Quick Auto-Mill Help (pic included)

[Xetian]

So I haven't been playing BTW in ages, and decided to start a fresh world. I'm several hours in at this point and have an ugly hemp farm and a decent sized kennel. That said, I just started doing the hellfire grinding crap, and it's time to professionalize my millstone(s).

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This is the design I'm about to use for my manually fed auto mill (I'll run some channels to the hoppers so I can just dump some stacks in a hole at the edge of my millhouse.)

My question is if there is a clearly superior way to set this up where I can power the hopper and avoid that small space the axle takes up where items can fall in but water can't.

[Speltz]

You can have the water collection at the same level as the mill, so that the items will be ejected directly into the water. This way, the floor will meet the bottom corners of the mill, so that there won't be any space for the items to drop into.

[Mrchaim]

As a quick visual look at the above suggestion, here's mine:

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Apologies for the giant images, as a side note)

as a quick handy hint i found - Thanks to BTW's modification of Trapdoors, you can use them as both ornamentation and functional fold-down walls, which is really handy for automated millstones- they'll act like a block stopping water from spreading everywhere, but can be folded down to allow easy access to the millstone to unclog it or the ilk.