Unmilled Rice

Unmilled Rice is a vegetable crop grown from Rice Shoots and harvested with a Scythe. It matures in 8 days on most farm tiles, or in 6 days when planted on irrigated tiles near a water source. When ready, it can be processed into Rice in a Mill: placing one Unmilled Rice into the Mill produces one Rice, which appears the following morning in the box on the right side of the machine.

Rice Shoots planted within about 3 tiles of water in any direction are considered irrigated, so they grow faster even if the watered area is not continuous. The crop has a two-stage growth difference based on irrigation, with non-irrigated Rice Shoots taking 1 day, 2 days, 2 days, and 3 days across their stages, while irrigated ones take 1 day, 1 day, 1 day, and 3 days. This makes placement near ponds, rivers, and other water sources especially useful if you want faster harvests.

When harvested, each Rice Shoot yields a variable amount of Unmilled Rice. At Farming level 0, there is a 50/50 chance to get either 1 or 2, plus an additional 10% chance of extra rice, for an average of 1.61. At Farming level 10 or higher, the 50/50 result becomes 1 or 3, with the same extra-rice chance, raising the average to 2.11. If the crop is grown from Rice Shoots purchased from Stone, it is only profitable to sell gold quality Unmilled Rice directly; with the Tiller profession, silver quality becomes profitable as well. In all cases, turning it into Rice with a Mill is more profitable than selling the crop raw.

Unmilled Rice also has a few other uses:

• It can be used in the Sewing Machine spool to create the dyeable Shirt And Belt.
• It can be used as orange dye at the dye pots in Emily's and Haley's house at 2 Willow Lane.
• It may be requested in Spring on the Help Wanted board outside Stone's General Store for a reward and 150 Friendship points.

A small planting detail matters after harvest: if you harvest Unmilled Rice from an irrigated tile, that tile keeps its irrigation water for the rest of the day. Anything planted there on the same day does not need to be watered. This makes it convenient for replanting after harvest, especially in rice paddies and other water-adjacent fields.