Hey there farmers!
As we get ever closer to the release of Farming Simulator 17, we’re unveiling the game’s exciting new features in this series of dev blogs. Last time, we talked about the new crops – now, we’d like to introduce the animals you’ll be rearing, transporting and selling in this upcoming installment!
If you want to take a break from harvesting crops, or if that just isn’t quite your focus, you can take care of animals on your farm. Available animals in Farming Simulator 17 include cows, sheep, chickens and, for the first time in the series, pigs!
Transportation
In Farming Simulator 17, you can choose to transport any animals you’ve purchased back to your farm yourself. In order to do this, you’ll need an animal trailer and ensure that it’s located near the livestock dealer you’re buying from.
Sometimes you might not have the time to transport your newly-purchased animals, or just don’t have the required trailer do so right now. If that’s the case, the livestock dealer can deliver the animals to your farm – for a fee of course!
You will also need to transport some of the goods that your animals produce. While your cows’ milk is sold automatically every day, you have to transport the wool from your sheep in pallets to the local spinnery.
Animal Husbandry
Your job doesn’t end with simply buying animals and placing them in a field. You need to take care of your animals!
There’s a few things to remember with animals on your farm. Foremost, they require both food and water. You’ll also need to change the bedding of cows and pigs by using a straw blower and clean the animals feeding areas periodically. Once your animals are happy enough, they will begin to multiply and increase your farm’s total animal population. Additionally, taking good care of your animals will increase their productivity (such as cows’ milk and sheep’s wool) and their respective breeding rates.
Having pigs or cows also means that they will produce manure and slurry. You can choose to use these in order to fertilize your fields and improve their yield.
The exception to the above comes with chickens! When you start your farm, you will already own some chickens. They’re the easiest animals to keep, as they’ll just happily lay eggs without you having to do anything. If you want to make money from their eggs, you’ll need to manually collect them by hand and sell them on to selected households.
Pigs
For the first time ever in the series, you can take care of pigs in Farming Simulator 17! Feeding them properly is particularly important, as they are primarily there to multiply and sell on for a profit. In order to maximize their growth you'll need to feed them a balanced diet consisting of all of the following types of nutrition:
50% Base food: Corn
25% Grain: Wheat or Barley
20% Protein: Canola or Sunflowers or Soybeans
5% Root crops: Potatoes or Sugar Beets
You also have the option of buying bags of perfectly balanced pig food directly from the local store, although you’ll need to manually transport them to your pig enclosures. Thanks for reading the fourth in our series of Farming Simulator 17 dev blogs - look out for more posts soon, where we’ll go over even more of the exciting features you can look forward to!
Farming Simulator 17 comes out October 25, 2016, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
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