No Creek Map Progress Update: COOP and More

Good afternoon, FS fans. It's been a bit since I updated everyone on the progress of the map so below is a rundown of where I've been spending my time since the last post:

If you ask me, Thundr's Row Crop System is one of the single best additions to the game. It is incredibly well done and adds so much to the simulation side. I'm happy to announce that the map now has two versions available to the player: a non-RCS version and an RCS version that can be chosen between on the map selection screen when loading the game! I love adding things to give the player options and having the maps selectable in one file is a great feature if you ask me. It was important to get this feature in as soon as the early beta showed that things were stable so that all of RCS's features can be thoroughly run through the gauntlet by you all. My initial tests of this addition seemed to work just fine; I'm curious to see what you guys think.

I was able to resize and add a custom soil map that was made for Ray County into the map as well as make the extra fertilizer filltypes compatible with Precision Farming. I'm trying to throw a few features in for each beta just to give testers "bite size" amounts of things to work through and give feedback on what is working and what isn't. I plan to make a custom soil map for each field eventually, but the one from Ray County will suffice to give much more variation that the basegame maps do.

One of the last things that was on my list to accomplish is to get a functional COOP placed and everything working on it. I'm happy to announce that most of that work is complete! One of the things with map making that you have to balance is to decide how much custom and brand new stuff you are going to create for the project. For this one, I've elected to use most of the COOP buildings that I created for Ray County on this map as well. There are a couple reasons for this. One, I feel like those buildings were too cool to use on just one project and wanted to utilize them in this map. Second, I plan to focus on customizing some other features and areas of the map, so not spending quite so much time on these will allow me to do that. Even though most of the buildings were completed already, it is still a ton of work to set them up in other map, get all the scripting and triggers functioning, and then add all the decorations to bring them to life. I'm really happy with how this layout is turning out. I did choose to use a different grain leg as well as add a bale storage building with a neat feature which I will talk about later.

So what's next? As I finish up these things, it will be time to test and make sure there isn't something game breaking that I've missed before calling this Beta 2.0. With that said, my plan is to release the second beta version on Saturday evening (CST), February 7th. It will take me a lot of time between now and then to zip and upload individual files for testers as well as clean up a few things. I've already got the list of things that are planned for completion on the third beta that I'll begin working on just as soon as possible. Look for more information on the release and how everything will function later this week.

Thank you for your patience as I try to bring you the best map from me to date. My schedule is busy and my family is still my number one priority; so please keep those things in mind. If you played the early beta, I think you'll be very excited to see how much more alive this version feels. Remember to follow along with progress in the Discord server as well as give feedback there.

Looking forward to getting Beta 2.0 into your hands very soon.

Take care,

No Creek Farms