Overview
This guide outlines the method to creating a completely custom, hand-crafted farm layout rather than relying on the default randomly generated terrain.
Introduction
As it stands, the only real choice you have when it comes to farm layout is the farm type (default, water, mountains, or flat) and then randomly generating a bunch of farms until you find one that works for you. So long as the devs don’t change anything about save storage, this will allow you to tweak your farm by swapping a few chunks here or there, or completely build your dream farm from the ground up.
I get that some people will consider this cheating or at least a door to it, but where there is a will there is a way; it’s the Unity engine. If you want to cheat infinite money and ribbons go ahead; you’ll just be stealing hours of gameplay from yourself. I want to cultivate an atmosphere of fun modding and people helping eachother enjoy the game even more.
So, with all that said: let’s Cartograph Together.
Getting Started
The first step is to decide what it is you want to do. You can swap a few chunks if you want, but this guide will go over a complete redesign. Let’s start by seeing what our options are. Below are six randomly generated farms that give us a pretty good selection of what is available. There’s ~50 ChunkIDs here, but there are probably more. The game must have three pools of chunktypes (default, water, and mountain) in which every map has default chunks, but is sprinkled with some type-specific chunks too.
Default Farms:
Mountain Farms:
Water Farms:
My recommendation is to write down the ChunkIDs you want or make a little map or something because it’s easy to lose your place when editing. If you are starting a fresh new farm, continue to the next step. If you are swapping chunks on an existing farm, recycle or move everything out of the target chunk(s) and create a backup copy of your farm.
For this guide, I will start on a flat farm and do this ridiculous layout to demonstrate what this method is capable of.
Modifying Chunks
Now that we’ve got a plan, we can start making some changes to our farm. Navigate to your Farm Together farm saves, typically located at:
“C:Program Files (x86)Steamuserdata(YOUR USER ID)673950remoteFarms”
If you are swapping chunks, make that backup copy now. If you are starting fresh, make a dummy flat farm in game: we will be injecting into it.
Open your farm or dummy farm with 7zip. You can probably use WinRAR, but it is finicky with editing files within an archive. In 7zip, right click the farm file and click “Edit” in the drop down. This will open in your default text editor (probably notepad). Don’t be afraid if it looks like hell; this stores the state and contents of every tile in every chunk.
Now, this is wear the guide splits.
Ctrl+F to find ChunkID you want to replace and change it to the one you want in this document. So “ChunkId”:”Lake” would be changed to “ChunkId”:”Hills” or whatever you want. You may have more than one instance of the would-be swapped ChunkID, so refrain from using the replace function unless you know exactly which chunk you are changing. Let’s say we are replacing the top left chunk, that would be: “ChunkId”:”Lake“,”Unlocked”:”false”,”ChunkPosition”:”0,4″ –>
“ChunkId”:”Hills“,”Unlocked”:”false”,”ChunkPosition”:”0,4″
Refer to this coordinate chart:
Keep the notepad open, but don’t make any changes to it. Instead, open this formatted and cleared out map data into a new window. I suggest notepad++ because it allows you to view it neatly.
www.mediafire com/file/7l462ib1nlv4e1i/FARM+FORMAT.txt (Add a period)
If you’re not comfortable downloading a random file that’s alright, it’s just messier without the formatting.
Now go down the list replacing ChunkIDs as you wish (in the downloaded file, or in directly in your farm), and custom tailor your farm to your tastes or the collective tastes of whoever you’ll be farming with. So long as you type the ID right, you can swap out anything including the starting chunk. Just remember that the FIRST chunk is the bottom left, and the LAST chunk is the top right.
Here is my bizarre layout in text:
Once you’re done with the layout, change the very top line farm style to either default (normal xp) or leave it at flat (hard mode, reduced xp).
“FarmStyle”:”FarmStyleFlat” –> “FarmStyle”:”FarmStyleDefault” (or leave it)
Now save your first notepad if you edited right in there OR copy all the formatted data into it and then save it. If you’re copying the formatted data in, completely clear out the other document before pasting so you don’t have duplicate chunk data. Don’t worry about the formatting, the game will strip it out upon loading. After saving, close the farm data document, 7zip will say the document has been modified. Hit “OK” to update the archive.
Test it, Tweak it, Test it again
If you used the formatted template, leave it open until you are sure everything looks right. Open up your farm in game and see how it looks. If something is out of place, the wrong chunk coordinate was changed. If you get a loading error or the whole farm is wrong, there was a typo: ex. “FveMountain” instead of “FiveMountains”.
This is how my monstrosity turned out:
A disaster, just like we planned.
After you get the hang of it, and everything is where you want it you are free to close everything and start working on your dream farm!