How I spent $1.3 million trying to bake a cake in Farming Simulator 22, Part 2

In the first part of my diary I was in the midst of attempting to bake a cake from scratch by Christmas in Farming Simulator 22, though with only two months left in the in-game year, I’d managed only to produce some eggs and strawberries while spending… let me check my notes… ah, yes. One million dollars.

I still need wheat to turn into flour, sugar beets to make sugar, and a whole bunch of milk because I need to turn some of it into butter while leaving the rest of it as milk. While my prospects of completing a single cake seem dim, at least there’s been a little progress in the cow department.

Milk and butter

A farmer’s work is never done, especially when he hasn’t even begun 80% of his work. As I’m running past my cow pen panicking about everything, I see they’ve actually produced some milk. Naturally, I can’t use my water tank to transport milk, so it’s time to lease a different goddamn tank and tow it to the farm. With 649 liters of fresh milk, I head to the dairy, which I buy (for $70,000). I then tell it to start making butter and to send that butter to the bakery, please and thank you.

Frazzled as I am, it never stops feeling good to actually produce something from my stupid little incomplete highway farm. But even though I’ve got milk for butter, I also need more milk for just plain milk, so I spend about $10,000 on more cows (this time I have them delivered). I now have eggs, butter, and strawberries sitting in my bakery, waiting for everything else.

Beets

Meanwhile, I get some discouraging news. After plowing a second small field on the other side of the exit ramp and renting a different seeding machine (everything seems to need its own specialized gear) and filling it with beet seeds, I get a notification that I can’t plant beets in October. They need to be planted earlier in the year. Well, shit. Beets were my avenue to sugar, a fairly important ingredient in cake. I really wanted to grow my own, but after sitting at my desk with my head in my hands for a while, I start wondering if there’s a shortcut I can take.

I check the map for existing beet fields, and as it turns out there’s one right next to the baseball stadium across the highway. I know I wanted to make everything from scratch, but I’ve got two months until Christmas, and my cake currently consists of strawberries floating in raw eggs next to a stack of butter and I am stressed. I buy the beet field for $146,000, I rent a giant beet-harvesting truck the size of an aircraft carrier for $24,000, and I drive to the beet field.