I haven't heard of any plans to.

Likewise, I also find the idea interesting, but it might simply not make sense for the scale at which farming is done in the game.

So, how would a cropduster work in terms of gameplay?

Since the sowing and L-fertilising steps are basically equivalent, offloading the fertilising to another vehicle that can be stored off-site just isn't beneficial. There's not really much in the way of traffic savings or vehicle savings.

If two things were both changed, it could probably be useful:

A) You have to buy and store the equipment, rather than just the tractor. You'd need the tanks and the sprayers and this would take up space in the farm. This would create benefits to not having to store that equipment and using that space for something else.

B) Freeform fields. This would allow you to create much larger individual fields, allowing spraying by aircraft to not look/behave completely silly. As it is, that area would be subdivided into multiple fields, and you'd have to do some sort of pathfinding/order malarkey to allow the aircraft to spray multiple fields in one pass - the closest we have to this behaviour is garbage trucks which are awful at doing more than one thing in sequence. Maybe you could get around this by having a manual waypoint tool for spray paths?

It would be interesting. Tractors would still be better gameplay but it'd be nice fancy feature. As animations go, field could have two waypoints, one above road access point, second on opposite end and plane would just fly in line between them activating particle emmiter, fertilising whole thing in seconds.
But are planes used to spread fertiliser irl? I always imagined that they spray pesticides, killing everything beneath, just like Muricans love to.
Dropping potato beetles from western planes would fit soviet theme more. :D

Originally posted by m4rek:

Since the sowing and L-fertilising steps are basically equivalent, offloading the fertilising to another vehicle that can be stored off-site just isn't beneficial. There's not really much in the way of traffic savings or vehicle savings.

That really depends on game settings. Having a dedicated vehicle for field fertilization isn't that attractive when there are fairly clearly delineated sowing/growing/harvest/fallow seasons, as is the case on the base-game biome with seasons enabled, but it's a lot more attractive when you can sow year-round.

I will also comment that offloading fertilization from the farm building to an airfield with crop dusters could potentially be a useful logistical simplification if an airfield with crop dusters has the practical capacity to cover a much larger area than a single farm, both because supplying one airfield with liquid fertilizer is simpler than supplying, say, half a dozen farm buildings with the same and because it's more likely to be convenient to co-locate a crop-dusting airfield and a fertilizer plant than it is to co-locate a fertilizer plant and most of the farms it's supplying. Whether or not that kind of logistical simplification is worthwhile is more debatable, especially if you're not inclined to get into truly large-scale agriculture, but it is nonetheless a potential argument in favor of such a setup.

you guys farm?

That would not be possible (or a really really hard:) to code in this game, because of how planes works :) Or how vehicles you can add to farm works.

Originally posted by Zizo:

That would not be possible (or a really really hard:) to code in this game, because of how planes works :) Or how vehicles you can add to farm works.

If planes won't work, will helicopters work?


I would love to use a helicopter sovkhoz so my tractors won't slowly go to those fields to fertilize them, but instead, helicopters will do the job more swiftly.

No, there were no plans to do any sort of air fertilization, plane, helicopter, pigeons or otherwise. I'm afraid this won't ever get done, no matter how cool it is. I remember watching biplane fertilizers over fields when I was a kid... Ah, good times.

That said, tractors are doing a fine job of fertilizing, I don't see a reason to use air fertilizers, except for the "cool factor" and yea, giving the airfield some other purpose.