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Millside is an old mill town that the industry abandoned and the Gritlands absorbed. It sits between the Quarry and Grit City, and it’s where your experience graduates from survival basics into something with more moving parts. Two things change when you arrive here: you get your first real home — walls, a wardrobe, a stash you don’t have to fold up — and you meet your first genuine combat. Millside doesn’t punish you too hard for getting it wrong, but it stops treating you like a beginner. Use that breathing room to get sharp before you head any further.

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What’s new here

Rented Apartments

Millside’s block of rented flats is your first proper address. A real wardrobe, a larger stash, and a place that feels like home — you pay rent to the landlord’s office to keep it, and you can pay in materials if CASH is tight.

The Millworks Anvil

The anvil in the Millworks yard takes the copper and iron you’ve mined in the Quarry and turns them into tool upgrades. Faster gathering, better yields, longer durability — this is why the Quarry-Millside loop is worth building into your routine.

Combat Training

A training yard behind the Millworks has dummies you can work on before any real stakes are involved. When you’re ready for live opponents, the Backlot is around the corner — low-stakes sparring with the locals that will get you ready for the Drains.

First Customization

Second Wind, the local thrift store, gives you your first wardrobe options beyond whatever you grabbed from the cellar. Clips, the barber on the main strip, will sort out however you arrived looking. It’s early-game style, but it counts.

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The Backlot

Cut through the alley beside the Millworks and you’ll find the Backlot — a scrubby yard where the local toughs hang around, spar, and size up newcomers. Challenge them and they’ll fight you. Go down and you wake up a short walk away, missing a small amount of carried CASH. Nobody takes your gear, nobody mocks you, and nobody stops you coming back. The Backlot is the game’s training mode for live combat, and spending time here before you try the Shallow Drains is one of the best decisions you can make. Learn your combos, learn your stamina limits, and learn when to back off — all in a setting where losing costs almost nothing.

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The Shallow Drains

Millside sits on top of the Shallow Drains, the game’s first underground zone. The entrance is in the old maintenance yard off the southern end of the main strip. Going down is optional, but it’s the best source of copper and scrap in the early game, and it’s where the game begins introducing you to real underground risk. Get comfortable in the Backlot first, then make the descent when you’re ready. Read up on the Shallow Drains before you go down →

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Where to shop and eat

The thrift store on the main strip stocks cheap clothes with real character — surplus workwear, scavenged outfits, and the kind of gear that makes you look like you belong in Millside. Prices are low and the stock rotates, so check in regularly when you’re building out an early wardrobe.
Millside’s barbershop offers a limited but solid range of cuts and styles. It’s not the full treatment you’ll get in Grit City later, but it gets you out of whatever your character defaulted to at the start and into something that feels more like you.
Pearl runs the Grindstone and she makes better food than anywhere else in the suburbs. The meals are filling, the price is right, and Pearl tends to know what’s going on around Millside before anyone else does. Eat here, chat, and listen — the gossip is worth something.
This is where you sign your lease, check your rent balance, and arrange payment. The landlord accepts CASH or a set quantity of materials in lieu — useful in the early weeks when your CASH flow is inconsistent. Don’t let rent lapse or you’ll find your stash locked behind the door.
Millside has no Fence node of its own — you can’t sell raw gathered goods here the way you could at Sal’s back at the lake. To cash out your haul, you’ll either head back to Sal or push forward to the Docks once you reach Grit City. That said, you can pay your rent directly in materials at the landlord’s office, which makes Millside self-sustaining if you’re mining regularly and not worried about building a CASH reserve.