Smalland Clay Mortar: Recipe, Materials, and How to Build the Forge

Surviving the wilds of Smalland gets rougher the deeper you push into late game territory. Standing up to tougher enemies eventually demands iron tier tools, and that means building a Forge. The Forge depends on Clay Mortar, and Clay Mortar sits at the end of a short chain of prerequisites that this guide breaks down step by step.

Clay Mortar also turns up when you reinforce gear or piece together stone building parts, so it stays useful long after the Forge goes online.

What You Need Before Crafting Clay Mortar

The raw material is Clay, no surprise there. The catch is that Clay sits behind two prerequisite tools:

• A Spiked Pickaxe to actually harvest the Clay nodes.
• A Windmill to refine raw Clay into Clay Mortar.

Miss either one and the recipe never opens up.

Building the Windmill

Place the Windmill near your base once you have the materials. The full list:

• 5x Fiber harvested from wild plants
• 10x Silk by snipping spider cocoons with the Flint Shears
• 10x Fiber String processed at the Loom and Spindle
• 10x Refined Wood produced at the Stonecutter from Wood and Seed Oil

The slow part is queuing up the Fiber String and Refined Wood. Both refine from materials you probably already have on hand, so the bottleneck is mostly back and forth trips between workstations.

Forging the Spiked Pickaxe

With the Windmill placed, the Spiked Pickaxe is next on the list. Its recipe:

• 5x Resin
• 5x Fiber
• 5x Iron Shard
• 5x Refined Wood

Resin and Fiber cost you nothing if you pull them from Sprouts, which need no tool to harvest. The Refined Wood you already produced for the Windmill carries over.

The real bottleneck is Iron Shard, which only drops when you mine an Iron node with a Flint Axe. The northwestern region of the map has the most reliable Iron spawns, but it also has plenty of hostile critters lurking around the nodes. With Peaceful Mode off, expect to fight your way in and out.

Gathering Clay and Crafting the Mortar

Once the Spiked Pickaxe is in your kit, head to the northern stretch of the southern island. Clay nodes are plentiful there. Mine until your inventory hurts, then come back to the Windmill.

Per the official recipe, each unit of Clay Mortar costs:

• 2x Clay
• 1x Bug's Lymph

Bug's Lymph is the easiest part of the chain. Almost any insect drops it. Confirmed sources include:

• Bull Ant
• Butterfly
• Carpenter Ant Warrior
• Carpenter Ant Worker
• Cockroach
• Damselfly
• Dawn Ant
• Dragonfly
• Grey Fly
• Hornet
• Ladybug
• Lubber
• Mosquito
• Moth
• Nocturnal Dragonfly
• Nocturnal Grasshopper
• Nocturnal Ladybug
• Wasp
• Wasp Queen
• Waterbug

If a creature has six legs and a bad attitude, it probably qualifies.

Why It Matters

Clay Mortar unlocks the Forge, which is the door to iron tier equipment like the Iron Pickaxe, Iron Hammer, and Iron Scythe. From that point on, the late game really opens up: faster mining, better gathering, and gear that actually survives a hornet swarm.

Keep a small stockpile around. You will keep reaching for Mortar long after the first Forge is standing.