Mill-ionaire is a letter shop tycoon built around a simulated vertical knee mill, the kind of manual machine a Bridgeport is. You cut metal letters, fill customer word orders, buy new finishes and more mills, and grow one machine into a factory floor. It is made by Mohave Technology Group.
Play it in a browser at mill-ionaire.vercel.app. Nothing installs. A downloaded copy runs the same way: unzip it and open index.html in any web browser, with or without internet.
How to play. Customers post word orders on the orders tab. Each word has to be made from letters cut in one finish, like brass or blue anodize, and shipping it pays cash. On the mill tab, tap run the order program under the machine. The mill loads a blank in the right finish, cuts whatever letter the orders are missing, and drops it straight into the bins. Tap it again to stop it. Next to it, cut the whole alphabet runs the mill through every letter in order, and call the millwright repairs a wrecked machine. You can also cut by hand with the wheels and sliders, then bag the part and stow it in its bin. A flashing marker shows a new player what to tap next until the first floor mill is running.
The orders tab is the shipping room. Ship an order when every tile has a blue corner. Loose parts in the tray only count once they are stowed, and the stow button puts them all away at once. The empty the bins button asks before it scraps anything.
Words get longer as your shop grows, and longer words pay more for every letter. Once you run several mills the spelling bee sends in long words at a premium, and now and then a collector wants a whole matching set of the alphabet, the numbers or the emoji, which pays double. Number dies and emoji dies in the shop unlock house number orders and emoji orders, and emoji are the best paying parts there are. The engine lathe in the shop costs half the price of your next mill and gets its own lathe tab. It turns round parts from bar stock in any finish: sign standoffs, threaded studs, sign posts, bushings, flanges, lazy susan plates, knobs and fixture pins. Once you own it, customers order batches of turned parts, words mounted on a standoff for every letter, and signs on posts, so the mill and the lathe have to work together. The lathe program turns whatever the orders need straight into the bins, and when nothing is on order it makes the part you picked on the lathe tab to stock, until that shelf is full. Standoffs and studs are open from the start, and every turned part you make counts toward unlocking the next part on the catalog, all the way up to lazy susan plates. To cut by hand, load a bar, start the spindle, feed the cross slide in and run the carriage along the bar, then part it off, and a piece that matches a part on the catalog goes to the tray.
The stamping press, the powder coat booth and the LED wiring bench open orders that need a finishing step. Those orders go down the finishing line on the orders tab after you ship them, each station working its own queue, and the customer pays more when they come off.
Spend your cash in the shop. New finishes and textures pay more per letter but are harder metal, so they cut slower. Floor mills run on their own on the floor tab, and your own mill sits in the first bay so you can see how much room is left. Tap a floor mill to set its letter and finish, switch it between auto and manual, or stop it on its own. When a light turns amber the mill needs a hand, so tap it to send an operator. The foreman sends operators without being told. A rush shift puts a timed quota on the board for a cash bonus.
Once you own a floor mill, your operators draw wages every minute, and every mill draws power while it cuts. The shop shows what the business costs to run each minute. If the cash runs dry the power gets cut and the crew goes home until you ship an order. The chip conveyor, better coolant, better cutters and better software make every mill run harder for the same bills, and the high speed head makes your own mill cut faster.
The press brake in the shop takes a floor bay and gets its own brake tab. It folds sheet into shape one bend at a time: angle brackets and mounting brackets first, then U channel, hat channel and sign box frames, and finally the giant chip, taco, donut and the muffler man. The brake program forms whatever the orders need or the part you picked. By hand, you hold press and let go when the bend reaches its angle, and holding too long overbends it into scrap. With the brake running, customers order batches of formed parts and big storefront signs for donut shops, taco stands, grocery stores and muffler shops. A big sign needs its letters, a box frame, brackets, standoffs from the lathe and sometimes a giant shape on top, and it pays the most of anything in the game.
The five axis CNC is the expensive shortcut to a simpler shop. A CNC takes a floor bay and cuts letters, numbers, emoji and turned parts in one machine, faster than a knee mill, with no chip stops, half the tool wear and a smaller power bill, on stock that costs a little more per part. The shop can also make your own mill a five axis CNC, which still runs free when the cash is gone and turns parts on the order program, and can swap the lathe for a CNC in the same bay, so a rich shop can fill its floor with nothing but CNCs.
Raw stock costs money. Every mill blank and every lathe bar is bought in the finish being cut, harder finishes cost more, and the shop lists each finish's blank and bar price. When the cash runs out, your own mill keeps running on scrap rack stock and free power in any finish, so a shop left running over lunch keeps cutting and shipping its way back while the floor waits for the bills to be paid.
The market cools off the longer you run the shop, so every letter pays a little less as the hours go by. Early money is the easiest money you will ever make.
The shop makes sound. Each running mill hums, chatters while it cuts, and squeals once in a while, and a full floor sounds like a whole shop. The blue note button turns sound on and off, and the menu has the shop volume. The menu also holds how to play and starting the whole business over, which asks before it throws anything away. The blue i button opens the same how to play and information panel.
The machine. X traverses the table left and right, Y moves the saddle in and out, and Z raises and lowers the whole knee so the work comes up to the cutter. A tilts the head over for angled work. The big view is a cutaway taken straight through the part at whatever Y the saddle is sitting at, and the stock panel shows the same part from above.
What is real and what is rough. The part is solid material, so you can machine one face, unclamp it, turn it over and machine another. Cut past the bottom of the work and you eat the table, and cut right through and you part the leadscrew until the millwright rebuilds it. The feed rate a cutter will take depends on spindle speed and on how hard the finish is. Prices, wages and the market are a game economy, not real shop rates.
How it is built. The whole game is mill-ionaire-v2.html, a single file with canvas drawing, plain JavaScript and sound made in the browser, with no downloads and no server. Progress saves in the browser on the device that plays it. The vercel.json file serves the game at the site root. Every push to GitHub runs mill-ionaire-v2-test.js, which plays the whole game in a headless browser, and when every check passes it builds the itch zip and posts it on the itch-latest release.
The thinking behind it. Every item is a letter, every machine turns blanks into letters, every finish changes what a letter is worth, and every order asks for a set of them. Grow the shop the way a real one grows, one more machine at a time.
