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- "No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune."
– Plutarch
- "I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand."
– Janet Fitch
Pottery is an Ancient Era technology in Civilization VI.
Strategy[]
Pottery is an important early step for civilization. The creation of containers out of clay ensures long-term, safe storage of food and other essentials. Through this technology, cities can build Granaries to improve sanitation and growth. It also allows Builders to harvest any 
Wheat or 
Rice in planned 
District spots.
Pottery is one of the five possible techs you can choose at the very start of the game. Although it doesn't unlock any important improvement or district, it leads to the ubiquitous Writing that unlocks the entire upper side of the tech tree, so you will need to research it eventually. It also leads to Irrigation, which you will absolutely need if your starting location's luxury resources are predominantly plant-based (and thus accessible via Plantations), or if it is far from the sea, devoid of minerals, and generally poor on terrain-based 
Gold sources. Otherwise, you should prioritize one of the other starting techs, which unlock more immediate benefits.
Civilopedia entry[]
“The art or craft of the potter, the skill of creating ceramic items” – in other words, making things out of mud. With pottery, objects (sometimes useful) are shaped out of clay and then placed in an oven and subjected to high temperatures. The resulting product is extremely brittle but is also airtight and more-or-less impervious to corrosion, oxidation, infestation, and other decay. The earliest pottery objects found include jugs and containers to hold liquid or grain. And some really ugly statuettes.
The earliest known ceramics are the Gravettian culture figurines (little, faceless representations of fat women) that date back to between 29 and 25 thousand BC. These were shaped by hand, and fired in a pit. Somewhere around 12000 years ago, clever folk figured out that clay – often mixed with sand, grit, crushed shells, or bone – could be used to make more useful items: pots, cups, plates, bowls, storage jars, and so forth. In Japan, during the Jōmon period, potters began putting glaze on their earthenware pots. During this time several types of pottery were developed – earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain.
Until the potter's wheel was invented in Mesopotamia sometime during the Ubaid period (6000-4000 BC), pots had to be shaped by hand ... a laborious process. Harnessing the wheel speeded pottery making. Until the Etruscans made use of molds to “mass produce” pots and other items in the 6th Century BC, a process “acquired” by the Romans when they swept away their bothersome neighbors. In China, meanwhile, the process of slipcasting – another way to mass-produce ceramic vessels – evolved during the T’ang dynasty.
Then all these lovely ceramics got replaced by plastic...
See also[]
- Pottery in other games
