Bricks are an advanced building material and together with Roof Tiles they mark the industrial era of a Banished town. Modern buildings like schools or hospitals but also wealthy houses with the best conditions require this material. Bricks are made from clay in special furnaces and the burning process consumes a lot of fuel. Fortunately, the Nordic brickmakers have found a way to achieve those high temperatures with firewood.
Category: Bricks
Produced by: Brickyard
Output: 3 – 4 from 3 Clay and 3 Firewood
Used as building material
Trade value: 12 – 16
Used storage: 18 (16 per tile)
Related resources: Ashlar, Roof Tiles
Tip: Since bricks are a late game resource, it reaches your town quite slowly. To rush for bricks, you should build more trading docks and order them from Hanseatic merchants.
Last edited on 4 December 2020
Tom Sawyer
The single brickmaker was intentionally. It felt unrealistic with doubled productivity just by another worker. The limit of such a furniture should be its capacity. Also it would just burn even faster through clay stocks.
I was looking at my old balancing xls and it turns out that brickmaking is not that bad compared to pottery. A brickmaker creates a trade value of up to 2,000 per year, a potter only up to 1,200. What you don’t see in the wiki numbers is the 3 times higher worktime of the pottery kiln.
So brickmaking is meant to depend much on raw material, while pottery depends more on worktime. With a higher income for brickmaking because leaving holes in the ground is a drawback that needs to be priced in. I will ad this info about worktime in the wiki for better understanding.
Where you are right is the comparison to glassmaking. It has a similar and in case of glassware an even higher trade value per year than brickmaking, without the drawback of using up land. It should get a nerf then, probably by increased worktime.
lauri0
The one concern with nerfing glassmaking is that there are other things which are still much more profitable, e.g. iron tool making in the blacksmith shop. Growing barley is also more profitable per person by some margin and pastures in the live version can also be very profitable in comparison, although those take more space than a glass factory. But I also feel like I am going a bit off topic here on the bricks page.
I’ll probably do some more testing specifically focusing on trade value and practical profitability of different production facilities when I have time. Balance is one of the great strengths of the North and I quite enjoy discussing it.
lauri0
Fair enough :)
lauri0
Brick production is fun, but it seems to me like bricks should be more valuable. Same output as pottery with triple the input materials, lower trade value, higher weight and harder to acquire tech.
Brickmaking also seems to be a very poor source of income compared to other higher tier production chains, e.g. glassmaking.
To make matters worse, there is the fact that clay is finite compared to sand being infinite. This means brickmaking is also quite environmentally destructive with multiple clay pits needed over time.
I would suggest a significant increase in trade value for bricks and roof tiles with also perhaps an increase in the capacity of clay pits. This would make brickmaking actually able to compete with other higher tier industries and would allow it to not ruin the environment quite as fast.
Tom Sawyer
Good thoughts. I remember quite some testing to get a reasonable amount of clay coming from the pits and wanted them being flooded also if people just use it for self-sufficiency. Making a trading business of it should end up with at least a couple of pits. So I would increase the price of bricks and tiles as you suggest.
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Another option which could be used in conjunction with a bricks/tiles price increase would be allowing more workers in the building. Considering glassworks allows 4 and paper mill allows 10 it would make sense the brickworks could employ several people too. Just a thought. Depends on what your vision for the brickworks is.