Farming Simulator 2013 Update

Farming Simulator 2013 is a great way to experience the joys and satisfaction of farming without the investment of time, endless hard work and real money (in-app purchases excepted). The game was developed by Giants Software and is distributed by Steam.

There are three basic ways to play:

Career: The player is the farmer and must take his or her rather old-fashioned farm and work to expand and upgrade it. The player must grow crops and breed animals, selling the resulting crops for cash. The cash is then used to buy more animals, plant more crops and upgrade the machinery and vehicles as well as expanding their farm by purchasing more fields.

Mission: Missions are shorter games where the player is given a task, delivering cargo or mowing grass, for example. Successful completion of the task results in the player being awarded with a sum of money, plus a bonus for speedy completion.

Multiplayer: Get some friends together and get a cooperative going!

There is no underlying back story and little in the way of time consuming cosmetic improvements. Refreshingly, the player is left to decide what to do and when, with the only incentive being the player's desire to expand and improve their farm. Simple crops are quickly grown and sell for less money, while more valuable harvests take longer, but pay out comparatively more. No matter how intensively you farm, all games start out quite slowly, with a certain amount of progress to be made before the farm is big enough and profitable enough for things to get moving faster. As the player adds fields, vehicles and crops, the profits begin to mount up and cash rolls in quite satisfactorily!

Shortly after the game's release this patch was released. The, rather large, patch introduced a new and improved graphic user interface which reduces a lot of the lag that plagued the earlier version of the game. The patch also contains new content in the form of a large, US based farming community called 'Westbridge Hills' as well as some new and improved vehicles. The patch has also enabled the ability to scroll back through old chat messages – a minor but satisfying feature!

NB: the patch does not need to be uploaded for multiplayer games that are played on servers, as the upgrade was automatically disseminated through the servers.

Pros

• Solves some issues with lag in the game
• Opens up the US environment on the map
• Provides new vehicles

Cons

• No cons known, apart from a lack of new playable content aside from the US area on the map