Claywork

[Alatyr]

I suggest adding water to the clay sculpting process. This will make the sculpting process more believable. Dry clay cannot be sculpted, so to create clay fakes you need wet clay. We can throw pieces of clay into water to turn it into wet clay, or combine the clay with a filled vessel (bucket, glass, etc.) in the crafting grid. Things created with wet clay would require time to dry before they could be moved for further firing or processed back into dry clay. Crafting multiple items in one craft will now be beneficial for saving space.
Wooden molds for roofing and bricks could be introduced as an alternative to the current manual labor, so that mass production of building materials would not be as tedious as it is now. We simply place the shape on the surface, click on it with wet clay and get the shape back. Bricks or tiles are left to dry on the ground.
By creating a simple pottery wheel, we can provide an alternative to creating pots and other vessels, making their crafting on a wheel less resource-intensive. But I would like to rework some of the recipes and make the bowls, glasses and pots physically rounder so that creating them on the potter's wheel makes sense and is perhaps faster than now.

To sum it up: I wish the game had ways to mass produce bricks and roof tiles. And also a hand-made pottery wheel, which will allow you to create more elegant dishes and vessels with low clay consumption and probably faster than with your bare hands.

[Venusgate]

I like the pottery wheel mod, but i think it should be a little faster.

 

Wooden casting for clay is a neat take

[Stranger92]

Found this topic while looking for kind of the same thing.

I don't really care much about new ways of forming clay or speeding things up, but what always bugged me is that missing crucial step of drying clay before firing.
It adds a whole new level of complexity for clay working: you suddenly require big flat sheltered spaces for drying your pottery before shoving it into the kiln. It will both make the process a lot more realistic and transform a pottery workshop from a clay chest + hole in the ground to a real meaningful place.

With the new beehive kiln coming in 1.20 I feel that clay works need just a tad more love to become perfect.