MoreRealistic is a deep game mod built to make playing more enjoyable, especially when you are behind the wheel. The whole idea is to create a “driving farming simulator”, so the way vehicles feel is a big part of it.
It reworks vehicle physics, transmissions, engine behavior, harvesting and working speeds, tire forces, mass, gravity and other systems. The result is a more realistic experience when you drive and work.
MoreRealistic history
IRL, I drove my first tractor at 7 years old, with only the steering wheel, a Ford 7000 and an IH745.
I am also a software engineer, but that is not the only thing I do.
I found LS2009 and played it shortly before Farming Simulator 2011 came out.
FS2011 is where I started modding. The physics felt too bad, with tractors flying unrealistically, more weight on the wheels giving more power, no rolling resistance, and so on.
That is why I made MR11. I wanted the best driving experience I could get from the vanilla game, while also fixing bugs such as the farm bales elevator. Once FS2011 with MR felt great to me, I released MR11.
It was already a little late, because Farming Simulator 2013 had also been released. MR11 had taken “ages” to make, thousands hours.
Next came MR13, since vanilla FS2013 felt so bad compared with MR11. Getting the “MR engine” ready took a lot of time again. Then every piece of equipment had to be converted to “MR”, including expansion vehicles.
That version cost another couple of thousand hours.
At that point, this mod was taking all my free time, and I did not have time to actually enjoy the game with it.
When FS15 arrived, I tried it. It still did not feel good, and I could not feel that I was driving a tractor. I checked the modding options, but I could not make anything good happen. I could not even apply proper gravity, so there was no MR15.
FS17 gave me the same feeling. It was like playing with “playmobil” tractors as usual. I did manage to make MR17, then spent a lot of time converting vehicles. There were even more vehicles this time, so I think this was the version that took the most time, more than 3000 hours ?
In the end, the mod used all my free time, but I still did not have time to play with it.
Then FS19 released. I had a new job and no time for playing, with more than full-time work, 3000 hours per year. So there was no MR.
FS22 was no different, with the same job and still no time for FS or MR.
Why MR25?
I bought the game just before release. I got almost one hour of playtime in before I started trying to mod it. The driving experience felt too bad:
- Turn manual direction change to “ON”, then try cultivating a field with the base MT635. It is unplayable. Every time you shift into reverse, the game chooses R1 speed, so you crawl along and have to shift through all the gears before reverse speed feels decent. It becomes unbearable fast.
- IRL, John Deere 3650 is one of “my” tractors, and I drove it for a couple hundred hours. In game, the gearbox is “badly” set up. The hi-lo lever goes in the wrong direction, and the tractor feels like a powershift. The gear ratio differences also have nothing to do with IRL, so it did not feel like a 3650.
- MF 8570 harvests at 10kph whatever the yield, crop or incline.
- I bought a Fendt with vario transmission. In 2 words, driving it was “disgusting”: flat and dull.
- That was already too much for me. The “simulator” part was gone.
Features
- Rolling resistance is now there. It is missing from the base game engine, even though it is really, really, really important IRL for farming vehicles. Air resistance is included too, but it is not as important.
- Tire forces work better. For example, pulling more than your weight is no longer possible.
- Earth gravity is included, unlike in base game FS2011 and 2013.
- Mass is IRL, with realistic fillType density, no mass limit and a better center of mass.
- Harvesting and working speed are more realistic. It is still a bit “easy” compared to IRL, but now that high horse power shiny tractor or bigger combine starts to look useful.
- Engines have a proper torque curve. Try the John Deere 3650 and Landini REX4 120 with MR and without MR, working in a hilly field, and compare them.
- Transmission management has been rebuilt. The MR game engine uses its own function, including for automatic shifting, which makes the experience much more realistic. Try making 0-40kph with the MT635 with or without MR and automatic shifting ON. Hydrostatic transmission works too. Drive the Massey Ferguson 8570 on the road for 30 seconds without MR and then with MR. If you like driving by yourself, going back to the base game feeling is difficult.
- There is no automatic brake when going downhill and faster than max vehicle speed. Let us hope AI can brake now.
- MR Combines look at “liters per second” and crops. With less yield, the combine goes faster, and leaving some of the header width unused, below 100%, also means more speed.
- MR Combines are held back by header max cut speed, combine threshing capacity and engine power. Chopping straw takes more power, so an underpowered combine can lose speed in the current crop.
- The center of mass varies with the fill level.
- Tires now matter a lot in game. Try taking a full trailer with narrow road tires across a wet field.
What should you not expect from MoreRealistic?
- MoreRealistic does not override every piece of equipment in the game, the expansion and the official mods. Doing that in an acceptable time would take me more than 24 hours a day.
Fun facts
- I bought the game on Steam first. After that, I had to buy it directly from Giants, since modding is not welcome on the Steam version of the game and there is no lua game source.
- Every MoreRealistic project starts from scratch. Code from the previous game is not copied.
- It can take dozens of hours, hundred ?, to remove unwanted vanilla features that Giants could remove in minutes, including the FS2011 “damping” value.
- It seems like every piece of equipment I check is “wrong”, so maybe I look too much ?
- APE50 is not CVT driven IRL. It has a manual gearbox like a motorbike. The shifting lever rotates the whole left handle, and there is also a reverser lever.
- Aprilia 125 is not 100Hp at all IRL, especially the current 4 strokes engine.
- Landini REX4 is not a GT version. In game, this is an F version.
- Amazone Spreader is not a 3200 model. It is the 2600 version, and the width is not the same at all.
- GreatPlains 1500 has the wrong optional attachment. The attachment is for small seeds, not a fertilizer unit.
- Challenger MT635/645 and MT655/665 do not share the same engine: sisu 7.4L and 8.4L. Their transmissions differ too, funk 18/6 and 18/9, so they do not have the same weight either.
- More than 90% of vehicles in the base game share one engine, one torque curve and a factor that derates the power. You cannot feel the difference between a 8.4L valmet engine and a 3.6L deutz engine. That is not what you want from a driving simulator, especially when you use manual gears.
- MR25 has been stopped several times, nearly aborted, because I could not get the base game engine to “bend” the way I wanted.
- When Giants studio is attached to debug and “vehicleDebug” is active with the base game engine, the game engine eats your memory, RAM. The MR engine fixes that.
- MR fits “hardcore” players best, the people who play vanilla game and do not spend time searching for mods, including those who would never know MR exists.
Changelog
20260329
- New woodcrusher code: the goal is to limit or avoid sliding at work. It now relies only on the “joint” between the wood logs and the crusher, with no more forces and frictionVelocity.
- Converted Lemken Solitair 12 seeder added.
- Fixed the speed text display issue when 2 “dashboards” are using one node, such as the John Deere 8R pillar speed display.
- Converted Geringhoff sunlite 40 header added.
- v1.17 of the game.
- Fixed detection of already loosened soil.
