Farming Simulator 25 Beginner Guide: Getting Your First Farm Running

So you've picked a save slot and now you're sitting in a tractor with no clue what to do first. Totally normal. Farming Simulator 25 hands you a map, a pile of machines, and a crop calendar, then pretty much wishes you luck. The good news is the first year runs on a simple loop: harvest what's already ripe, plant something for next summer, sell when prices look good, and hire help once the fields outgrow you. Get that loop going and the rest of the game opens up on its own.

Choosing Your Starting Map and Farm

Which map to pick

There are three base maps. Riverbend Springs is the North American one, all winding river, creeks, and old historic buildings. Hutan Pantai is East Asian, built around mountains, rice paddies, and a neon-lit port city. Zielonka is Central European, ponds everywhere, a quiet village, carried over from FS22's Premium Expansion.

All three work fine. For a first save, go Riverbend Springs. The fields are the flattest and tidiest of the three, the shop and sell points sit at reasonable distances, and the roads are friendly to slow tractors hauling a full trailer. Hutan Pantai is gorgeous but its small terraced plots and rice mechanics are kind of a pain while you're still learning the buttons. Zielonka lands somewhere in the middle, so it makes a fine second save.

There are extra maps on the ModHub too, like Silverrun Forest for logging. Ignore all that for now. The base game is plenty.

Which mode to pick

The career screen gives you three options, and they mostly change your bank account.

• New Farmer gets you a working farm: land, buildings, a starter fleet of machines, and roughly $100,000 in the bank. This is the one to pick. You skip the shopping phase and start farming in the first five minutes.
• Farm Manager trades the equipment for a big pile of cash, so you build the fleet yourself. It also comes with a loan you have to pay back. Better for a second playthrough when you already know what each machine does.
• Start from Scratch leaves you nearly broke with no land and no gear. You do contract work for neighbors until you can afford a plot. Save it for when the base game feels easy.

What day one actually looks like

On Riverbend Springs with New Farmer, you own farmlands 1 through 5, which includes fields 02 through 05. The fleet that comes with it: a Challenger MT625 for the heavy pulling, a John Deere 3650 (116 hp) as the do-everything rig, a Massey Ferguson MF 8570 combine with its header and header trailer, a Great Plains Solid Stand planter, a Farmtech EDK 650 grain trailer, and a cultivator. There's also a cow pasture with three cows attached to the farm.

And here's the part people miss: the clock starts in August, and one of your fields already has ripe canola on it, with a strip of wheat ready on another. Your first job is harvesting, not shopping. That's a nice change from most sims.

Not into cows yet? You can sell the three animals for about $3,200 and the pasture itself for around $7,500, which pushes your budget toward $110,000. Keeping them is fine too, but know that they arrive with food, water, and productivity all sitting at zero, so they need attention before they pay you anything.

Settings worth a look before you drive off

At save creation you can adjust starting money. Bumping it to $250,000 makes the opening smoother; a million just deletes the early game. In the game settings, "seasonal growth" is the big one. Leave it on and the crop calendar is enforced, with winter dead time, the way the game is meant to be played. Turn it off and you can plant and harvest any month, which is handy for testing but makes seasons meaningless. Snow can be toggled separately if slippery roads annoy you.

Buying Your First Tractor and Essential Equipment

What the starter fleet already covers

Walk the yard before you open the shop. Between the two tractors, the combine, the planter, the cultivator, and the trailer, you can already do a full grain cycle: work the soil, sow, harvest, haul. That's the whole loop. What you don't have is anything for fertilizer, weeding, or lime, and those are the tools that turn an okay harvest into a great one. So your first shopping trip is small, not a fleet rebuild.

The full list if you're ever starting from zero

If you jump to Farm Manager later, this is the set the game's own manual tells you to own:

• A tractor (check the power requirement on everything you hang off it)
• A cultivator, plus a plow for occasional deep work
• A seeder or planter matched to the crops you want
• A weeder for weed control
• A fertilizer spreader, and check for the lime icon at the dealership since not every spreader takes lime
• A combine with the right header for your crop
• A trailer to move the harvest

Horsepower is the number that matters

Every tool lists a required power figure, and every tractor lists its output. Come up short and the tool either won't run or crawls along barely working. Matching those two numbers is 90% of smart equipment buying.

For reference, replacing the starter John Deere 3650 costs $45,000 and gets you 116 hp at 35 kph. The Zetor Proxima HS runs $60,000 for the base 76 hp version, with engine configs taking it up to 117 hp, and it's the cheapest small tractor in the shop that accepts a front loader. That front loader detail matters more than you'd think, because the moment you start moving bales, seed pallets, or egg boxes, you'll want one.

Lease or buy?

The dealership lets you lease anything. You pay a starting fee plus an ongoing charge, and you're on the hook for the wear. Leasing shines for machines you use a couple weeks a year, like a big combine outside harvest season, or a stone picker you need exactly once. Buy the daily-driver stuff outright, lease the specialists, and keep an eye on the used vehicle sale section for straight discounts.

Repairs are part of life too. Worn machines lose speed and engine power, so drag them to the dealer's work area (or your own workshop, if you build one) when the condition meter gets ugly. Fixing a $200 problem beats driving a weak tractor for a season.

Planting, Fertilizing, and Harvesting Your First Field

Read the crop calendar before you touch a lever

The calendar decides everything. Here are the numbers for the five easiest starter crops, pulled from the game's crop comparison data at easy (New Farmer) pricing:

| Crop | Plant during | Harvest during | Yield per ha | Avg price per 1,000 L | Seed per ha | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Wheat | Sep - Oct | Jul - Aug | 17,800 L | $1,011 | 308 L | | Barley | Sep - Oct | Jun - Jul | 19,200 L | $938 | 265 L | | Canola | Aug - Sep | Jul - Aug | 11,600 L | $1,808 | 7 L | | Soybeans | Apr - May | Oct - Nov | 9,000 L | $2,333 | 214 L | | Oats | Mar - Apr | Jul - Aug | 11,400 L | $1,596 | 340 L |

That August start slots perfectly into this. Harvest the ripe canola and wheat now, then sow canola in late August or early September, or wheat and barley through September and October. The crop sleeps through winter and comes off next summer. Prices drift, so treat those averages as a ballpark, not a promise.

The first field, step by step

1. Harvest what's ripe. Drive the combine in, drop the header, and go. When the grain tank fills, park the trailer under the pipe and unload. One starter canola field on Riverbend Springs gives you a bit over 6,000 liters, just as a real example of what to expect.
2. Cultivate. That loosens the topsoil and is all you need most years. Plow only when the field info says so, which happens after root crops and every few harvests. Plowing is slow, so skip it when you can.
3. Lime if the field asks for it. The field info box tells you when it's needed, roughly every third harvest. Lime goes on first, then you cultivate it in.
4. Sow. Fill the planter with seed from your farm silo or a purchased pallet, pick the crop, lower the tool, and drive.
5. Fertilize, then fertilize again. Two passes, with a growth stage between them, gets you up to 45% extra yield. One pass is worth about half that. The cheapest route early on is solid fertilizer through a spreader. Once you have animals, slurry and manure do the same job for free. There's also a sneaky option: plant oilseed radish as a catch crop, then cultivate it in when it's grown. That's a free fertilize stage without buying anything.
6. Roll after sowing for another 2.5%. Cheap bonus, easy work.
7. Kill weeds early. Small weeds come out with a weeder, medium ones with a hoe, and big ones need a sprayer and herbicide. Herbicide works but carries a small yield penalty, so catch them while they're little. The full stack, everything done right, roughly doubles a field's base output.

Stones are the other nuisance. Cultivating and plowing dig them up, and driving over them damages your machines. Small stones flatten back down if you roll the field. Big ones need a stone picker, and the collected stone sells at the debris crusher, which is a nice little side check.

Weather is a real boss

You cannot harvest in rain or snow, full stop. Watch the forecast icon in the corner and plan around it. Hail and twisters can tear up standing crops and any bales left outside, so check your fields after a storm rolls through. And winter, with seasonal growth on, is dead time for fields, which makes it the perfect season for contracts, logging, or just running the clock at high speed while your wheat grows.

Selling Crops and Managing Early Cash Flow

Check the prices screen before you drive anywhere

Every sell point on the map pays a different rate, and those rates move day to day and season to season. The prices screen shows you all of them at once with trend bars, so use it. On Riverbend Springs your main grain buyers are Grain West Silo, the two Grain Barge Terminals, and the Grain River Silo System, plus smaller spots like the Farmer's Market, the River Restaurant, and the Kiosk that pay surprisingly well for the right goods. Hauling the same load two minutes down the road can be worth thousands more.

Hold in the silo, or sell now?

Your farm has grain storage, and dumping harvest into it costs you nothing. The classic play is to store the crop and wait for a price spike instead of selling into a dip. That's usually right, with one warning: cash sitting in a silo can't buy the next field. Don't hoard forever. Sell, reinvest, repeat.

The actual money per hectare

Running the average easy-mode prices against the yield numbers:

• Wheat: 17,800 L at $1,011 per 1,000 L lands around $18,000 per hectare
• Canola: 11,600 L at $1,808 lands around $21,000
• Soybeans: 9,000 L at $2,333 also lands around $21,000
• Barley: 19,200 L at $938 lands around $18,000

Those are gross numbers before seed, fuel, and wages. Nail both fertilizer passes though and 45% more yield pushes wheat toward $26,000 a hectare and canola past $30,000. That's why the fertilizer spreader is the first thing worth buying.

Small detail that adds up: canola seed is absurdly cheap to plant, only 7 liters per hectare against wheat's 308. Cheap seed plus a high price per liter makes it a great early crop.

Sell raw, or process it

Selling raw grain at a silo is the fast, simple option. Processing pays better. The grain mill takes your wheat and barley and turns out flour, the bakery turns flour into bread, the oil mill takes canola and makes oil. You don't need to own these factories to use them, either. Deliver to a factory you don't own and it still pays out more than the raw crop usually nets, and owning them later is where the serious money starts.

Loans, interest, and the finance screen

The finance screen tracks income and spending for the current month plus the previous four, and it's worth a glance every so often just to see what your farm actually costs to run. Loans are available any time, with interest charged monthly. They're a fine tool for grabbing a field or a combine that unlocks real money. They're a bad tool for toys. Borrow with a plan, pay it back fast.

Money while the crop grows

Two good options during downtime. Contracts show up as blue icons and pay you to work other farmers' fields, and harvest contracts are the best of them, often a few thousand on a small job and tens of thousands on a big one, with the equipment spawned at the field for free. Second, collectibles: Riverbend Springs hides 25 historic machine parts around the map, each one paying around $10,000, so about $250,000 for the full set. You'll need to renovate the grain elevator museum before you can turn them in, which itself takes big material deliveries, so treat it as a mid-game project rather than day-one money.

Hiring Workers and Automating Routine Tasks

The H key does most of the work

Press H (on PC) while sitting in a machine with a job ready, and a hired hand takes over that pass. Hold the button instead of tapping it and you get a settings menu first: working width, how many headland passes to cut around the edge, whether to work the headlands or just use them to turn, and whether to start with the headland or the middle. For harvesting, starting with the headland keeps the combine from flattening crop on its turns.

The worker figures out the best direction on their own and always stays inside the field borders. Their wage comes out of your account automatically while they run, which shows up on the finance screen under worker costs. It's real money, but it's cheap next to what a finished field pays.

What they're good at, and where they quit

Workers handle straight fieldwork well: cultivating, plowing, sowing, fertilizing, harvesting. What they won't do is think. A worker stops dead when the machine runs out of fuel, when the seeder runs dry of seed, when the spreader empties, or when a combine's grain tank fills up with nobody hauling for them. You'll get a notification, and the fix is usually just refilling and pressing H again. On a blocked or weirdly shaped field they can get stuck too, so Tab over and check on them now and then.

The real payoff is running two jobs at once

One worker is a convenience. Two running machines is a strategy. Put a worker on the seeder across the farm while you personally haul the last trailer of wheat to the silo, then Tab between them as each finishes. That's how you cover all four starter fields in a single day instead of a week, and it's the moment the game clicks for most people.

GPS-assisted steering is free, use it

FS25 ships with GPS steering built in, no mods needed. It draws ideal lines for each field and either steers for you or keeps your hired worker dead straight, which means fewer skipped strips and less overlap. It's a small icon in the HUD and it saves a surprising amount of fatigue on long passes. Turn it on early and you'll never go back.

Automating past the field

Once cash allows, the game gives you ways to remove chores entirely. Barns with feeding robots handle the animal feed mixing for you. Greenhouses turn water into lettuce and tomatoes year-round, even through winter. Solar panels and wind turbines pay out steadily with zero attention. Bale collectors clear a field on their own. Automate the boring loops first and keep the fun driving for yourself.

A reasonable target for year one: starter canola harvested and sold into a good price, two fields sown in wheat before October ends, fertilizer on everything, and most of that starting $100,000 still in the bank while the crop does the growing for you.