Of all the building practices in history, bricks have remained a relatively strong option. This is no different in the early access of Going Medieval. By digging up clay and firing it into bricks you can have yourself a great, cheap source of building material. If you are wondering how to find and mine clay this is the place for you! This guide will show you the best way of obtaining clay and show you how to make bricks for building.
Finding and Mining Clay
The first step of being able to get some clay is obviously going to be finding it. Clay may be tricky to find at first but once you see a couple of images you’ll spot it easily. Clay can be found on every layer of the ground. You should be able to find plenty of clay on the surface as it is very common. Search around on the ground and look for a brownish rocky looking surface. When you have your mouse over an area on the ground there will be information in the bottom left of the screen. This will tell you the type of resource in the area. Check the image below.
It should be pretty easy to spot clay once you know what it looks like. As aforementioned it is a very common resource. Now taht we have found some clay, we can order a settler to mine it.
Mining Clay in Going Medieval
To mine clay you will have to select the mine action. Using this tool you are able to select specific areas or paint a large area. To select smaller squares of clay just left-click on them in Mine mode. To select an area to be mined, press the Mine button from the bottom right of the UI. This is the icon that looks like a pickaxe. Alternatively you can just press the N hotkey with nothing selected.
After choosing to mine you are able to mark an area. As you can see in the image above, once you are in the mining tool you can see a little more information about the resource being mined. Here you can see how much of the resource has been mined and how much is remaining. Now that you have chosen some clay to be mined, your settlers assigned to mining will dig it up.
Assigning a Settler to the Mining Job
If you are finding that none of your settlers are mining there may not be any assigned to the actual job of mining. Or, it may not be a priority over other jobs. Press the Jobs button at the top of the screen and ensure at least one settlers is assigned to mine. In the best case, pick someone who is actually good at mining as they will take less time and make less mistakes.
Researching Clay Brick Crafting
If you have started a new game you will not be able to make clay bricks. Every piece of technology must be researched first. Luckily clay brick creation is a relatively early research task and will not take very long to unlock. Is you already have a research bench and have unlocked research, you can open up the research menu at the top of the UI.
If not, check out this guide on research in Going Medieval. It will tell you how research works and show you how to unlock new research.
Once you have the research up and running you will need a total of 35 chronicle to research Clay Brick Making. That is, 15 for the initial Architecture research and then another 20 for the Clay Brick Making. you can see this above. Once you have researched this and unlocked it, you will be able to create a kiln and produce bricks.
How to Craft Bricks in Going Medieval
We are finally up to the production stage! Clay can be used for a great many things. You can even use it directly to create clay walls. Clay is best used to create bricks, however. If you process the clay into bricks you will be able to create much stronger, stable structures. Plus, brick walls look a lot nicer than raw clay walls. First of all, we have to build a kiln.
Building a Kiln for Clay Bricks
The kiln is where the clay is processed into bricks. Now that we have researched the correct topic we should be able to build this. Open up the Production building menu from the bottom of the screen. Here, you will see all of the production facilities that you currently have unlocked. The kiln should be somewhere near the bottom. Select this kiln and you will see a little sub-menu. Here, you can decide whether you want to make the kiln from clay or limestone. Limestone is a little stronger but it doesn’t really make a difference as long as raiders are not attacking it.
Select your preferred material and place the blueprint down. One of your colonists who is assigned to construction will come and build this. That is, if they have the materials. If you want it built quickly you can select a settler and right-click the blueprint to find the Prioritize Building button. Now that we have a kiln up and running, we are able to start producing bricks!
How to Produce Bricks From Clay
Now that we have the clay build we can move on to production. For this we have to find our kiln. Select the kiln to open up it’s production menu. You can see at the top of this menu there are two icons in the Products area. The one on the left is the Clay Bricks and the other is Coal. We obviously want to pick the Clay Bricks option.
Once you have selected the bricks a job will appear in the production queue at the bottom of this menu. In this area, you can decide how many bricks you want to make. You can try to keep a certain number in stock, create a specified amount or just create bricks forever. If you choose the option forever, your settlers will continue creating bricks as long as they have the clay to make it. You should not need to do anything else to create bricks. Your settlers will bring clay here and throw it in the kiln.
Another tip here is to try to keep clay close to the kiln. You can create a stockpile near the kiln and only allow clay to be inside it. That way settlers will not have to walk too far in order to keep producing bricks.
Building With Bricks
Now that we have bricks what do we do with them? We build of course! In order to build with bricks or any other material we will open up the Base menu at the bottom left of the screen. You could also just press the F1 key with nothing selected. You will probably only see a Wooden wall availble to build. That is what we are looking for for now! Once you select the wooden wall another sub-menu will appear on the right side of the build menu. Here you can change what type of material you are using for the wall. Go through this list and find the Clay Brick wall. Now, click and drag wherever you want in your colony to build up some brick walls!
That’s all there is to it! You can also find some nice new variants of many of the other building pieces. For example there are brick floors and roof designs that can be built. You builders will be able to build much nicer, sturdier buildings now!