Cptldsilver
Planter
The mill is a criminally underutilized farm building that can do some great things in the right situation. The mill has 3 products, sugar, milled rice, and flour, from 3 separate crops, unmilled rice, beets, and wheat. Each product adds value to the crop (except for gold quality beets) and most importantly can process ALL crops of one type overnight. This means that as long as you are willing to wait one night and click one time you can create extra value from crops without having to spend the time clicking and waiting on kegs/preserves jars. Here's a quick overview of the crops and products from the mill.
- Beets/Sugar (Fall Crop)
- Seed Price: 20 gold
- Regular Quality Sell Price: 100 gold with no perk, 110 gold with tiller profession.
- Sell Price of Sugar: 150 gold for 3 sugar, which is what one beet will produce. Note that this is a bad deal if you have gold quality beets with the tiller profession (loss of 15 gold per beet).
- Growth Time with no bonuses: 6 days
- Growth Time with max bonuses (Agriculturalist and Deluxe Speed Gro): 3 days
- Analysis: Growing beets with max speed bonuses and with a mill creates a profit per tile of 44.6 Compare this to fall's standard bearer, the pumpkin. The pumpkin, with max speed bonuses creates a profit of 37.1 per day.
- Unmilled Rice/Rice (Spring Crop)
- Seed Price: 40 gold
- Regular Quality Sell Price: 30 gold no perk, 33 with perk.
- Sell Price of Rice: 100 gold. It is always profitable to mill rice assuming you have a mill.
- Growth Time with no bonuses: 8 days.
- Growth Time with max bonuses (Agriculturalist, Deluxe Speed Gro, and Irrigated): 5 days
- Analysis: Rice is not the most profitable crop per day in spring, even under the most favorable conditions. However, it does allow you to skip sprinklers since it can be auto watered if within 3 tiles of a water source. This can be very valuable in the first spring especially when you probably don't have any sprinklers. It will take 472 harvests of unmilled rice to achieve level 6 farming. I think that if you used every single tile in a standard farm that was within 3 tiles of the two ponds you could do this in 2 harvests. This would allow you to completely forgo using your watering can (quality sprinklers unlocked at level 6). Building an early mill and abusing the special feature of rice shoots could be an interesting path to take in a min max run.
- Wheat/Flour (Summer/Fall Crop)
- Seed Price: 10 gold.
- Regular Quality Sell Price: 25 gold no perk, 27 gold with perk.
- Sell Price of Flour: 50 gold. It always profitable to mill wheat assuming you have a mill.
- Sell Price of Bread: 60 gold. If you go one step further and build a kitchen you an also create bread with one click to add an additional 10 gold of profit to your flour.
- Growth Time with no bonuses: 4 days.
- Growth Time with max bonuses (Agriculturalist, Deluxe Speed Gro): 2 days.
- Analysis: While not the most profitable crop, wheat is incredibly versatile and is great as a filler crop when you don't have time or money to grow anything else. In a typical min max run you end up with a lot of wheat and you don't always have the keg space to turn it all into beer. Adding a mill and kitchen ensures that you can get maximal immediate profit from this versatile crop.
