Fox Farms 4X: Conversion Engineering and Runtime Evidence

Scope and relationship to the Technologies work

The Fox Farms work carried out on 30 September–1 October is an applied engineering case study for TW Farms Technologies: taking an authorised FS22 source into an FS25 map-development workflow while preserving the original. This report adds the technical record behind the existing milestone announcement.

The map work tests capabilities that matter to the wider Farm Forge direction: dependency discovery, terrain and ownership consistency, native editor compilation, repeatable packaging and inspection of the actual game state. It does not establish that a standalone Farm Forge product already performs the whole workflow.

Dependency migration: valid XML was not enough

The initial conversion audit parsed 128 XML/I3D documents with zero parse errors, yet found 1,649 missing FS25 reference occurrences representing 854 unique references. Of those unique missing references, 793 were present in the installed FS22 assets. That distinction matters: a syntactically valid scene can still depend heavily on paths belonging to the previous game.

Migration work had to distinguish local files, installed native resources, dynamic or archive references and references requiring an engine check. The source audit recorded 398 existing local references, 673 existing FS25 references and 81 dynamic/archive occurrences that had not been resolved. These are initial audit counts, not a claim that all missing items remained in the finished test build.

Runtime repairs addressed traffic splines, cattle navigation, obsolete starter vehicles, road access and surface firmness. Native editor reopening and actual load logs were used to check the repairs rather than treating a rewritten path as proof that the referenced asset behaved correctly.

Fields, crops and production configuration

• Field geometry audit: 67 fields; invalid polygons 0; overlapping polygons 0.
• Production baseline: 176 stock fill types; 13 preserved custom types; 4 added forage types.
• Editor-only all-placeables preview merge: 134 matches, no mismatches; 164 XML documents parsed. That report explicitly left the game check pending.

The field-numbering polygon audit records 67 fields, with no invalid polygons, duplicate field identifiers, duplicate vertices or overlaps in that check. Field entrances and borders were reviewed separately; the field 13 entrance pole was moved clear of the access while preserving connected wires.

The production integration report records 176 stock fill types and preservation of 13 custom types, including the cereal variants, alfalfa forms and CATTAILS. It also records four added forage types: ALFALFA_FERMENTED, CLOVER_WINDROW, DRYCLOVER_WINDROW and CLOVER_FERMENTED.

Selling-point configuration was extended for the relevant added crops and forage. These are configuration and reference results. They do not prove that every crop can be harvested, every material sold or every production cycle completed.

Native artwork, visual corrections and runtime result

A native aerial PDA was rebuilt, but the older DDS initially masked the corrected PNG in game. Replacing the DDS exposed the intended aerial artwork. Roads and field boundaries aligned in the inspected starter-farm region; a full-map interactive inspection was still outstanding.

The supplied preview DDS appeared on the map-selection card and loading screen. The editor reopened the all-placeables preview, and the farmers-market building was visible at close range with shaped grass margins and planting.

The finishing report records a dedicated slot 6 loading, saving and reloading successfully. Its fourth reload log contained no Error entries, and the earlier traffic-spline, cattle-navigation and obsolete-vehicle load errors did not recur. Existing user saves were not modified.

Acceptance limits and retained evidence

• Evidence records: conversion-audit.json; field-numbering-polygon-audit.json; fs25-production-integration.json; complete-preview-merge-verification.json; finishing-verification-2026-10-01.txt.

Actual sales and unloading, full production cycles, cattle purchase and movement, traffic driving and a complete ground-level tour were not confirmed by the finishing report. Terrain virtual-texture allocation and unrelated scanned-mod warnings remained recorded.

The technical lesson is that parsing, reference resolution, native rendering and saved gameplay state are different checks. We retain each result with its scope so a later successful load cannot silently become a claim of complete functionality.