The clay mound is where pottery starts. Dig it with a small basket and you come away with clay, which the pottery table turns into the jars, pots and pitchers a colony carries water, milk and honey in.
What it feeds
Clay has one destination: the pottery table. Clay jars, clay pots and pitchers all come off it, and those are tools rather than ingredients — a jar is what gathers water, a pot is what brings home milk and honey. A region with cows and no clay is a region where nobody can milk them.
The pottery tutorial is here: [CRAFTABLES] Pottery Table
The tool
You cannot dig clay with your hands. The tool is the small basket.
Two steps, and people miss the first one:
- Get tool small basket from your HUD puts it in your hand.
- Use tool small basket rezzes it at your feet, ready to work.
A basket comes with five durability.
Tools only run on a region with an SL Colonies region server on it. Stand on land without one and nothing will happen when you try to take the basket out.
Gathering
Walk up to a mound with the basket out and left-click it.
- About 30 seconds to gather.
- 5 energy per gather.
- 1 to 5 clay per gather, chosen at random.
So the yield swings widely. Plan for the low end if you are laying in clay for a batch of pots.
Spawn points, for the owner
Hold down left-click on the mound to open the owner menu, then choose Spawn points.
- Set a point anywhere you like on the region — any position, any rotation.
- Points must be on the same region as the mound.
- Set as many as you want.
Every time the mound respawns it picks one of those points at random. It may come back where it was, or across the sim; it may come back upside down or on its side. That is intended. It stops players from learning a fixed round and walking it every five minutes.
The respawn rate is set to roughly five minutes.
Clearing points
Two ways:
- Remove points from the same menu takes them off one at a time.
- Picking the mound up and rezzing it somewhere else clears all of them, and you start again from scratch.
Worth knowing before you tidy your build: move a mound and its whole set of points goes with it.
Placing them well
Clay mounds work best scattered rather than pooled. Set points across the ground a potter would plausibly walk — a riverbank, a cutting, the edge of a field — and let the randomness do the rest. Our trees and reed plants behave the same way, so if you have already set those up this will feel familiar.
The product page is here: https://slcolonies.com/treasure/clay-mound