OK, so, playing with 4j. I tried to build a base using stoneware bricks.
Turned out to be really tricky to get the task flow right.
So here's how I thought I should do it.
1. Acquire a source of clay.
2. Acquire a source of peat.
3. Build a clay oven and start the 'gather clay' task. This should slowly fill up both my peat and my clay stockpiles.
4. Build a screw press.
5. Set the screw press to compact the peat.
6. Build a smelter.
7. Set the smelter the turn the compact peat into coke.
8. Build a Pottery.
9. Set the pottery to shape clay bricks.
10. The pottery will detect greenware bricks and automatically dry them, so I can leave the 'shape clay bricks' task on repeat.
11. Set the clay oven to bake the dry bricks into stoneware bricks.
12. Build build build before the inevitable winter siege.
This didn't work. I think the fail points were with step 3 and step 10.
The 'gather clay' task wouldn't prioritize my peat source and my clay source evenly, even with a separate clay oven close to both with the gathering task on. I had to micromanage it, which sucked.
The brick drying task was also really spotty. I would end up with huge stockpiles of greenware bricks, a few 'leather hard' bricks, and some 'bone-dry' bricks. I am guessing that the 'leather hard' state is some kind of intermediary stage between the two but I have no idea how to go from greenware to leather-hard, and I can't tell if the leather-hard to bone-dry process was really working properly.
This seems overwhelmingly complex to me, even if it had worked. It requires four buildings, and somewhere along the line of thirty individual jobs to produce four bricks.
I have to be doing something wrong here, right?
Has anyone got this pipeline working efficiently before?
Right now, it seems my best bet is to use the raw clay for walls. I prefer using bricks, because bricks are lighter and don't take as long to haul, but the incredible amount of investment necessary to make clay bricks in Masterwork means that it just doesn't appear to be worth it.