Create a Quality EC

If your goal is to have a quality center, it will take time. Here is a solid starting plan, which assumes no passes:

Preliminary Steps:
Don't take a job extension, so you can work for your own center once your current job ends
Aggressively train your own best horse, especially in dressage, so you can move it in when you're ready to open to the public.

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When you start, you will get 25,000e to begin with. Do not buy boxes or hire employees right away. Instead, buy 5 15-acre regular meadows. The cost will be 17,500e. (You can start your competitions at no cost, see other threads in my forum about that.) These will be for growing crops - never use regular meadows for pasture. A 15-acre regular meadow however will yield more than a 6-acre fertile meadow, and costs less.

The real money maker for a center is crops - in particular turnips, which can be grown in the summer.

If you start in autumn or winter, you can't plant right away. Each day you can buy droppings, make manure, and sell it to the store for profit. Do this as much as possible!

On the 15th of the month, spring begins. This is when you can plant carrots for your boarders, and flax. You can also plant barley and oats for use in mash making. Flax will yield flax for mashes and bedding which can be sold or used as your own bedding. Its not as profitable as turnips. Plant 1 meadow with carrots, 2 with flax, 1 with oats, 1 with barley. Plant all with manure - it allows you to harvest sooner.

On the 20th, harvest your flax and sell most of it. Keep 100 units for bedding, that will last a while. On the 21st, harvest your carrots. Barley will be ready for harvest on the 22nd, and oats on the 23rd.

On the 22nd, after harvesting the barley, you should have 4 fallow meadows. Plant turnip seeds on all 4, using manure. You can harvest in 4 days. Use this schedule:

Plant 22nd, harvest 26th
Leave fallow to regain lost fertility
Plant 30th, harvest 4th*

After harvesting the oats on the 23rd, plant wheat on that meadow. Wheat will give you straw (sell it, since flax is better for bedding) and wheat oat for mashes.

After harvesting your last round of turnips, it will be autumn. Plant one meadow with apples, leave the others fallow. Apples are the last ingredient in making mashes. They'll harvest the next fall.

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After you sell your first turnip crop, buy 2 6 acre fertile meadows. These will be used for pasture. From your meadows page, make one pasture and leave the other fallow. Every 2-3 days, swap them out. (Lay fallow what is in pasture, put the other one in pasture.) Buy 6 12m boxes. Go to your boxes page, and under manage bedding indicate to use flax from your stock. It will go in overnight.

It will take a few days for your boxes & pasture to get cleaned. Once they are 80-90% clean, go ahead and move your best horse in.

Start looking for employees, most importantly saddler as its the only one you can't use a temp to fill. You can be your own vet and hire temps for RI and blacksmith if you need to. With turnip harvest money, you'll be able to afford it.

Once your meadows/boxes are clean & you have the vet/RI spots filled you should have no trouble finding boarders. (As long as your own horse is in - a center with no horses has much lower prestige.)

Each spring/summer, grow crops for revenue. Sell most of the flax - just keep enough for your own boxes. Work on buying a greenhouse at some point, and then more meadows. Ultimately, add more boxes and/or upgrade to larger boxes

~ Robin