little thing to look forward to each day. I'm really glad they reworked the system this way.

One of the new items is a security booth. This allows you to set custom permissions for a plot of land. It is AWESOME. In FT, I was always wary of giving full access to the farm because I had seasonal crops I didn't want anyone to harvest. Now, you can remove permissions for a section as needed.

I also unlocked a second house. I wasn't sure how many houses they'd offer in the base game. At this stage, there's not a lot of decorations so it's more about being able to run multiple art/sculpting/cooking stations.

After a long day of chores I decompressed by spending time arranging my crops by color, as one does. I also set up a color grid for flowers so I can decide what order I want my final flower garden to look like. I've waffled between organizing them by color, because pretteh, versus organizing them by type so it will be convenient to harvest the type I need.

I decided to allow full permissions on my farm, since the only thing I don't want people to grief is holiday crops and those are protected now. One big complaint people had in FT was guests harvesting crops and not re-plowing after, but FT2's auto tractor automatically does that, so I don't think I have to worry too much about finding a bunch of empty, unplanted fields but we'll see. The game has signs that can dictate what crops are planted where, and other things, so you can get pretty granular with permissions if needed. I doubt I'll get any visitors, but if anyone gets on my nerves I can just lock it down again.

Previously, I organized trees by season, so I could harvest an entire section at once, and I had reeeeeaally long rows of each type. I think this time, I'm going to organize by season again, but have them in continuous sections of 27 or 36. I've only unlocked about half of them and they are still adding trees so I'm not to the point where I can really plan it out too well.

I realized I forgot to share Trout Park, which will become Koi Park whenever I unlock koi. Just a fun scenic area that takes advantage of the game's neat waterfall mechanics. The only part I don't like is the different tiers must be harvested independently. I'd like to experiment with higher waterfalls, and see if I can come up with a way to connect tiers though I'm sure I can't..

Last game, I set up a pretty complicated orchard where the seasons flowed into each other, so all the winters were together, etc. But it wasn't perfect because there were a few outlier trees that were hard to fit into the pattern. This time I decided I'd simplify my life and set up 4 seasonal treelines that have an assortment of trees that produce that particular season. This is exclusively so any given season, I can auto tractor down the line and fully harvest everything, and not have to devote so much land to rows and rows of trees.1

Finally organized my mess of animals. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of the sheer volume of animals there are, and I'm still thinking of ways to maintain a decent stock of animals without it completely overwhelming everything. I've started planting feed supply crops just for them in their little areas. I tend to run short of grains, and corn is the cheapest and fastest grain crop, so I've got some nice long fields of corn contained with white fences.

My tree unlocks lag behind everything else, and those are the ones I want to work on. I think I'm gonna set up something similar to my flowers, and have clusters based on what I want to unlock most quickly, but idk. I also started making "type" forests, so for example, near Trout Park there's a pear forest filled with different trees that all produce pear-type resources. It's not as efficient as long ass rows of trees, but I like the way it looks a lot better.

I wish the game had seasonal signs.

I've had a few visitors and everyone has been very nice. I put up a "do whatever you want and have fun" welcome message, but I think having a meticulously organized color coded farm naturally encourages people to keep things tidy, and the guests have maintained my planting patterns.

I built a second house. It's HUGE and the game doesn't have enough furniture to furnish it, so I'll stick to the cosy starter house for now.

The mechanical draw of having multiple houses is you can have additional crafting stations going: 2 stoves, an easel, and a piano. I doubt I'll ever get grindy about that but it's good to have options.

A busy day left me with low bandwidth, so I piddled around on my farm. Since I was playing later at night, I got a few visitors, including a lovely visitor who left a very nice guestbook message but decided to replant some of my fields with the wrong crops. I have a carefully terraced grape area and alas, they did not plant grapes there. They also messed with my tomato color coded rows.

Witness the horrors (chickpeas in my tomato beds).

Now I know how this makes me feel: itchy. Lol. You can buy crop instruction signs that only allow a certain crop to be planted in an area, so if it keeps happening I can either do that or change my farm permissions, but I'm gonna TRY to be a little more flexible here. It's probably good for me.

I finally unlocked the first type of water lantern, so I began refining my hatchery and you know, I REALLY don't like those seasonal tree rows I planted, but I think I might like them better after I fully pave and decorate the area. IDK. Most of my crop unlocks are to the grindy phase (level 50 cosmic carrots, level 80 peanuts) but what really needs work is my orchard.