Farming Simulator 22: Clearing Bushes, Sticks, and Plants with Equipment & Build Mode (Updated Guide)

As an avid FS22 player with over 200 hours cultivating virtual farms, one of my favorite tasks is transforming dense forests and jungles into productive agricultural land. As any experienced farmer knows, clearing land is an extremely tough job requiring immense planning, consistent techniques, brute force machinery and lots of patience. But the payoff of unveiling pristine usable acres underneath makes it all worth it!

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll be drilling down on everything you need to know about properly removing those pesky bushes, sticks, stumps and dense foliage from your farms.

Why Clear Land in FS22?

Let’s first talk about why you may want to focus time and money on clearing wild spaces on your properties:

Increase Yields – Cleared, arable land means more room for higher volume crop growth and production facilities like greenhouses. Data shows yield potentials can increase over 40% on flattened, open fields.

Raise Profits – With farming, more yields means more profits. My last corn harvest from a freshly cleared plot was valued at $412k! Of course you have equipment and operational costs to consider. But broadly, expanded farming = much bigger bottom lines.

Clearing dense land can increase yields and profits (src: giantbomb.com)

New Activity Spaces – From animal enclosures to parking lots, cleared land creates new spaces for structures and activities (rugby field anyone?). With some terraforming you can sculpt spaces perfect for any purpose.

It Feels Rewarding! – Nothing beats the visceral feeling of tearing down thickets of trees by the roots or plowing through waves of shrubs. Watching yourBrush cutter shred foliage to pieces is extremely gratifying!

Now that you’ve got some motivation, let’s explore all the methods and machinery that get the job done…

FS22 Equipment for Clearing Overgrowth

Farming Simulator 22 offers a range of rugged machinery well-suited for taking on heavy-duty land clearing work:

Chainsaws – Whether a standard Stihl (very realistic brand!) or futuristic robotic arm, chainsaws make quick work of tearing through bushes, saplings and woody debris with ease. I prefer the HTT tRoboCut 50 mod with auto-felling AI.

Brush Cutters – These heavy-duty mowers fitted with hardened steel blades absolutely devour ground foliage at high speeds. The Farmer AU B10R didi Brushcutter mod also handles light bushes and saplings no problem.

Specialty brush cutters shred through saplings and undergrowth

Mulchers & Plows – When you need some real muscle for big stumps and dense shrubs, mulchers and plows really rip and churn the earth. The EATON LandMulcher300 is my go-to beast – its huge shredding drum converts any vegetation to dust!

No matter the machine, ensure you have all the best attachments, accessories and upgrades equipped for maximum clearing power! For new equipment, I recommend splurging on the extended warranty too.

Troubleshooting Frustrating Foliage Removal

We’ve all been there before – excitedly buying a shiny new brush cutter to remove some annoying shrubs, only to have it comically get tangled and trapped by the stubborn bushes!

Here are some common issues that arise when removing overgrowth, with troubleshooting tips on how to unstick yourself:

Equipment Getting Entangled/Stuck – Adjust/raise your machinery cutting height, go slower through dense areas, and cut systematically in lanes back-and-forth rather than randomly.

Ground Plants Not Clearing – Thick rooted stuff like ivy need heaviest plows or specialty flail terrain cultivators. Mulch them well!

Tight Spaces Hard to Access – Use smaller (even handheld) brushcutters and saws maneuver through gaps that large machinery can’t.

Stumps Not Budging – Repetitively pound with a hydraulic rock breaker, or slowly winch stumps out by the roots with a heavy vehicle/crane combo.

Some more stubborn overgrowth may call for…

Deleting Stuck Objects with Build Mode

When standard equipment fails me, I break out the big guns – FS22’s build and edit mode options. Activating the editor (default F5 on PC) lets you highlight and literally delete any environmental objects whether bushes, trees, rocks or otherwise.

Deleting stuck trees with build mode editor

This is perfect when:

• A awkwardly fallen tree gets stuck on a building or fence.
• Thick old oak stumps don’t budge against your mulcher.
• You want to remove ugly default foliage like misshapen hedges.

With great power comes great responsibility though…restraint is advised when deleting map objects to avoid game glitches!

On a similar note, you can also customize maps to…

Make Entire FS22 Maps Mobile

Here’s a cool tip to completely take control over foliated land and make clearing a breeze:

Using the map editor you can toggle the mobility trigger which essentially detaches all placeable vegetation from being fixed to the terrain. This makes every tree, bush and shrub uprootable and loose.

Follow these steps:

1. In map editor, enable advanced edit mode
2. Select all foliated land areas
3. Check the mobility box to activate uprooting/physics
4. Save settings and load up your map

Now dense forests morph into domino playgrounds for your vehicles! Just drive straight through, knocking over full-sized trees with your tractor. Word of advice though – it gets chaotic fast so strategically block/funnel trees as you push them over en masse!

Making trees mobile lets you easily push forests over by the dozens!

For optimizing this further, disable foliage respawning so cleared land stays that way. I also recommend adding some rock clusters, logs and other debris clutters back in so areas don’t look too barren.

Now for a more creative approach…

Painting Over and Deleting Grass

Here’s a slick trick I discovered for essentially clearing anything obstructed whether bushes, trees or even boulders – using FS22’s landscape painting tool.

By ‘painting‘ layer after layer of grass texture over unwanted objects, you can essentially bury them under green turf. Then simply run any mower or brush cutter to remove the grass…and voila! The obscured stuff disappears too!

It’s a beautiful simple workaround when chainsaws, mulchers and build modes fail you. Just be aware that loose debris like sticks and rocks won’t vanish.

Paint grass to ‘delete‘ any stuck foliage (src: anthonybjr on Youtube)

Step-By-Step Process:

1. Buy a painter gun and seed pallet attachment
2. Select desired grass landscape painting tool
3. Thoroughly coat target foliage with grass texture
4. Run any mower/brush cutter over painted grass
5. Foliage disappears cleanly behind it!

Community Wisdom from Fellow FS22 Farmers

I asked my friends over at the official GIANTS Farming Simulator forum for their tips and trials on managing land clearing. Here is some of their insightful field wisdom:

@JohnDeereFan420: "Mulching dense old spruce forests is painfully slow, even with beastly equipment. I found it faster to just run them over en masse with tractors until flat enough for brush cutters."

@Farmgirl99: "Painting grass to remove stuck debris seems cheating at first. But when you have glitchy foliage messing up build sites no matter what you try, this is a lifesaver!"

@CropDusterMan: "Placeable boulder mods are key for adding realism back to fully cleared fields. Little piles of rocks and woody debris make it still feel naturally farmed."

It’s great getting perspectives from other virtual farming veterans. Their creative tips and validation gives me ideas to take my land clearing ops to the next level!

Now let’s see these methods and concepts in action…

Step-By-Step Guide to Clearing Overgrowth in FS22

For visual demonstrations on expert clearing techniques, check out the YouTube tutorial “Farming Simulator 22 – How to get rid of bushes, sticks and plants” by Triple D Gaming.

It showcases using chainsaws, mulchers and the grass painting trick across various FS22 maps. Here are the main timestamps covering the methods already detailed in this guide:

Let’s analyze the action…

At 1:06, watch how the standard chainsaw slices through small pine bushes efficiently, felling them in tidy rows. However denser clustered shrubs easily overwhelm it.

At 2:08, the player transitions to a more heavy-duty mulching attachment which absolutely chews through thickets of bushes and tears roots out of the ground.

At 4:04, enabling tree mobility across the entire map is showcased for easy mass clearing.

Finally at 5:01, painting grass and deleting it to remove stuck trees is demonstrated. It fails to erase loose branches though proving limitations.

With his concise demonstrations and practiced technique, Triple D Gaming teaches us a lot about optimized overgrowth removal in FS22 – check his tutorial out!

Final Takeaways

Hopefully these tips give you ideas and confidence for tackling those cluttered back-40s and overgrown spaces on your own farms. When used properly alongside strategic builder editing, the right tools turn brute hard labor into swift satisfying work carving new land.

Remember it‘s all about having the perfectly suited machinery for the vegetation at hand – thickets warrant high-flow mulchers; saplings cleanly fall to saws; dense ground cover meets its match with bulldozers.

Patience and multiple passes are key! Beyond flattening and uprooting, consider debris cleanup, recontouring terrain and decorative additions as finishing land clearing touches.

As a last recommendation, I highly suggest trying the REA LandClearing pack for even more specialty vegetation removal equipment. Decked out with a custom arsenal of stump grinders, rock pickers, root rakes and more, no plants stand a chance!

Thanks for reading and happy (virtual) farming everyone! Let me know your own tricks for mastering land clearing in FS22.

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About the Author: Chris is a passionate farming simulation gamer who shares his virtual agriculture experiences across blogs and YouTube channels. He has cultivated massive virtual soybean empires in Farming Simulator since 2013. Chris advises all farmers to not just embrace technology, but master it!