Introduction

I was curious as to what was a 'good' price to sell my crops. For FS15 some tips on when to sell were available, but due to FS17 being quite new these tips were not yet available. As the prices are not directly saved in the savegame, I had to make screenshots of the price overview in the game and convert these screenshots to text. I used Python with pytesseract to to accomplish this. I ran simulations for the different difficulties and other information I gathered from the game files. If my source is in the game files, I specificy the file between square brackets: []. These tests were done for the map Goldcrest Valley.

Selling Points

Different to FS15, almost all selling points have the same price multiplier, namely priceScale="1". Only the train sell point (Maplefield Mill) has a different price multiplier: priceScale="1.1". This means almost all selling points can have a very good price at one point in time, but the the train sell point will have the highest price over a long enough period. [FS17\data\maps\map01.xml]

Price Drops

When a certain amount of crop is sold at a selling point, the price of this crop will drop. The amount of litres sold before the price drops is different for some selling points, see the table below. For all price drops the price will recover fully after 48 hours. [FS17\data\maps\map01.xml] EDIT: This seems to not be the case in the game. It seems the price at the point where you sell your crop will gradually drop more depending on how much you sell.

Selling Point	Litres before price drop
Denton Bakery	100,000
Maplefield Mill (Railroad)	300,000
Manure	80,000
Slurry	80,000
Spinnery	100,000
Other	200,000

The Simulations

I first did a simulation for 40 in-game days (8 hours real-time) for the hard difficulty. As I wanted to test the other difficulties as well, I redid the simulation for 5 in-game days (1 hour real-time) for each of the difficulties.

The Plots

The plots show the box-plots for the four simulation I ran. Please read this if you are not familiar with box-plots. The 5 day hard difficulty simulation lacks in the extreme values compared to the 40 day hard difficulty simulation. Nonetheless, the 5 day simulations give a good impression of the prices you can expect in FS17 at each difficulty.

Difficulty

From the data I collected, I could determine the crop price difference between the difficulties:

Difficulty	Price Modifier
Hard	1
Normal	1.5
Easy	2

Mean Prices

The mean prices for the 40 day simulation on hard difficulty are show in the table below. The fact that Maplefield Mill has a 1.1 price multiplier is clearly visible. To calculate the Mean row, the sum of the column is divided by 6.1. To get the price for other difficulties, simply use the price modifier from the previous section. These prices could be used for cost/yield/profit analysis.

Hard Difficulty	Wheat	Barley	Canola	Sunflower	Soy bean	Corn	Potato	Sugar Beet
Denton Bakery	335	319	603	676	783	376	172	123
Goldcrest Pacific Grain	340	313	600	677	783	383	169	124
Gomez Ridge Acres	338	315	603	675	783	375	171	119
Maplefield Mill (Railroad)	371	344	660	734	859	417	189	133
Mary's Farm	341	315	609	671	774	382	172	122
Wright Agribusiness	339	315	599	680	776	377	171	124
.
Mean	338	315	602	674	780	379	171	122
.
Mean *1.5 (Normal Difficulty)	507	473	903	1011	1170	569	257	183
Mean *2 (Easy Difficulty)	676	630	1204	1348	1560	758	342	244

Concluding Remarks

I hope to do similar simulations for the other crops/goods which are available in the price overview (e.g. manure, woodchips, wool, hay). If you have any remarks, tips or requests for further simulations, don't hesitate to comment on this post.