Ceramic Tools

[Mafia Salad]

I have been reading the forums and playing the game for more than a month now, and now I think I know enough about how the game works to make a suggestion.

Ceramic tools,
Clay + heat (oven, kiln, fire pit) + time = screwdriver or pliers or some other simple tools. They would have to deteriorate a lot faster then their iron counterparts and maybe be impossible to repair.

I think it would be a good counterweight to the iron means power system the game has right now. It won't overthrow iron power in the game, but it will give new spawns and down-on-their-luck chars an alternative to slaving for years to get a screwdriver.

[Sho]

Good idea, but what tools would there be ceramic variations of? Screwdriver, no. But certainly there are other tools that could be made this way.

[El_Skwidd]

I think more uses for clay in general could be made.

Now that I think about it, nothing comes to mind. Maybe clay beads... XD

Hmm.. clay tools... is it possible to cook in a clay pot? Or does the whole water aspect mess that up? Then again, water was never a requirement in regular meat cooking with stone pots, so technically it wouldn't make a difference.

Maybe a clay cooking stone. Clay fire pits?

Clay landmark? Clay hut? Ok, that's a stretch.

Maybe a crucible could be added to the apothecary tools. Chemistry stuff.

[Pie]

CLAY CUPS!!! To increas (drasticly... like... 500g of whater with this. Seriously, do you know how hard it is to gather 10g of whater with just your hands?)the gathering of whater.

thats all i can think of.

[Mafia Salad]

Hmm.. clay tools... is it possible to cook in a clay pot? Or does the whole water aspect mess that up? Then again, water was never a requirement in regular meat cooking with stone pots, so technically it wouldn't make a difference.

When clay is fired (baked) it undergoes a chemical change that turns it into water tight ceramic, unless its fired wrong or made out of crappy clay.

In RL I've made cups, bowls, and stamps out of ceramic before, and I've seen a pair of ceramic pliers, they were strong but also brittle so I wouldn't use them on anything that requires a lot of pressure, anything that required a little or a moderate ammount of pressure they could handle.

[Doug R.]

The only mortar and pestle I've ever seen was ceramic.

[Agar]

Hmm.. clay tools... is it possible to cook in a clay pot? Or does the whole water aspect mess that up? Then again, water was never a requirement in regular meat cooking with stone pots, so technically it wouldn't make a difference.

When clay is fired (baked) it undergoes a chemical change that turns it into water tight ceramic, unless its fired wrong or made out of crappy clay.

In RL I've made cups, bowls, and stamps out of ceramic before, and I've seen a pair of ceramic pliers, they were strong but also brittle so I wouldn't use them on anything that requires a lot of pressure, anything that required a little or a moderate ammount of pressure they could handle.

Way not true. Fired clay is porous. It will not leak like a sieve, but water will pass through it, and stay in it like a sponge, of sorts. There is nothing in the clay that will hurt you, however, that trapped water will also trap all sorts of neat bacteria and do not nice things to you if you consume food out of it.

To make vessels for storing liquid, they need to be glazed. Simplified, Glaze is powdered sand (silicate) suspended in a liquid, like water. There are other things you can do to glaze, like adding salt to get crackles, copper to get greens, lead to make it smooth out, or carbon to get blacks and rainbow, oil spill sheens. The silicate goes through a molecular change, altering the crystaline structure of the matter, to make a vessel water tight by coating it in a thin layer of glass.

Glass, being nonreactive, keeps anything touching it from getting any worse than it is.

Eating food off an unglazed surface won't kill you, neither will eating off a leaded glass surface, although they may lead to some not nice things happening. Perhaps a new sickness. The lead isn't all that reacitve either, unless it comes in contact with an acidic substance, like coffee, tomatoes, salsa, or the like.

[Mafia Salad]

Your right, I was over simplifying it, but Cantr is a fairly simple world compared to Earth. Ceramic isn't plyable after its fired so it wont loose its shape because of moisture. Its porous nature can be a useful attribute too.

[Agar]

I ran a cermaics studio for a couple years. I just wanted to get the info out there.

We did have things like African Violet pots, where we didn't glaze the bowl portion so that it would remain porous and let just a little water in, much like how the violets would get very little water in their native enviroment. So, yes, the porousness can be useful.

[Appleide]

Umm porcelain bowl, pots? Dishes, cooking stones. <-Quite obvious especially when others said them already, but I still want to name them.

[in vitro...]

There should be clay pots in Cantr, because the stone one needs chisel = iron (or bronze, both hard to made in wildnes).

[Elros]

Clay items are being worked on right now. Actually I am in charge of getting that area done. So hopefully it won't be much longer before you see it.

[wichita]

Not sure if you will be able to cook with them, though.

[Sicofonte]

And the brick mould could be used for making clay+reed bricks (in a especific project) and the bricks could be used for buildings.

[Arlequin]

And... err... heat shields for space shuttles?

It could be good for adding mosaics to stone and marble buildings.