Our guide to watching the Farming Simulator League

The fourth season of the Farming Simulator League has just kicked off. Yes, you read that correctly. The Farming Simulator series has its own esports league, where teams competitively farm in 15-minute matches. Season 4 will stretch from May to November 2022, with €100,000 to be won along the way. 

Seeing the sedate agriculture simulation turned into a three-vs-three wheat harvesting race is something of a revelation. It started as a bale-stacking game mode in Farming Simulator 17 to entertain trade show attendees (Farming Simulator  is as much a part of the farming landscape as cow dung and early mornings) and grew into a spectacle of its own. Developer GIANTS Software has shepherded their flock into a robust, watchable esport based on Farming Simulator 19. 

It makes sense when you see it in action. Modern farming is a high-tech pursuit, and Farming Simulator represents that perfectly. It takes a lot of skill to harvest a field of wheat in 15 minutes, and anything can be a sport if you add enough rules and obstacles.

You have questions? So did we. So let’s answer them as we dip into the strange, niche world of competitive farming. Or, as we like to call it: “aggro-culture.” 

How do Farming Simulator matches work?

Each match is a 15-minute, three-vs-three harvesting race on symmetrical farmland. The goal is to harvest wheat, press bales and deliver them to the barn, and transfer the harvested grain. Each bale scores points, and grain deliveries are score multipliers. 

Pre-game

The battle begins before the match kicks off, with a ‘Pick and Ban’ phase. Here, the team captains select the vehicles that can and can’t be used during the match. There are team and player perks to be chosen (a team could decide to speed up their bale harvest belt; a player could increase their straw intake) and vehicles to clamor for that will help with harvesting and baling. With that done, it’s time to farm!

Kick-off

As each team roars into action (a few drivers will even pop a wheelie), you begin to see how farming becomes competitive. Equipment is left at random areas of the map, and each player has to connect swiftly to it to get into the crops. 

Harvesters lead the way, gathering the wheat and grain into their headers. They’re oddly elegant, scraping swathes of the golden crop in long lines. The hay balers that follow them will press bales from the cut crop and deliver them to the barn to score. The additional collected grain acts as a multiplier, increasing the team’s score while decreasing the opposition’s multiplier. 

The map is laid out into two fields of wheat and a number of movable bridges. A barn sits on the map for both teams to score, with ground-level and first-floor drop areas to deliver to. The lower drop-off is worth 10 points, and the upper drop-off’s score is based on the team’s multipliers. Though the higher drop-off area has an elevator, there are players good enough to roar their baler up to the barn and whip bales into the upper drop-off like a basketball player hitting a three-pointer, as seen in the highlights video from last season below. 

Tactics and tricks

There are subtleties in the high-stakes world of battle-farming. Here are some to look out for. 

There’s a chance right at the start of the match, when the teams are racing for equipment, where one team could make a clean sweep of the harvesters or balers, immediately ending the game. That’s why the ‘Pick and Ban’ stage is so important. A good captain will guarantee the team grabs one of each vehicle before the match begins. 

The lumpy farmland fights every stomp of the accelerator and turn of the wheel. Even if a contestant manages to reach the equipment, they have to line up their vehicle correctly with it to hook them together. Miss, and they’ve lost vital seconds in the race for wheat supremacy. It must be torture having to take another crack at backing up into the baler while the other team heads off into their field of dreams. 

The map has a number of dynamic bridges that raise and lower while players deliver their bales, cutting off shortcuts to the barn. There’s a little static bridge over a stream, but that brings its own risks: this route takes longer to get to the barn, and speeding up to make up that lost time could cause players to drop bales from the fork. 

Drops occur at timed intervals during a match. They have wide-ranging effects, like destroying a number of the enemy team’s bales or adding score multipliers. 

I want to get involved!

We thought you might. Here’s how you can watch all the action live and how you can even take part. 

How to watch the Farming Simulator League

The official site is the one-stop-shop for Farming Simulator League fandom. Here you’ll find the rulebook, schedule, and links to the Twitch channels. By the time this post is live, the first round of the schedule will have already taken place. That means you can start right away and be caught up in time for June’s qualifiers. 

How to play in the Farming Simulator League

The tournament client is available as a free DLC for Farming Simulator 19. You can grab it from the official site by following the instructions in this post. You’ll need two other teammates to sign up. We’d also suggest you take a look at the Stats Sheet and Official Rulebook in this post. 

And now… a new dawn awaits. Climb into that tractor and make hay while the sun shines.