Surprised there isn’t already a topic for this. Comparing wood to clay, the amount of dirt you need to mine to get enough clay for Rayyas Children is… lots. Lots and lots. This is both time consuming and requires the player to deform a lot of terrain. I like to dig clay pits, but it’s just not feasible. Soon you’re having to strip-mine underground to get your clay. Even just building 4 or 5 buildings in a new town seems to require a LOT of digging. The multiplier for bricks in the latest unstable helps a lot, but you’re still chewing through the clay to make all those windows and lamps. So how could this be solved?
I’d like to see “veins” of clay in the soil, just like metals. They could be much larger and taller than metal veins, and perhaps be found more common lower down or near water. Then the player is able to make clay pits and find enough of the stuff without having to create vast underground caverns. I wouldn’t mind seeing a longer mining time for it too, to mirror the short time it takes to chop trees.
Ooh, why not have either termite mounds, or “stone finger” sort of formations in the desert. These could be like a clay style of tree. You’re not deforming the world, and a single entity can deliver many bits of clay! Termite mounds can regenerate over time too! (I’m biased for termite mounds, we have em here in northern Australia)
Of course the other idea is just to up the drop rate for clay, even if it’s simply at a certain depth.
I was just looking through old threads where it seems like clay generation used to be higher. Even using Ascendancy and wanting to decorate with Potter’s goods was too much. Now starting a RC village I’m kind like
I recall that clay used to be easier to come by as well. My hearthings aren’t finding nearly as much clay as they used to. It makes it a real PITA to try to get the Craftmaster’s Skill monument. With Ascendancy, rather than try for a potter now, I jump on the decorative vase trader that comes up every so often.
If the clay drop rate is that low in RC as well, I guess I’ll hold off on going back to playing them for a while.
This may just be because I don’t use clay very much, but (to me at least), I seem to get A LOT more clay out of dirt under water than I do anywhere else. Might be something to look into.
Yeah, clay generation was higher. It was reduced as a balance fix that was said could be changed later.
Literally JUST came to the forum with this same complaint! It’s nuts how I mine out hundreds of dirt blocks and get a handful of clay. It’s not so much that clay ‘drops’ less frequently it’s the logistics required to amass significant amounts to supply your industry.
It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much easier felling trees for wood. They are easy to access without Hearthlings needing extra paths to access from different directions. One tree comes down super fast and drops a bunch of wood. I don’t have to deform huge swaths of the map or dork around with slice view. Eventually I have tree farms as a easy renewable wood source. It takes more Hearthlings to keep up a steady supply of clay than it does wood.
Playing RC is such a chore… a pity because I do love playing them.
The problem is the only renewable building material is wood. While clay and stone are clearly not renewable resources, in reality they are way more abundant than in Stonehearth. I think it should at least be possible to buy a lot of them (and they should be cheap) if one doesn’t want to mine for them to the point where it harms the terrain.
Basically, a running gag of Settlers of Catan players applies here: I literally want to buy ore for wool (or, to be more specific, clay for cloth, so that Weaver is somewhat more useful).
Yeah, I think a layer of clay, especially in the desert biome, would be great. Not sure how easy that is to do, but clay veins should at least be possible.
I think clay specifically should come in LARGE chunk veins a few voxels under the surface, which have a guarantee yield of clay. This is because
a) it’s so important for Rayas Childrens game, it needs to be as reliably harvestable as wood in the temperate maps.
b) if we’re trying to mirror real life, clay pits aren’t huge sprawling works following thin veins like your classical mine, they’re digging plentiful “solid” clay directly out of the ground, so a clay pit shouldn’t be a massive strip mining operation. They should lead to pit style excavations, which would require greater yield per voxel in order to keep the pit sensibly sized. Mining tunnels for conventional ores work well because they’re out of sight. Further justification is time/effort by hearthling. A tree takes seconds to chop then POOF loads of wood. If clay veins delivered clay at 1 clay per every 1 or 2 voxels it’d lead to sensibly sized pits with ample clay for the player. The veins could be somewhat evenly spaced, so that the player had a good chance of having to send his hearthlings away from town a small way to the source.
(and while we’re discussing ores, a pet peeve of mine - copper ore isn’t rock with lovely orange stuff in it, copper ore is GREEN! The whole idea of smelting is you’re starting out with copper bonded to oxygen in an ore, then ripping that oxygen away with high temperature and carbon monoxide to leave the pure metal behind!)
I agree, the problem is I wouldn’t like to damage the terrain so much. I we’re trying to mirror real life, pit excavations are heavily damaging to the environment and I would prefer not to engage my Lings in creating them (ugly holes in the ground pretty much defeat the purpose of building an elaborate palace next to them). Being able to purchase tons of clay cheaply seems an optimal solution for me.
As a chemist-to-be: this is not true. If we wanted to include realistic ores they should yield more than one metal each. The most abundant copper ore is chalcopyrite which also contains iron and is brown, another important copper-iron ore is bornite which ranges from black to brown depending on composition. Another class of copper ores are its sulphides (chalcocite, covellite, digenite) which are all black. A mineral which is indeed green and contains copper is malachite (a pretty one, looks like the surface of Jupiter but deep green), which is copper carbonate hydroxide, but it is not used in metallurgy because copper yield from smelting it is relatively low so it makes more sense to use it as a pigment. Among all options copper ore representing native copper seems a good choice, it is relatively rare but very easy to distinguish (a problem here is it is often found together with native silver). It is also worth noting that native copper was the first source of copper ever smelted and smelting oxidised copper ores is a relatively new process because it involves much more modern chemistry knowledge. While I often have objections to some development decisions I think the current solution is actually the best one possible.
In this instance, I have to ask how strip mining an area to follow a vein is better then? Yes, a pit is ugly, but at least it’s contained. On top of that, it’d give you an area to create an industrial area, making it more of a city.
I don’t remember writing I think veins are better (probably because I don’t think so ).
You can always count for an unorthodox idea from me and I have one. In the Anno series there are non-renewable resources mined in huge quantities but the terrain is not damaged because mining spots are represented by objects which can be exploited (i.e. they resources come from mining spots, not from the terrain). A clay pit being an object which Lings can mine infinitely (in Anno 1404 the sources deplete over time and can be renewed for money, which is interpreted as hiring a geologist to find new veins) may be not very realistic but completely solves the problem of unintended terraforming for the sake of obtaining resources.
That being written, if I modded a clay pit as a workshop and added an ingredient-less recipe producing clay mound we could have an infinite clay pit without any major changes. Sadly this would limit the pit’s functionality to a specific crafter class (Potter makes sense).
In regards to ore I just don’t like the fact video games constantly re-enforce all of these tropey things surrounding resources and crafting.
My idea for clay chunks/veins shouldn’t result in HUGE pits around the place, if the yield of clay-to-voxel was a good ration. You’d end up with a nice sized pit just like Anno. And if you didn’t like open pits you could always just have an underground mine instead.
).