What the fleet carries
A harvester cuts a ripe field and leaves bales on the ground. Bales do not travel to the factory on their own: a vehicle has to collect them and take them to a drop point. If that does not happen, fields fill to their bale limit, harvesting stops, and the production line starves.
| Vehicle | What it does | When |
|---|---|---|
| Tractor | Planting and general field work | From the start |
| Harvester | Cuts ripe fields and leaves bales | From the start |
| Trailer | Collects the nearest bales and unloads them | Early and mid game |
| Bale train | Goes to the largest cluster of bales and sweeps the corner | Once the farm grows |
| Autonomous harvester | Clears a wide radius from a single stop | Very large farms |
Why adding trailers stops helping
A trailer goes to the bale nearest to itself. On its own that is a sensible rule, but when the whole fleet follows it every vehicle attacks the same pile near the yard and nobody drives to the far half of the farm. On top of that, a longer farm means more of each trip is spent travelling, so the same vehicle does less work.
So adding vehicles works up to a point, and past it each new vehicle simply divides the work of the previous one. Every vehicle also costs the game some performance.
A measured figure: on a real player save, a fleet of 40 vehicles and 2 autonomous harvesters collected almost exactly the same amount. One robot does roughly the work of twenty vehicles. That is why the game pushes you toward better vehicles rather than more of them.
The bale train
A tractor plus wagons, using a different rule from the trailer: it heads for the largest accumulation of bales rather than the nearest one, then sweeps that area and makes a single long trip.
This fills the gap the trailer leaves. Trailers take the near piles and the newly opened edges while the train takes the distant corners. They are not competitors, they divide the map between them without being told to.
The autonomous harvester
The late-game answer. It clears a very wide radius from one stop, enough to empty a whole parcel in a single visit, and its capacity scales with bale size, so it grows as the farm grows.
Two things to watch:
- There must be a drop point on the farm: an intake point, a processing centre or a belt station. With none of them, the purchase is refused.
- How many you may own depends on your field count. The limit rises as the farm does.
Shortening the trip: the cotton processing centre
Besides improving the vehicles there is another route: shorten the road. The processing centre is built in the middle of the fields and becomes a third drop point. That is also why it is round: a circle has no far side, so every field around it is equally close.
Building it removes the fields underneath, but their cost is refunded and any bales on top are moved into storage. The placement ghost tells you how many fields will go before you commit, so there is no surprise.
Use the fleet panel
The Fleet button in the bottom bar lists every vehicle, and the ordering is deliberate: stuck vehicles first, then idle ones, working vehicles last. The red badge counts the stuck ones. If a vehicle has jammed, the panel puts it at the top so you do not have to go hunting for it on the map.