A game centered on being a rancher gives the player a firsthand experience of raising cattle, goats and other livestock.
The game starts off with the usual, make a character, and do the tutorial.
The tutorial gives a little backstory, as you break down the old ranch you inherited. After you finished or skipped the tutorial. You can start building the ranch you want.
You start off with a mule, a little utility vehicle. This is where you get logs and cut them into planks.
For this you will need a jerry can (Gas can) and a portable saw table. You can buy planks at the hardware store. However, they cost $32 for a stack of 8 and with the saw, you can cut 160 logs per 1 gas can that cost 30 dollars to fill up.
This gives you 40 stacks for the same price as the 1 stack at the hardware store. The downside is you can only cut the trees on your ranch, but there are plenty for a modest building.
So now that you have the planks you need, what to build?
There's a lot to do on the ranch, from managing cattle, goats, chickens, and bees. This is where it's important to figure out your focus, as taking on too much will quickly get out of hand. There's just not enough daylight to manage a large ranch solo. Get too busy and forget to feed the animals, and you're gonna need to get out your meat grinder.
The day goes by quick, and before you know it you've spent all day milking your cows, gathering eggs from the chickens, running down to the store for mold all to make cheese.
Just sell the milk, you say? Sure you can do that. 1 Jug of milk sells for $126, 1 egg sells for $6. it’s easy to just run down and sell for a fast buck. Nothing wrong with it really, especially in the beginning.
However, there's a far greater payout for processed items over raw items. Therefore, it's necessary to focus on one or two areas or you will get overwhelmed. A friend or two can also join your ranch and help as hands.
The ranch sim falls under the Gaming Genre of Job simulators and somewhat base building. The Building aspect is lacking in a few areas, one is the snap to grid function is quirky at best, and there's no pillar for more complex builds.
Still, with some imagination, you can build some pleasant areas.
The D&K Milk Lab
where cheese is born.
Dairy Cows on the back porch for easy milking.
Kola’s goats over here
You can certainly use the prefab barns and homes, but the real action is in custom builds.
The Ranch sim offers a solid, but still bare bones experience. the game has hunting, some quests (mostly for starter money), and a small town with limited interaction. There's a hardware store, a Burger joint ,and a General Store, and a car shop.
The burger joint offers deals for certain items at a higher payout rate. I've seen up to 2x the price on some items. These specials change daily.
The local wildlife enjoys a peaceful stroll through town.
A recent update added pets, but I found the dog following you 2 inches from your face to be very annoying.
The dog is supposed to be an aid to hunting, but the dangers just aren't there. The bears drops in two shots with the rifle and 4 with the pistol.
The Annoyances and Bugs
- Your weapon has to be reloaded each time you draw it. This can get you killed when a bear drops in on you.
- As mentioned earlier, the Dog follows always( bugged I believe) and stays too close.
- The economy needs work. Vehicles are too cheap, and there's no money sinks or hobbies to spend that money. After a while, you're just working to produce more products when you have too much money and nothing to spend it on.
- The Vehicles could use some more fine tuning. It's certainly playable with some experience, but there is a learning curve.
- The game uses a control wheel to select different modes of play. There's no option to use a key bind. Press TAB to bring up the wheel and select the mode. This is slow and unnecessary on PC.
6. It rains way too much.
7. There's no dedicated servers. There argument against it has been there's no pause in the game for when no one's online, and the animals will starve.
A fix for this would be to add a pause for when no one's online and give us Hired NPC hands to help with managing the ranch.
The game is fun, but playing with your friends means waiting till their online to join their ranch.
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