Survival Guide 3 – Milling

Objectives

Milling grain is a decisive activity in human settlements. Efficient tools and grain storage bring an appreciated food security. People have to manage their food production: They have to pay attention about soil fertility, cultivate the grain, transform it into flour and finally bake bread. We wanted to include all those details in Stormland.

In-game application

Grain transformation

Some activities generate co-products. For example we harvest spelt for its grain but also obtain straw in the process. In the game you will have to manage those co-products and find a way to use them in order to avoid having an enormous garbage pile in the middle of your welcoming island!

Manual tools

How to mechanize this activity?

Water power is clearly an easy way to produce energy for such an activity. Historically, the possibility of using wind power was unknown in western Europe before the crusades, and it has been really difficult for people to believe in this mechanics at the beginning.

This is very similar to the sawmill we described in a previous post. We can identify three mechanical groups.

1. Driving part

A waterwheel receives a water flow on its paddles and transmits the power in a rotating movement.

2. Movement transformation

Here we need to modify the horizontal rotation into a vertical one. Wooden gears do the job perfectly.

3. Operative part

This type of millstone needs a vertical rotation because it uses gravity for driving grain between the rotating stone and the inert one. The grain makes 40 turns from the top to the end of the cone (you can see the details on the right of the first image of this post).

By the way all the black-and-white drawings we use in our survival guides are made by Francesco Corni. We’d like to deeply thank him as well as Ink Line Edizioni to allow us to use those precious drawings in order to show didactic content on our blog.

Team practical experiences

Nothing better than experimenting by yourself. We spent 20 hours to make this model, which helped us to create data for the game like the amount of time and materials required for crafting the different parts of the mechanism. It also helped for drawing the animations.

Perhaps you’ll have the opportunity to try this model in a future exhibition of the game! (spoiler: it doesn’t make flour)

Sources

Inspiring books:

Drawings used in accord with Francesco CORNI and Ink Line Edizioni

Mulini in Italia (Francesco CORNI)

L’Encyclopédie (DIDEROT and D’ALEMBERT)

Visits:

Windmill of Mont Furon (Lubéron, France)

Papermill of Fontaines de Vaucluse (France)