Moonlight Peaks Farm Helpers: Every Machine, Recipe & What It Makes

In Moonlight Peaks, your machines have personality. The Refiner is a pink, mouthy little gremlin that eats logs whole and spits out planks; the Keg wears tiny bat wings on its hoops. These are your Farm Helpers — placeable machines that turn raw crops, wood, stone and ore into useful materials, food and income. This page now combines the early captured recipes with the full-release values documented after launch.

Short version: you unlock Farm Helpers as blueprints, craft them from the build menu, plop them anywhere on your plot, and feed them. Processing is where the money is — see our money guide for why raw goods are almost always the wrong thing to sell.

Core machines and build recipes

These recipes were first captured in the demo and have remained in the community’s launch-build tables. We retain that provenance rather than presenting an uncited screenshot as a fresh official confirmation.

Machine	What it does	Recipe	Size
Refiner	Refines raw resources — wood into planks, stone into refined stone	20 Wood, 20 Stone	4×3
Furnace	Smelts ore into metal bars (copper, iron) and coal	15 Copper Ore, 5 Refined Stone	2×2
Workbench	General crafting station	30 Wood	4×2
Cooking Station	Outdoor cooking — see cooking & recipes	5 Refined Stone, 5 Planks	2×2
Keg	Turns produce into juice, beer and wine	20 Wood (Workbench)	small
Herb Garden	Dedicated plot — the only place herbs grow	Early blueprint (a gift from your mom)	large
Scarecrow	Appears in the build menu alongside the machines	Not yet captured	—

A Loom — for weaving ethereal threads into cloth — also turns up in demo mail as a buildable, so expect it early in the full game too.

The build costs above held up at launch. Blueprints for the Furnace, Keg and Refiner come from the Workbench; the Mill is bought from the Howling Hammer carpentry shop instead.

What each machine makes (confirmed recipes)

Now the game is out, we can list the exact outputs for the three core processors — the machines you’ll live in. The patterns are clean: juice takes 3 fruit, wine takes 4 grapes, and every metal bar needs 1 Charcoal.

Keg — drinks. Feed it fruit, wheat or grapes:

Output	Recipe
Any fruit Juice (Blackberry, Blueberry, Cranberry, Lemon, Melon, Raspberry, Strawberry, Blood Grape, Blood Orange, White Grape)	3 of that fruit
Beer	3 Wily Wheat
Red Wine	4 Blood Grapes
White Wine	4 White Grapes

Furnace — smelting. Note that every bar also eats a Charcoal, which the Furnace makes from plain wood:

Output	Recipe
Charcoal	1 Wood
Copper Bar	4 Copper Ore + 1 Charcoal
Iron Bar	4 Iron Ore + 1 Charcoal
Gold Bar	4 Gold Ore + 1 Charcoal

Refiner — raw materials and animal feed:

Output	Recipe	Yields
Planks	3 Wood	1
Soft Planks	3 Light Wood	1
Hardwood Planks	1 Heart Stone	1
Refined Stone	6 Stone	1
Stone	1 Heart Stone	20
Fodder	1 Fiber	2
Deluxe Fodder	50 Fodder + 1 Mana Essence	—

Two things worth flagging: the Refiner cracks a single Heart Stone into 20 Stone, so one lucky mining drop feeds a lot of building; and Deluxe Fodder ties your spellcasting economy to your livestock, since it needs Mana Essence.

The processing chain (why the Refiner comes first)

Farm Helpers feed each other, and the order matters:

1. Refiner first. Wood and stone are everywhere; the Refiner turns them into planks and refined stone — and nearly everything else is built from those. Even the Furnace needs refined stone.
2. Furnace second. Copper ore from the rocks around your plot becomes copper bars (later, iron bars) — the ingredient behind lamps, wheelbarrows and sturdier gear.
3. Then the fun ones. Kegs, the Cooking Station and the Herb Garden turn your crops into things people actually pay for.

You’ll see the chain right in the crafting UI: furniture recipes are tagged “Made at Refiner” or “Made at Furnace”, so the game tells you exactly which machine gates which item. Decorating your house runs through these machines too — half the catalog in our decorating guide starts life as a log in the Refiner’s mouth.

Kegs: the wine economy

The Keg deserves its own paragraph because the town practically runs on it. Orlock’s first quest is literally a wine order, and demo players agree: “you will need a lot of kegs.” Produce goes in; juice, beer and wine come out, worth far more than the raw harvest. Kegs are compact and place anywhere — one player set theirs directly beside the bed, which is either efficiency or a lifestyle statement.

Grapes → keg → Red Wine is still an early money loop, but launch tables now give us a few concrete alternatives. These are community-reported output values; slash-separated figures are reproduced exactly because wiki.gg has not labelled the tiers.

Keg output	Input	Energy	Reported sell value
Beer	3 Wily Wheat	1 / 2	420 / 520
Blood Grape Juice	3 Blood Grapes	40 / 50	100 / 120
White Grape Juice	3 White Grapes	3 / 5	120 / 180
Melon Juice	3 Melon	3 / 4	300 / 380
Moon Juice	3 Moonfruit	50	320

That makes the Keg more than a wine-only machine: Blood Grape Juice and Moon Juice are credible emergency food while you are still building a full cooking pantry. Keep enough grapes for Orlock and recipes before feeding every last one to the machine.

Herb Garden: herbs play by different rules

Herbs cannot be planted on normal farmland. They need the dedicated Herb Garden — a chunky plot that arrives early as a blueprint from your mom — and they feed straight into potion brewing. Datamined machines suggest the herb pipeline goes deeper: a Herb Drying Rack to dry them and a Mortar to grind dried herbs into spices for cooking.

Bee House: flowers become passive Honey

The Bee House is a flower-powered producer rather than an ordinary input machine. Luna sends its blueprint by mail, and the current recipe is 10 Hardwood Planks + 20 Fiber. Place it where flowers can remain inside its range: Honey output depends on the number of nearby flowers and caps at 16 Honey per night.

Honey sells for 20 coins before any other use is considered, so a fully supplied Bee House can produce up to 320 coins overnight. That is useful background income, but ripping up loved-gift flowers or museum stock to chase the cap is poor planning. Build around flowers you intended to keep growing.

Firefly Sanctuary and Pollinator: exact setup

Both blueprints unlock at 10% Museum completion, which makes early donations a direct farm upgrade rather than a cosmetic checklist. They work as a pair but have different jobs:

Helper	Recipe	Range / capacity	What it does
Firefly Sanctuary	10 Planks, 5 Refined Stone, 5 Rose Quartz	Output caps at 23 Firedrops	Produces Firedrops overnight from nearby crops; no caught Firefly is required
Firefly Pollinator	5 Wood, 5 Iron Bars, 5 Rose Quartz	9×9 crop grid; stores up to 35 Firedrops	Consumes 5 Firedrops per night to improve crop quality

The Sanctuary activates as soon as it is placed. Its output scales with nearby crops and reaches 23 Firedrops overnight at the documented maximum. Each Firedrop has a base sell value of 20 coins, but selling every drop defeats the reason to build the Pollinator.

The Pollinator burns 5 Firedrops per night. Its 35-drop capacity therefore holds exactly seven nights of fuel. A clean routine is to collect the Sanctuary output, refill the Pollinator to 35, and sell or store only the surplus. Place the Pollinator first so its 9×9 square covers the crops whose quality matters most; use the Sanctuary’s visible crop relationship to plan around it.

The full 16-machine roster

The launch game confirms 16 Farm Helpers in total. Beyond the core processors and the two firefly structures above, these are the remaining production tools:

Machine	What the files say it does
Herb Drying Rack	Hang herbs and plants to dry
Mortar	Grinds dried herbs and foods into spices
Bee House	Produces Honey overnight based on nearby flowers; maximum 16
Loom	Weaves materials from ethereal threads
Cheese Press	Cheese from milk — pairs with your Draculambs & livestock
Mana Extractor	Extracts essence from magical crops — fuel for your spellcasting
Mill	Grinds resources into powders (think flour)
Jam Maker	Pots of jam from fruit
Firefly Sanctuary	Produces up to 23 Firedrops overnight from nearby crops
Firefly Pollinator	Improves crop quality in a 9×9 grid while consuming 5 Firedrops nightly
Chocolatier	Chocolates
Seed Sequencer	Produces seeds — likely from crops, Stardew-seed-maker style

The standouts are the Firefly Pollinator, because its 9×9 coverage should determine the valuable center of a crop layout, and the Mana Extractor, because it connects magical crops to the spell economy.

Placement is forgiving

Nothing we’ve seen suggests you can brick your layout. In the demo you rotate machines freely (Q/E on PC), pick them up again, and re-place them at will — so plant your Refiner wherever and re-plan later when the Firefly Pollinator makes 9×9 grids the law of the land. More plot-planning in the beginner tips.

What still needs cautious reading

Some recipe tables remain incomplete, and not every helper reports its processing time consistently. Use the exact values above where the launch-build table is clear, but do not assume every machine has upgrade tiers or that two visually similar processors share a timer. Patch changes can also affect performance and output behavior, so include a platform and version when reporting a result that differs from the documented setup.

New to the game? Start with everything we know, then the first-week walkthrough — your Refiner is hungry by day two.