In 7 Days to Die you may find yourself struggling to get clay. It is a very basic material but it is also extremely valuable as it is used in crafting the forge, one of the most important early game crafting stations. C
lay can also be smelted into the forge to help make ingots for better gear. However, there are many other recipes that we will get to in this guide.
How to Get Clay in 7 Days to Die
Finding clay is one of the easiest things you can do in 7 Days to Die. All you need to do is simply look down at the ground and attack in any biome. This isn’t the most efficient method as you will only really get one piece of clay every few hits, and you’ll need much more than that.
We recommend you use a shovel for gathering. Using a shovel to collect clay is much more efficient as you get a lot more of the material, and you can cover more ground, quite literally.
Crafting a Basic Stone Shovel
Luckily, a stone shovel can be crafted very early into the game, all it takes is 5 small stones, 3 plant fibers, and 3 wood. These are all essential items that you will gather in the first few minutes of your game anyway.
To begin with, a stone shovel will be level 1, this can change based on what you put your skill points into when you level up. If you want to craft higher-level tools and have some spare skill points, go to the perception part of the skills and put points into miner 69’ER. This will allow you to craft higher-level tools
A stone shovel will give you 7 clay per hit, sometimes more. An iron shovel will give you 9 clay a hit and a steel shovel will give you 13 at their base levels. When you eventually obtain higher-level tools, these numbers will gradually go up.
What is Clay Needed For?
One of the earliest things you will need clay for is the forge. The forge can be crafted after unlocking the skill of advanced engineering in intelligence or using a forge schematic.
A forge schematic is a blueprint for the crafting recipe to save you from using skill points. These can be found randomly when looting. The forge takes 60 clay to craft. You then need to smelt the clay in the forge to make things like iron and steel, etc.
However, clay is used in quite a good amount of recipes, if you want to check some more of them out of the game, you can see them over at the wiki for Clay Soil
