MILLWRIGHT

Raise three windmills. A mill stays where you raise it.

A farming parish needs its grain milled. Every farm carts its sacks to whichever mill is nearest, walking round the river, the drystone walls and the ponds, and a bigger farm sends more carts. You are the millwright. Walk the parish, raise three mills one at a time, and make the hauling as short as it can be.

Hold a direction and the millwright walks. The number at the top of the screen, HAUL, is the parish's total carting if a mill stood right where you are, with the mills you have already raised. It changes with every step. It is honest, but it only knows the mills already up, so where it is lowest for your first mill is rarely where your first mill should go.

Every parish has a proved least hauling

For every parish the game tries every possible set of three places and works out the least hauling any three mills could give. That is the PAR on screen. Get within 1% of it for GOLD, within 4% for SILVER, within 8% for BRONZE. Anything more is LONG ROADS, and the next parish waits until you do better.

Pass a parish and X shows where the best three mills stand, with every farm's cart track drawn to them and your own mills as dotted outlines. Miss it and you get a clue instead: which farms share a mill in the best answer, but not where the mills go. Learning to see where they stand before you raise the first one is most of the game.

Play it in your browser first

The free edition on this page is ten parishes. The $5.99 Windows download is forty, with more farms and more carts on the road as it goes, a ledger of every parish you have milled, and an ending.

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Controls. Arrows or WASD: hold to walk. Mouse or touch: hold a finger where you want to go and he walks there; tap the millwright to raise a mill. Z raises (it asks first, Z again to raise, X to change your mind), X for back and the best mills (or a clue), P to pause, M to mute. On the parish screen, Up opens the ledger and Down shows the rules.

Paid, from the same studio: ROOTWORK ($5.99), grow a seed's roots down to every pool of water, sharing every path you can · NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99), clear every street of a snowbound village before dawn, doubling back as little as you can · WARDLOCK ($7.99), forty-eight generated warded locks for the Game Boy, each with a proof of its shortest solution · everything else at csaf.itch.io

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every parish is generated by the game's own code, and the best three mills for each parish are computed by that same code. The browser edition's source is unminified.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text were made with generative AI assistance, and the cover illustration was generated with an image model. The music and sound effects are procedural synthesis from note data, not the output of a generative audio model.