Duck Mines

Where it is

Duck Mines is a small village a short walk from Riverside, the same one in every world. Find it once and it joins your map and your fast-travel list, just like a town.

What's there

• The mine (Mina dos Patos): a lantern-lit tunnel into the hillside, ending in a chamber of blue crystals. Duck miners walk in with pickaxes and come back out with ore. Anyone may mine its veins: copper, iron, and the region's own honest minerals, Phosphate Rock and Blue Quartz.
• Corn fields and the paiol: rows of corn anyone may harvest, beside a raised wooden barn.
• The curral and the queijaria: a fenced pen of cows, and the cheese hut beside it.
• The kitchen: a country kitchen built around a fogão a lenha (wood stove).
• The mill: a monjolo, grinding corn into fubá.
• The venda: the village shop.
• The lagoa: a small lagoon with wild ducks, buriti palms and flowering ipê trees — the very reason the village has its name (see below).

The ducks

Duck Mines is run by ducks, not gators: miners, farmers and a milker walk their rounds all day between the mine, the fields and the curral, and a handful of named villagers keep the place running:

• Olegário, the mine foreman, teaches mining and buys ore.
• Secundino tends the corn fields.
• Hélio keeps the venda.
• Marialda cooks at the kitchen.
• Abadia makes cheese at the queijaria.
• Moacir runs the mill.
• Aguinaldo makes pamonha and tells stories down at the lagoa dock.

They speak with a little regional flavour — "Uai!" and "Trem bão, sô!" turn up now and then, always with their meaning close by, so nobody's left guessing.

Milking and the cheese

Visit the curral once a game day and you can milk a cow for Cow Milk (Leite). Bring it to the queijaria and press it into Queijo Minas — a wedge of tangy white farmhouse cheese, the same way real Minas Gerais farms have made it for generations. Cook the milk down slowly instead, with a little sweetness, and you get Doce de Leite — nothing from a full curral goes to waste.

The mill

The monjolo turns corn into Fubá (cornmeal), the base of several dishes below. Polvilho (cassava starch) isn't grown here — buy it at the venda instead.

The corn kitchen

The wood stove cooks almost everything below (the campfire handles the simplest one). Every dish uses what the village itself grows, mills or milks:

Café Coado carries a little cafezinho buff — faster stamina regen for a few minutes, the way a good cup of coffee should feel. A few dishes are worth cooking just for their boosts; the rest are simply good eating.

Once you've found Duck Mines, you already know what the fogão, the monjolo and the queijaria need: build your own back home and cook these anywhere.

Selling and buying

Hélio's venda stocks the local goods — Polvilho, Coffee Beans, Cow Milk (Leite), Queijo Minas, Doce de Leite and a few ready-made dishes — and buys your corn. Down at the mine, Olegário pays a fair price for Phosphate Rock and Blue Quartz, though he has nothing of his own to sell.

Why "Duck Mines"?

Ask Aguinaldo at the lagoa and he'll tell you: the village takes its name from the wild ducks that once gathered on the lagoon here, long before anyone thought to look for minerals nearby. "Duck Mines" is simply the English of Patos de Minas — patos, ducks; minas, mines — a real place in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

A small plaque by the village sign reads:

It's a quiet nod to the people who made this game: their hometown, tucked into a corner of the valley for anyone who wanders far enough to find it.