Bone Mill
| Bone Mill | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Crafted Item |
| Recipe | "Fragments of the past" Special Order |
The Bone Mill is a refining machine that grinds bones and fossils into fertiliser. Feeding it Bone Fragments or a spare fossil produces a random batch of Quality Fertilizer, Speed-Gro, Deluxe Speed-Gro or Tree Fertilizer. The recipe comes from Gunther, as the prize for his "Fragments of the Past" special order. For farms that dig up the same fossils again and again, it turns clutter from Artifact Spots and Ginger Island into something useful. It also gives the piles of Bone Fragments from the Dig Site a steady job.
The in-game description reads: Turns bone items into fertilizers.
Recipe
Gunther posts "Fragments of the Past" on the Special Orders board. The order asks for a hundred Bone Fragments or other bone items, dropped into the box inside the Museum within a week. Finishing it pays a good sum of gold, and Gunther mails the Bone Mill recipe soon after.
Ginger Island makes the order much easier. Bone Nodes at the Dig Site in the north of the island appear every day, and breaking them gives Bone Fragments. Skeletons in the Mines and Lava Lurks drop them too. Crates and barrels in the Skull Cavern and ordinary Artifact Spots add a few more.
Once learned, the machine itself takes Bone Fragments, Clay and Stone. Clay turns up when tilling soil or digging Artifact Spots.
These are the ingredients one batch needs.
| Name | Image | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Bone Fragment | 
|
10 |
| Clay | 
|
3 |
| Stone | 
|
20 |
Use
The mill accepts a wide range of bony items. Bone Fragments go in five at a time. Fossils and other bone artifacts go in one at a time, from Trilobites and Nautilus Fossils to the prehistoric skeleton pieces and the Snake Skull. Mummified Bats and Mummified Frogs count as well. A Bone Flute dug out of an Artifact Spot goes the same way, which is a real decision rather than an obvious one, since the flute is one of the more interesting finds in the Museum's collection.
Processing takes about four in-game hours. The fertiliser that comes out is chosen at random and has nothing to do with the bone that went in. The machine might hand back Quality Fertilizer, Speed-Gro, Deluxe Speed-Gro or Tree Fertilizer. Every batch also has a small chance to come out doubled.
Four hours means two loads in a comfortable farming day. A mill filled on the way out to the fields and emptied at lunch can be filled again before evening, which is how a stack of fragments turns into a season's worth of fertiliser without any real effort.
Notes
The Bone Mill shines once the Museum already holds every fossil worth donating. Duplicates that would otherwise sit in a chest become fertiliser instead.
Each of its products has a clear use. Quality Fertilizer lifts crop quality, while Speed-Gro and Deluxe Speed-Gro shorten growing time. Tree Fertilizer makes wild trees grow quickly, even through Winter. Since the output is random, a mill running for a few weeks builds up a mixed stock of all of them.
The gold saved is the plainest way to see the value. Pierre asks a stiff price per bag for Quality Fertilizer and for Deluxe Speed-Gro, and the Oasis in the desert only sometimes undercuts him on the deluxe mix. Speed-Gro promises a tenth faster growth at the very least, and the deluxe mix a quarter, so a mill churning out those bags by the handful pays for a whole field of planting that would otherwise be bought over the counter. Tree Fertilizer is the odd one in the batch: sprinkled on a wild sapling it pushes the tree up a stage every single night, Winter included, which is the fastest way to turn a bare corner of the farm into a stand of hardwood.
All Crafting
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
