The Farm Production Pack DLC for Farming Simulator 22 contains only one item that is to be found in the ingame store. All other things that come with this pack are in the construction category. In brief, they can be split into two big categories: new sheds and new selling points. On top of that there’s also a couple of different items like rootcrop washer, a sugarbeet shredder, a fertilizer production point, new solar panels, a new smaller-sized wind turbine, and a vehicle workshop.
The shed category is mostly about providing some more choice when it comes to building your farm. A number of new models of sheds are included in the pack, most are medium-to-large sized. In addition there are new rootcrop storage and bale storage of the newer transfer style gameplay where you deliver the bales and they stack automatically for future retrievement.
The selling points are all sizes of farmer’s market stores; from the small outdoor market stall of the kind you see at the roadside by farms or on the local market square, to big supermarket-like farmers stores. The largest of them all is the distribution center where you can sell your produce for further transport out in the big world.
Unfortunately – for the paid DLC – the addition of sellpoints in the form of market stalls and small stores are literally a bit late to the game. The same kind of sellpoints already exists as free mods on the official modhub, which makes them less interesting than they otherwise had been. The big distribution center with its built-in optional forklift-driving minigame is what saves this part of the pack.
The distribution center forklift mini-game in my mind takes me back to the days of contract work in Farming Simulator 17. The work has to be completed within a certain amount of time, which brings a bit of extra challenge to it. That said, I’m not sure how great the longer term playability will be for it. But for the occasional play event, sure.
It is also important to mention that the new marketplace sellpoints all have rather limited demand for the different products. A case that does make sense for the smaller ones – roadside stalls and their likes rarely sells tons of carrots – but somewhat less sense for the larger supermarket-sized one.
The rootcrop washing machine do have a minor problem in that the washed crops are not by automatic sellable in old sellpoints which takes the unwashed versions of the same crops, limiting their usefulness a bit. That said, the washing itself is a nice and logical way to improve the prices for your harvested produce.
The Lely Sphere apparatus is an interesting new way to produce fertilizer by utilizing the gas-rich air from first and foremost cow sheds – but in the game any husbandry would do – to produce liquid fertilizer through a chemical process. The Lely Sphere is placed adjacent to the husbandry from which it then extract the air and with the addition of sulphuric acid it is transformed into liquid fertilizer ready to be used for crop improvement. A modern farm can’t let any valuable raw material go unused and this is a novel way which I had never heard of before this.
Another fun and practical addition is the solar panels with their cleaning robot. Unlike the existing, basegame ones, these new ones are positioned by dragging out rows of them in the same vein as you plant olives and grapes. Very nifty.
All in all, this is one of the packs I’ve had the most mixed feelings about. Let’s face it, it’s not very innovative of a pack compared to most others and one can’t help but feel a little like Dutch Modding has ripped off individual modders’ ideas from the modhub a little too much here. That said, the pack do give us some more options when building farms and selling produce. We can only hope that some of the negative points will be seen to in an update.
In the end, I’d say that the value of the pack very much comes down to how much you want that extra diversity in choices. It’s by no means a must-have pack, but simply an extra pack for the variations it can provide. Personally I’d say that the best things in it are the Lely Sphere fertilizer producer and the solar panels, both items having a purpose in making for a more ecological farm for those who want to be modern farmers.
