Mill
| Mill | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Building |
| Cost | 2,500g |
| Materials | Stone (50); Wood (150); Cloth (4) |
| Size | 4x2 |
The Mill is the farm's kitchen supplier. Wheat goes in and comes out as Wheat Flour, beets become Sugar and Unmilled Rice becomes plain Rice, and those three are the backbone ingredients of the cookbook. Flour, sugar and rice turn up in more recipes than almost anything else, and Pierre's General Store charges for all of them, so a mill standing next to a wheat field means the shopping list for cooking shrinks to almost nothing. It is a cheap building with a short construction time, and the only reason to delay it is that nothing can be cooked until the Farmhouse has a kitchen.
Construction
Robin sells the plans at the Carpenter's Shop for 2,500g with 150 Wood, 50 Stone and 4 Cloth. The cloth is the part that needs thinking about: it comes from putting Wool through a Loom, which means a sheep in a Deluxe Barn, or from the occasional bolt found underground and in the Traveling Cart's stock. Robin needs two days to finish the work.
Because of the cloth, the mill is rarely the first thing a farm builds, and the usual order is to get the kitchen upgrade and some wheat in the ground first.
Use
Everything is dropped straight into the mill and collected the next morning. Several kinds of produce can go in at once and in any quantity, so an entire Fall wheat harvest and a crate of beets can be processed together overnight.
The finished goods appear in the little box on the right-hand side of the building. That box behaves like a chest with thirty-six slots, it holds the output indefinitely, and the first slot shows what is waiting in the same way a piece of artisan equipment signals a finished batch. Fresh produce can keep being fed in while yesterday's flour is still sitting there, and the new output simply stacks on top.
The box can be used as ordinary storage too, as long as at least two different items are in it. That convenience carries a real risk. The mill needs somewhere to put the morning's output, and it prefers slots that already hold the same milled good before falling back on the first empty slot. If every slot is taken when the day turns, the milled goods are destroyed rather than held over, and milling two stacks into a single free slot saves only the first of them.
One wheat gives one Wheat Flour. One beet gives three Sugar, which makes beets by far the better bargain of the two crops, since a single harvested beet covers three recipes' worth of sweetening. Unmilled Rice becomes Rice, and that is worth doing for the sale value alone as well as for the cooking.
Notes
The signal on the box is not reliable. It only lights up for goods sitting in the first slot, so milled goods tucked away further along go unannounced and can be forgotten for seasons. Keeping the box empty of everything else avoids that entirely.
Wheat is the crop that makes the mill pay. It matures quickly and the harvest splits neatly: flour for the kitchen, and the rest into a Keg for Beer. Beets are the only route to home-made Sugar, so a mill and a few rows of beets together remove the last ingredient a baker has to buy from a shop.
The mill is also one of the better-looking buildings on offer. Its sails turn, it reads as the centrepiece of a farm rather than as equipment, and farmers routinely place it on a pond edge or at the head of a path for that reason alone.
All Buildings
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
| Name | Image | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Barn | 
|
- |
| Cabin | 
|
100g |
| Coop | 
|
- |
| Farmhouse | 
|
- |
| Fish Pond | 
|
5,000g |
| Gold Clock | 
|
10,000,000g |
| Greenhouse | 
|
35,000g |
| Junimo Hut | 
|
20,000g |
| Mill | 
|
2,500g |
| Pet Bowl | 
|
5,000g |
| Shed | 
|
- |
| Silo | 
|
100g |
| Slime Hutch | 
|
10,000g |
| Stable | 
|
10,000g |
| Well | 
|
1,000g |
| Witch's Hut | 
|
- |