Guide by Playbahnosh

Intro
This is a guide/FAQ for Farm Simulator 2009, also known as Landwirtschafts Simulator 2009. I did my best to detail every aspect of the game and explain everything there is to know about how to play the game and have fun while doing it. The sections are loosely tied together and written to be read in order, but you can read just the sections that interest you, look in the Contents. The things written here are as accurate as possible and all based on my own personal experience in the game. My methods are by far not the 'only' or the 'best' ways to go about playing the game. You are not required to follow this guide to the letter, in fact, I encourage you to experiment and try different methods, everyone has a different play-style, the most important thing is to HAVE FUN! Everything is here to get you started, but there are still incomplete sections, I might update them in the future. The guide is written for absolute beginners, using mostly layman terms so everyone can understand what I'm saying, so please don't write me about the absence or incorrectly written agricultural lingo. English is not my first language, I'm Hungarian, I did my best to clean up the guide but there may still be some errors in grammar and wording, sorry about that. If you can't understand something, feel free to write an email, and I'll try my best to answer your questions (contact rules in the Feedback section). If you find a discrepancy in the guide, stuff that is not in your game or, in fact, missing from the guide, that may be because you are using a different version of the game than me (different release, patches). This guide is for the unmodded 'vanilla' game, so please don't ask me about specific mods (more on that in the Mods section). Now, let's get on with the guide, shall we?

Controls
The game, by default, is controlled with the keyboard and mouse. Some of the keys are context sensitive and may do other things than described here, I will explain them in detail in their appropriate section. Also, mods may have different key assignments, more on that in the Mods section. For now, here is the basic keyboard layout: ESC - Menu F1 - Show/Hide help text W - Accelerate S - Brake/Reverse A - Turn Left D - Turn Right E - Enter/Exit vehicle TAB - Change vehicle F - Lights ON/OFF 1,2,3 - Cruise Control T - Refuel (near pump) Shift - Run (on foot) Q - Attach/Detach equipment, dump grain (near grain vent) Shift+Q - Detach equipment group G - Switch between attached equipments V - Lower/Raise equipment X - Fold/Unfold equipment B - Turn equipment (ON/OFF) J - Raise Front-loader N - Lower Front-loader K - Tilt Front-loader up M - Tilt Front-loader down H - Hire/Dismiss worker I - PDA P - Shop 9 - Zoom on map C - Change camera Mouse and arrow keys - Rotate camera Mouse wheel - Zoom camera One important feature is the F1 key, you can turn on the in-game help with it. It will list the usable keys for the current vehicle you are in and the implement selected, it is a very handy feature. You can also use certain gamepads and wheels to control the game. In the Gold edition you can also customize your keyboard layout and use more controllers.

Missions
The game has two modes of playing: Career and Missions. First, let's see the missions. This section contains some tutorial tasks and a few others. They are pretty boring and rather useless, so other than learning the controls for the first time or trying out farming implements, you shouldn't bother too much with them. The loading screen for each mission describes what you need to do and how, so I won't repeat that here. Some of the missions involve driving around with the tractor on an obstacle course or through checkpoints, this is a way to learn how to drive vehicles in the game, but you'll do that a lot anyway so it's pretty pointless to drive around dodging shopping carts and tires or whatever. Some missions require you to drive harvesters or use different implements attached to your tractor, like plows, fertilizer sprayers, etc. These are good to familiarize yourself with the different equipment needed to grow crops and harvest them, but again, you'll use those implements fairly often in the game anyway, and learning by doing is the best way to do it. Missions have a time limit, if you run out of time, you fail the mission, but if you finish the task fast enough you can get medals. This is pretty much all there is to it. If you want, you can replay missions to get the best time and reach gold in every one of them but there is no reward for that so why bother. With missions out of the way, let's see the real deal...

Career mode
This is what you'll be playing in Farming Simulator. In Career mode, you get your own farm and a whole island to explore. It's up to you what you do in the game, it's basically sandbox. There is no story or campaign, so don't expect anything fancy. In the Menu, press the Career button, and choose a save slot for your game. (The game will always be saved to this slot and you can load it from here. You can start new games using the other slots and play them while having your other saves intact.) Then you need to choose a difficulty setting, Easy, Normal or Hard. As far as I can tell, there is not much difference between between the difficulty settings, save for one important thing: the price of crops. In easy mode, you can get as much as $5000 for a ton of crop whereas in Hard mode, only around $500. Plus, in Easy and Normal mode you get some starting crops pre-stored in your silos, and of course the starting capital is higher in Easy an quite low in Hard. The Normal mode is smack in between the two in terms of money and stuff you start with and also grain prices. You start at your farmhouse. You can see little 'i' icons in front of you, walk over them to read them (you can find many of these scattered around the island, walk over them to read the tips). So, you inherited a farm, cool. Also, you got some machinery. You can see your starting equipment standing out in the yard. It is as follows: - an old, rickety tractor - a small plow - a small cultivator - a small sowing machine - a small sprayer - a small weight - a small tipper - a dozer shield - an rusty, ancient harvester - header for the harvester You have everything you need to start becoming a full fledged farmer. First, let's see your PDA.