Arelith

Feedback: Bricks suck to make and are pointless, but they're the only form of craftable stone available.

The recipe should either give more bricks or the base value of the bricks should be raised to make having craftable bricks under art crafting have any point at all.

living up to your name I see

A more serious/less rushed explanation:

The settlement resource system sucks. It's annoying and boring and generates no significant or appreciable RP beyond providing people with something to point at and go "UR BAD AT LEADING" because you didn't want to spend 6 hours hitting Granite deposits, or you're short on STR-builds. Some of the resources (food, metal, wood) are super easy to gather en-masse - others like cloth can be produced by low STR individuals because they can be crafted with lightweight resources. But not stone, nope.

Gathering enough stone for your settlement is an obnoxious chore, one that is weighted entirely on convincing your settlement's STR builds to go hit granite deposits. If you have 3 exiles, use 12-slot settlement storage and clean water, you require 35,000 units (and in this case 35,000 pounds as well) of granite & marble per annum to cover all of that. That comes out to 700 granite/marble slabs. Since each deposit gives about 4-6 on average, that comes out to roughly 117-175 granite/marble deposits that need to be mined annually. If your settlement has 70+ citizens (which is most of them now), you require even more, scaling up to double (for all non-exile expenses) and beyond at 140+ citizens. The bulk of this rests on the shoulders of STR builds to gather, because granite/marble slabs are 50 lbs apiece.

Now let's compare a few other resources' craftable options:

FOOD: Turn 15 lbs of Meat & Salt (worth approx. 25 GP or so) into 50 units of food.
CLOTH: Turn 5 lbs of cotton (worth maybe 100 GP, honestly?) into 50 units of cloth.
METAL: Turn 20 lbs of ore and coal (worth ~200 GP) into 300 units of metal.
STONE: Turn 45 lbs of clay and coal (worth ~200 GP) into 20 units of stone.

It takes far more weight and value of material that is much more difficult to harvest en masse to manufacture any appreciable quantity of stone via crafting compared to any other resource (the clay and coal also weigh 5 lbs apiece, making it more difficult for low-STR builds to harvest them to contribute, even if they were so inclined) making it effectively not worth doing. This is why, even during the many "stone crises" of Arelith's past, you basically never saw anyone crafting bricks.

There're a few solutions that pop out:

1) Make the Bricks option generate more bricks. It takes 6 clay, so why not 12? I would love to find 12 bricks.
2) Increase the value of bricks from 4 each to like, literally anything else, increasing the amount of stone generated by the recipe.
3) Keep value & output the same, but drop the recipe's costs down to 3 clay + 1 coal per cycle, making it easier for low STR builds to gather the needed resources and making it more efficient to manufacture.

Throwing my 2c in here.

Yes please, in complete agreement with Memelord. Being able to craft a decent amount of bricks to raise stockpiles sounds like an excellent idea, and makes sense. It would also raise the value of clay, which is nice too.