why is clay such a bottleneck for mass producing ceramic?

[MellowTigger]

I've found that clay is a big bottleneck.  No mining fields produce it, so there's no infinite supply available that way.  Deodorizers seem like a very inefficient (and slow) way to produce it.  But there's not really any other method, is there?  Strip mine your asteroids, and hope that's enough, I guess?

[Alex_D]

As per mass producing clay, I built early on my PO-to-O2 farm. Now I have may tons of clay and ceramic available. There are several examples of mass use of deodorizers. But the most effective is a closed room with a layer of PW off-gassing PO and the roof full of deodorizers, separated by a layer of regular water.

I'm attaching an image (made by others) to illustrate the concept. The one I used is slightly different.

[Joe Dee]

Yeah, sustainable production of clay comes from deodorizers only. A pool of PWater is alright but has very low off-gassing per tile since this got nerfed a couple of updates ago.

Much better in my opinion is large bottles of PWater, and those can be efficiently obtained by algae terrariums. People think that algae terrariums have only relatively low oxygen production, but if you just let the produced PWater bottles accumulate to several tons of mass each, they off-gas very efficiently, and after a number of cycles they will produce again as much oxygen after filtering as you put water into the terrarium. This is assuming that you have secured an unlimited source of water, of course.

So basically one algae terrarium plus 4 deodorizers eventually produces 364 g/s of oxygen for negligible power and only 30 g/s of algae, and makes vast amounts of clay as well.

Right now I'm only running the first one, used to have five in total to ramp up bottle accumulation, but this setup has basically carried the oxygen production for 6 dupes for hundreds of cycles since the start of the colony. (Initially I just let them breathe the PO2 directly however...)

[Alex_D]

I could be wrong but now I think PW evaporation is the same regardless if it's on a pond or bottled up. The idea is to minimize dupe labor. So auto-sweepers can deliver the sand/regolith and pick up the clay for transporting to the furnace.

I wonder if emptying a pipe full of PW can produce similar effects. Said bottles may still need to be in a closed room and serviceable by dupes (airlocked?). The deodorizers can "suck in up" the PO as it's converted in to O2. The H2O layer under each deodorizer is to keep the PO from mixing with the clean O2 above.

Keep that O2 for a bit in its own room with radiant pipes for cooling and you have cool O2 at 100% conversion rate from polluted water for a minimum electric power. Two deodorizers per dupe on average ought to do it.

[Joe Dee]

Bottled PW can emit more PO2 because bottles are not limited to 1000 kg per tile; and because the emission rate is tied to the amount of PW, with bottles it can go arbitrarily high as far as I can tell.

If space is no concern it doesn't really matter though. But I prefer to produce the O2 "in situ" rather than in far away rooms to avoid pumping it, and algae terrariums are the best source of PW bottles. The dupe labor is really minor, cleaning them every few cycles is quick and adding water is needed only once every cycle or two, not a big deal. But to each their own.

[Alex_D]

57 minutes ago, Joe Dee said:

Bottled PW can emit more PO2 because bottles are not limited to 1000 kg per tile; and because the emission rate is tied to the amount of PW, with bottles it can go arbitrarily high as far as I can tell.

This would simplify things as far as PO production is concerned (I may have to try it on my next base). But in general, it would also move the bottleneck to the deodorizer capacity to process said PO into O2, which is 90 g/s if I remember correctly. Multiple deodorizers would be needed to create the O2 and the clay byproduct usually on large horizontal arrays for space efficiency.
I used to have pumps to push the O2 out of the O2 room into the rest of my base, but I think since a recent update, the production of O2 sort of leveled out and I just leave said room door open. So much better, I deconstructed the complex gas pump, emergency release doors, and mechanical filters I created when I used to "hoard" 20 kg/tile O2 in said room

[Ankh]

Sublimation stations, converting pDirt to pO2 for deoderizing can also be used, if you’ve got a steady source of pdirt.

[beowulf2010]

As others have mentioned, Deodorizers are the way to go.

Depending on which starting biome I have, I use one of 2 methods for producing oxygen inside my main base and both use Deodorizer to convert polluted oxygen to clean oxygen which leads to plenty of clay over the first few hundred cycles. Algae Terrariums to convert Water to Polluted water bottles or Sublimation Stations. 

[SkunkMaster]

I usually setup my toilets to let the overflow go into a off-gas room. Result is a small but consistent production of clay.

[Occam Blazer]

I run all my slime through a digestor that turns it into pO2 then clay. On vanilla you end up with about 400 tons of ceramic and a steady supply of oxygen for 8-14 dupes.  Just remember to transition over to a more permanent source of oxygen before your slime runs out.

[NikiHammerforce]

I set up morb ranch from the very start. Tens of tons of ceramic to the moment I need it. And "free" oxygen. Some people might consider this to be an exploit due to the need to "restart" outhouses every 2 cycles to generate more morbs though. Also slimelung should be addressed which is not a big deal with DLC but may be not so easy with vanilla. Here is one of my morb ranches from my current playthrough. (Pump is to start things up only, I just left it there)