The Facility Manager and Ingredient Planner

Transcription

1 The Facility Manager and Ingredient Planner As a Facility Manager This is where you go to fill all of your facilities with one click or so (depending on the tools you have purchased). Even if you haven't purchased tools, it is a good place to go to fill your facilities one at a time because you don't have to move from farm to farm. You can see how many items you currently have in production and how many items are ready to be added to storage for use or to sell. As an Ingredient Planner This is a powerful tool for serious farmers. For instance it can tell you what products individual facilities are using, it can tell you about your stock, it can tell you if you are producing enough to maintain your facilities for one day, seven days, 15 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or even a year.

2 Open the facility manager and click on the notepad at the top right to get to the Ingredient Planner. The one day category does not fill your facilities one time to full...it really is one day. It takes 15 days of products from your stock to fill a facility from empty to full. If I open the Ingredient Planner and select the filters All Facilities 15 Days By Required I can see how much of each item I need to fill up my facilities from empty to full.

3 If I mouse over the picture of the item in the planner without clicking, it will tell me how much of an item I have in storage. Now lets say I have a lot of products in storage but I want to be sure I can run a month without having to plant anything. First of all, this is a little misleading because it is only a month as in 30 days worth. Remember I said that a day was just a day, but it takes 15 days to fill a facility from empty to full? So in reality, a month will only fill your facilities two times empty to full. If I change the ingredient planner's filters to read All Facilities 30 Days By Required or By Missing A quick glance will tell me what I need to plant to maintain 30 days (2 fills). The numbers in red tell me what I am short of. If all the numbers are brown I am in good shape for a month. If I just need to know what to plant, I can do one of two things. Using the Ingredient Planner I can filter to All Facilities 15 Days By Category. This will bring up the crops first and I can look for the red numbers. If I have no red numbers at 15 Days, I can bump the Time to 30 days, then 3 months and so on until I find what I need to plant. This is the most accurate way to plan your crops., however you can also go into the store either manually or by selecting your planting tool and filter to stored amount. This doesn't give a preference to what you need according to what facilities you have, but it will tell you what you are low on. Just be aware that just because store amount for beets is lower than the store amount for corn, doesn't necessarily mean you need beets...you may use more corn than beets in your facilities. What Can I Sell? When I am considering reducing stock, I look once again to the Ingredient Planner. This time I will select the filters All Facilities 1 Year By Category. I look at the numbers to maintain my facilities for a year and then compare it to what I have in storage by placing my mouse, without clicking, over the picture of the item. This brings up a tool tip that tells me how many I have in storage. I subtract the number needed for 1 year from the amount and storage and get the number I can sell. I make note of this and continue with as many items as I want. Then I go to the market to sell and I sell by half amounts until I get in the general area of the number needed to supply for one year. Don't go below 1 year on this because remember the time is a little deceiving. A year is only about 26 fills, you would not have enough in a year's time to fill every day from empty to fill for one month. The By Name category puts the ingredients in Alpha Order.

4 Trouble Shooting Lets say that I cannot produce enough cheese and I don't know why. The first thing I am going to do is see how much cheese it takes to fill all my facilities from empty to full. I will choose the following filters. All Facilities 15 Days By Name. This will allow me to see how much of products all my facilities use for 15 days (empty to full) listed in Alpha order. I will scroll down to the cheese and see that I need 7170 cheese for a complete fill. Now if I click on the cheese image I will see that it takes cows milk to produce cheese. So this is the first thing I am going to check..am I producing enough cows milk? If I hold my mouse over the milk can I can see that I have 252, 452 cow milk in storage. I will click the back button arrow on the upper left hand corner to take me back to the 15 day run in the Ingredient Planner. I will find the cow milk to see that I only need 16,898 cow milk to make a 15 day run. So this is not my problem. If I didn't have enough cow milk, since cow milk comes from cows the next logical step would be to buy more barns if I have farms without barns then buy more cows or if I had the farm cash to buy the super barn and Holstein cows which produce 20 times the amount of milk per cow and 40 times if I put them in the barn. The problem then would be solved. But since I have enough milk I must look further. Going back up to find my cheese again I will click on it. I am then going to see what I am making with cheese. Looking up in the upper left hand corner I will see blue words that say See what to make with cheese. Clicking on that I see the images of all the items made with cheese. If I click on each one of these items, it will tell me what facilities use cheese. I make a note of each of the facilities and also note which of the times are not used in other facilities such as the French Onion Soup. I see cheese is used to make pizza I click on one of the pizza's and see that pizza is made in the Pizza Restaurant. Unfortunately at this time there is not an easier way I know of to make this list than by clicking on each item that uses cheese to find out what facility makes the item by clicking on See how to obtain item name in blue letters at the top left of the screen. My list for cheese includes the following facilities. Pizza Restaurant, Bakery, Sandwich Shop, Taco Restaurant, Pasta Restaurant, Diner Restaurant, Frozen Foods, Smokehouse, Soup Restaurant, Gourmet Restaurant, and the French Restaurant. With this list I will go into the facility manager select the filter for Regular Facilities, Alpha. I will see how many of each of these facilities I own. I see that I only own one of each with the exception of the Bakery which I own 5 of them. Now I can do some things that will help me build up the stock of cheese. I can remove the check from the items that are not used in other facilities or I can try to cut down on my bakeries.

5 Trouble shooting is not easy, it takes time and persistence. But in doing so you will have a much more productive game and more satisfaction of knowing that you are in charge of your farms. There are other things you can do with your facility manager / ingredient planner but this is a start to learning how to use them to maintain your farms. As the game gets more complicated in structure, you will find learning how to use the available tools will save you time in the long run and allow you to play the game to its' full capacity. Happy Farming! *Numbers used herein are just examples, not necessarily the numbers in any manager. Your numbers may be different. Disclaimer: This is a guide to help you learn to use the tools available to you. I make no guarantees written or implied. Use the information at your own risk. Written by Melody Phipps To close this document please click the X in your browser tab All images and information contained within are the sole property of Farm Town Design Elite Copyright 2013