Stories Background
Back in Farming Simulator 17 I started to write down what kind of careers I played or the details on those careers, sort of to leave a ever lasting memory in writing of what I did. Kind of like I spent all this time playing this game, I mean just absolutely insane amount of hours put to farming, it would be great to have some sort of record of these. Youtube videos and twitch live streams are OK but the live streams disappear over time and even with youtube videos you can't really "hammer down" the date and time (difficult to explain) of when it happened. So I started to scribble down some notes to a text file and that is how these Farming Stories were born 
See our older FS17 stories page how it all got started.
PMC Start From Zero Background
Back in FS17 I started my own "start from scratch" career (on Cornbelt) by editing savegame files removing everything I owned and reset loan to zero as well. No fields, no vehicles, no loan and no money. Then I started to do missions until had enough money to buy vehicles and the first field.
In FS19 this premise is a bit different, yes we can do the same but with the placeable system like farm silos and stuff, it really is much more harder to start from zero. And I switched to use "Start From Zero" name for it not to confuse it to the official in-game mode called "Start From Scratch".
For example how contracts work now is much better technically, but you need to do so much more to purchase land and then on top of that the placeable buildings like silo, which you didn't have to buy in FS17. Also fertilizer/seed contracts require you to buy the fert/seed which you cannot do without money. So you have to start with other contracts like harvesting, cultivating etc.
Also with contracts you cant even get guidance steering mod on leased vehicles. Of course in singleplayer you can use courseplay but that would ruin all the fun in the absolute zero start, like I didn't use FS17 GPS or courseplay before I purchased my first field and that had me do a lot of manual driving.
Giants small farm silo placeable costs 110,000 and only holds 100k liters. Larger ones and extensions really increase the expenses. Farm silo obviously is only needed if/when you harvest while crop sale price is low, which it often is.
Land prices also depend on which terrain you play, they might be really affordable if you find some tiny lot of land or they can be in hundreds of thousands sometimes even millions, it all depends how the terrain was designed (or in some cases based on real world location restrictions).
I don't like the farm manager and (giants) start from scratch game modes with 1 million and 500k of money, its no start from scratch its start as millionaire hehe.
What do you guys think, is it too hardcore to start from complete zero in FS19?
For these stories I'm not going to mark $ US Dollar sign because its so cumbersome to type in, I'm just going to list the currency values as numbers so just know they are all dollars. Lower case k means thousand and m means million, for example 12.3k would be one twelve thousand three hundred and 1.234m would be one million two hundred thirty four thousand.
2021-04-25 Better Contracts mod changed how easy it is to get Start From Zero savegame going, now it is so easy to find contracts from ESC mapview and minimap, no more scrolling and trying to remember which field was where and with what contract.
Garden City, Iowa. Start From Zero Midwest Horizon. Start From Zero Grande Gardens. Start From Zero Grande Gardens. Unofficial Start From Zero North Dakota, Greendale. Start From Zero North Dakota, Greendale. Farm Manager Garden City, Iowa. Unofficial Start From Zero Garden City, Iowa. Unofficial Start From Zero Better Contracts Rowena, Texas. Start From Zero (unfinished) Garden City, Iowa. Start From Zero (2022-04-25 unofficial)