Lilly's Windmill
Lilly's Windmill is a landmark in The Outdoors biome of Outbound, a large hilltop windmill with a locked paint room, a tulip greenhouse, a mechanical ladder puzzle, and a balcony overlook.
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Lilly's Windmill is one of the signature landmarks found in The Outdoors biome of Outbound. It sits on a hill overlooking wheat fields and crop plots, and it is the only place in the game where players can gather flower petals for use in the crafting system. The windmill itself is a tall, Dutch-style tower mill, but its blades sit motionless when you first arrive, hinting at a puzzle waiting to be solved inside.
The windmill stands on top of a hill in the plains section of The Outdoors, one of the core biomes featured in the demo. The hillside can be spotted from a long distance because the windmill towers over the surrounding landscape, which makes it a natural navigation point during early exploration.
The base of the hill is one of the most agriculturally rich spots on the map. Wheat fields sprawl across the slopes below the windmill and are the main source of grain in the region, and a carrot plot grows nearby as well. Because of the density of harvestable plants, the hill doubles as a go-to stop for anyone stocking up on resources.
From the outside, the windmill is a classic tower mill: a tall stone and timber shaft topped with a cap and long wooden sails. The blades do not turn when the player first visits, a detail that hints at the puzzle waiting inside.
The windmill arrives broken. Its sails sit still, the ground-floor door is locked, and the upper terminal room is sealed. Restoring it is a short multi-step puzzle that pays off with a crafting reward, and completing the repair unlocks an achievement.
Head up to the interior walkway and find the control panel with two levers. The levers rotate the floor layout on the level above, shifting the ladders and objects sitting on it.
Pull the left lever twice. This swings the upper floor around so that a stack of barrels topped with a plank lines up against the wall where a set of shelves had been sitting. Moving the shelves out of the way exposes a switch that was hidden behind them the whole time.
Climb onto the barrels, walk up the plank, and flip the switch. A second ladder drops down from the floor above, opening the route to the top of the tower.
Before you climb, make sure you are carrying 20 Scrap Metal. At the top you will find a brake lever that refuses to move and prompts you to check the cogwheels.
Turn to look directly behind the brake lever to find the broken cogwheel. Interact with it and spend the 20 Scrap Metal to repair it.
Go back to the brake lever and pull it. The sails begin turning and power is restored to the windmill, unlocking the ground-floor door (a green light appears above it).
With power restored, head inside the now-open ground-floor room. Grab the password data bank from the shelf, then use the terminal, which hands you the Mortar and Pestle blueprint. The Mortar and Pestle is what grinds tulip petals into paint, so fixing the windmill is the step that turns this hill's tulips into a usable supply for recoloring your camper van at a paint station. If you intend to drive up the hill rather than approach on foot, note that the road up is a steep slope, so upgrade the van's motor first or it will not make the climb.
The main interior feature is a large mechanism that moves a ladder around the inside wall of the windmill. Instead of a fixed staircase, the ladder slides along the curved interior, letting players reach different heights and sections of the tower by operating the mechanism. This moving ladder is the heart of the windmill's internal puzzle: working out how to position it correctly is how you access the upper sections, the locked door, and eventually the balcony.
At the top of the windmill, a door opens onto a small outdoor balcony wrapped around the cap of the tower. From up there, you can look out in every direction across the vast world of Outbound. Because the windmill already sits on a hill, the balcony is one of the highest vantage points in The Outdoors and a great spot to scan the surrounding plains for other points of interest, grazing wildlife, weather fronts, and distant landmarks.
Players often use the balcony as an informal scouting platform before heading off to visit locations like the Fire Lookout, the Tree Hut, or Sunbeam Acres Farm.
Inside the windmill, one of the rooms is locked by default and cannot be opened by simply walking up to the door. Figuring out how to get in is part of the reason to visit: the reward for cracking the puzzle is access to Lilly's personal paint manufacturing secrets. The room essentially is a small workshop where she produced paint, and it is where players learn the recipe that connects petals, the mortar and pestle, and the paint station together.
The puzzle tied to the locked room also rewards petals, giving you a one-off stash in addition to whatever you can harvest outside. That makes Lilly's Windmill doubly important for anyone focused on van customization: it teaches you how paint is made, hands you a starter supply, and then sets up the greenhouse and tulip hill as a renewable source of the main ingredient for the rest of the game. Paint made from those petals is applied at a dedicated paint station as part of the building system workflow.
Tucked behind the main windmill building is Lilly's greenhouse. It is the place where she grew the flowers used to produce her paints, and it remains a working petal source for visiting players. The flowers tied to the greenhouse and the surrounding hillside are tulips, and they are the only source of flower petals in the entire game. No other landmark in Outbound grows them, which makes this hill uniquely important.
Petals count as an uncommon crafting resource. You can collect them by harvesting tulips growing on the hill around the windmill, and you will also pick some up as part of the interior puzzle reward. Once you have enough, five petals can be processed in a mortar and pestle to make a single unit of paint, which then becomes usable at a paint station for recoloring your camper van. Because tulips regrow, the windmill hill functions like a small renewable farming area for anyone who wants to keep tweaking their paint job.
Lilly is the former occupant of the windmill and the person it is named after. The available wiki information describes her only through her work: she ran a paint manufacturing operation out of the locked room and cultivated the tulips in the attached greenhouse to produce her petals. Outbound tends to tell stories through environments and objects rather than through long dialogue scenes, and Lilly's Windmill is a clear example of that approach. You never see Lilly herself during exploration of the landmark, and the current wiki coverage does not confirm whether she appears elsewhere in the game as a live character or is strictly a lore figure.
The landmark stacks several different kinds of rewards into a single location. Some are tied to solving the ladder and locked-room puzzle, while others simply come from harvesting the environment around the hill.
Reward | Source |
|---|---|
Flower Petals | Harvested from tulips on the hill, and awarded from solving the interior puzzle. |
Paint Recipe Access | Unlocked by entering Lilly's locked paint workshop inside the windmill. |
Grain and Wheat | Harvested from the wheat fields spreading across the base of the windmill hill. |
Carrots | Picked from the nearby carrot plot at the foot of the hill. |
Scenic Overlook | The rooftop balcony at the top of the mechanical ladder, reached by solving the mill's puzzle. |
Lilly's Windmill is the most direct link between the open world and the cosmetic side of the building system. Outbound encourages players to personalize their camper van with paint, decorations, and furniture as a core part of the long-term gameplay loop. Paint is the item that actually changes your vehicle's color when applied at a paint station, and every unit of paint in the game traces back through the same ingredient chain: tulip petals from this hill, processed in a mortar and pestle, finished at the paint station.
Lilly's Windmill is accessible in the public Outbound demo on Steam, alongside other Outdoors biome landmarks such as the Woods Cabin and the Mountain Outpost. For many players it is one of the more memorable stops in the demo: it packs a vertical puzzle, a unique crafting material, a scenic viewpoint, and a small environmental story into a single location. The landmark has also been refined across multiple patch notes, with dedicated sound effects added for the windmill levers and ladder mechanism so that the puzzle reads more clearly.
Tip | Details |
|---|---|
Harvest tulips first | The hill tulips are the only source of petals in the game, so they are the top priority before exploring the tower. |
Do the puzzle on your first visit | The locked room gives a one-off petal reward and teaches the paint recipe, so it is worth solving before you leave. |
Use the balcony to scout | The rooftop offers one of the clearest views in The Outdoors; mark distant landmarks before climbing down. |
Arrive with free inventory space | Between tulips, wheat, carrots, and the puzzle reward, you can fill a lot of slots in one visit. |
For newer players, it is also worth reading the beginners guide before tackling the windmill puzzle, since it covers the basics of lever interactions and resource collection that come into play here. The tips and tricks page also covers efficient petal farming, which pairs naturally with repeat visits to this landmark.
Lilly's Windmill is part of a broader cluster of named landmarks that populate the plains and forests of The Outdoors. Players who enjoy the exploration-and-puzzle structure of the windmill will usually want to visit the other Outdoors locations back to back and compare their rewards and atmospheres.
Landmark | Why Visit |
|---|---|
Another elevated vantage point in The Outdoors, useful for mapping routes between biomes. | |
A small forested landmark with its own puzzle and reward loop, complementing the windmill visit. | |
The other major agricultural landmark in The Outdoors, pairing naturally with the windmill's wheat and carrot plots. | |
A forest landmark with its own environmental story, a good contrast to the open-plains feel of the windmill hill. | |
A higher-elevation landmark accessed later in exploration, offering a different style of overlook from the windmill balcony. |
For context on how this landmark fits into the wider game, see the map and regions overview and the sustainability theme article, which explains how small hand-crafted production sites like Lilly's paint workshop reinforce the game's broader off-grid, self-sufficient tone.