Row Crop System Progress: 01/15/26

Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay. Ran into a snag with the next Row Crop System update. I'm working on an issue where, if a field is planted at a different spacing than what is set in the map, the PF yield meter shows wrong values.

The problem here is, in a vanilla game, everything is calculated off of one variable. This variable is taken from the area that changed from harvest ready to cut. Also, in a vanilla game, all crops regardless of how they look are painted solid. To the game they all look like the RCS crops do without RCS running. Just a solid block.

Because of that, it's easy to calculate both yield and worked area off of the same variable. When the crops are painted in strips, however, the area in between the rows remains unchanged. This makes calculating both yield and worked area on the same value impossible. If you take just the area changed from harvest ready to cut, and only 66% of the work area is covered in crop, then your yield and worked area will only be 66% of normal. To remedy that, I factor for the missing area. This fixes the yield, but also boosts reported area harvested (again, same variable).

This is making fields look bigger or smaller than they really are, and making people see numbers that don't match up to what they are actually getting.

Difficult to explain, so I have included a couple images here. The first image would be a vanilla game with 66% of the work area covered. This would report the area that was actually harvested and calculate the yield off of that same area.

The second image would be a RCS field also with 66% of the work area covered. If this was a vanilla field, it would be considered 100% covered. But, because the areas in between the rows are unchanged with the RCS crops, the game sees that exactly like the first image, as the header only touching 66% of the worked area. It then treats it exactly the same as it would in the first image. In other words, to the game, both images are exactly the same thing.

I can't simply calculate the entire worked area each tick, because you barely move each tick of the game and that would cause the same area to be re-processed over and over. You have to calculate on something that has changed. Again, in vanilla, this is the foliage area changed from harvest ready to cut. With RCS, I can't use that.

I have been experimenting with using my harvest lock layer for this, and creating a second global variable to read the "real" area changed/harvested. It's not perfect because it cannot look at what was actually harvested. It is just looking to see if anything was harvested and counting the unlocked portion of the work area each tick if true. This prevents overlap and re-counting the same area multiple times.

It's been quite the task trying to figure out (and explain lol). This is why the delay. I will be posting the next beta update soon here, with some changes to hopefully resolve the issue as much as possible. I will also put a note in the download post noting that this specific issue should be watched.

Keep in mind, because the game really does not have actual rows in it, calculations are not going to be as exact as vanilla. It's done by extrapolation and estimating the missing areas based on what is actually there. In testing so far, however, it has been close.

I'm working on some more advanced calculations for some of this, but I don't want to slow the game down too much. So, it's been kind of a balancing act between accuracy and performance.

I'll keep you posted, later!