Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town Lumber Maker | How to unlock and use
Some people regard maker machines as an industrial intrusion into a rural idyll. But whatever your opinion of them, makers are a key aspect of Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, allowing you to transform raw materials into processed crafting items.
The first maker machine you're likely to encounter is the Lumber Maker. It's used for refining logs into lumber, and is essential for performing the many repairs to your grandfather's broken-down farm that are necessary right from the start of the game.
- How to unlock the Lumber Maker in Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town
- How to craft the Lumber Maker in Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town
- Using the Lumber Maker
- Upgrading the Lumber Maker
How to unlock the Lumber Maker in Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town
In order to unlock the Lumber Maker crafting recipe, you'll need to reach Level 2 of the Logging Skill. Fortunately, this is quite easy to do.
Upon your arrival in Olive Town, Mayor Victor will welcome you with a set of farm tools that includes an axe. The overgrown old farm you've inherited from your character's grandfather has definitely got too many trees growing up around it, so get to chopping as soon as you've finished the introductory cutscenes.
Skill unlocking in this game is very generous in the early stages, so you should reach Level 2 long before you run out of trees.
This will give you access to the crafting recipe for a Lumber Maker, though the game won't actually tell you so at this point.
Instead, at the beginning of Day 3, Mayor Victor will return to your farm with local carpenter Nigel in tow. Nigel dispenses his wisdom, drawing your attention to the Crafting Tab and explaining the Maker system.
How to craft the Lumber Maker in Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town
You'll need 20 logs in order to craft the Lumber Maker. You don't need any tools or workbenches to craft in this game. It's done directly from the Crafting tab in your Notebook.
Once crafted it'll be in your inventory; from there, you need to place it on the ground on your farm. There are a few restrictions, in addition to its 2x2 tile space requirement: it needs to be placed outdoors, on grass, and can't be put down in the fenced-in area immediately surrounding your home.
You can place up to 20 lumber makers on your farm at a time. Since they take a minimum of two in-game hours to process a single piece of lumber, it's definitely worth having multiple makers of the same type, if you can spare the space.
Using the Lumber Maker
Interact with the Lumber Maker and a pop-up menu will appear. This shows all lumber types that can be produced with the logs currently on your person. If you don't have enough logs to produce lumber, the option will be greyed out.
The exchange rate — that is, the number of raw logs you need to feed into the Lumber Maker to produce processed lumber — is around three to five logs for one piece of lumber, depending on variety. It takes five regular logs to make lumber, but only three mirage logs to make mirage lumber, for example.
Upgrading the Lumber Maker
Maker machines in Pioneers of Olive Town aren't upgradeable in the ordinary sense. However, reaching Level 10 in the skill linked to each maker will allow you to craft a new, giant version of that machine.
Keep chopping down trees and eventually you'll hit Level 10 of the Logging Skill. At that point, you'll be able to craft a Giant Lumber Maker — though you'll need a hefty set of resources with which to do so. You'll need:
- 500x logs
- 400x solid logs
- 300x supple logs
- 200x durable logs
- 20x mirage logs
Giant maker machines, as the name suggests, take up more tiles than their regular-sized equivalents (2x3 as opposed to 2x2). You're also limited to a maximum of five giant lumber makers on your farm, whereas you can have 20 regular-sized lumber makers in operation at a time. However, they do produce one-and-a-half times the yield for the same raw material input.