Where to find kaolin clay in TerraFirmaCraft and TerraFirmaGreg

Kaolin clay is where TerraFirmaCraft’s high-temperature work starts. Heating it gives kaolinite powder, one of the ingredients of fire clay, and fire clay makes the crucible, fire ingot molds and the fire bricks the blast furnace needs. It is also one of the hardest materials to find, because three conditions have to hold at once, and most of the world fails at least one.

The three conditions

  • Climate: an average annual temperature of at least 18 °C and an annual rainfall of at least 300 mm, both at once.
  • Biome: in TerraFirmaCraft only Highlands, Old Mountains and Plateau. TerraFirmaGreg allows 24 biomes, listed below.
  • Height: every patch lies between Y 86 and 98, well above sea level, so it only reaches the surface where the ground is that high.

Where all three hold, one chunk in 40 rolls a patch, up to 37 blocks across.

Why only between Y 86 and 98

Kaolin forms as a flat disc. The game looks for the disc’s centre between Y 75 and 110, but first keeps the disc’s own size, 18, clear of both ends of that range. Nothing is left, so it falls back to the middle: every disc is centred on Y 92, and reaches 6 blocks above and below it.

Inside a patch, grass becomes kaolin clay grass, and dirt, gravel and raw rock become kaolin clay; TerraFirmaGreg adds mud. So a patch shows at the surface where the ground lies between Y 86 and 98, and is buried under higher ground: dig down on a hillside that rises above Y 98.

The Blood Lily

A patch’s surface indicator is the Blood Lily: TerraFirmaCraft’s field guide notes that the flower grows on kaolin clay. The game places these indicators near a patch, and only when the patch lies less than 35 blocks below the ground, so in one of the right biomes and climates a Blood Lily is worth digging under.

Kaolin in TerraFirmaGreg

TerraFirmaGreg keeps TerraFirmaCraft’s kaolin feature, with the same size, height and rarity, and the same climate gate, but its own list of biomes: Rolling Hills, Highlands, Plateau, Plateau Wide, Old Mountains, Tower Karst Hills, Tower Karst Highlands, Extreme Doline Plateau, Extreme Doline Mountains, Doline Rolling Hills, Doline Highlands, Doline Plateau, Cenote Rolling Hills, Cenote Highlands, Cenote Plateau, Shilin Highlands, Shilin Plateau, Active Shield Volcano, Dormant Shield Volcano, Extinct Shield Volcano, Ancient Shield Volcano, Ice Sheet Shield Volcano, Glaciated Shield Volcano and Sunken Shield Volcano.

Finding kaolin with the map

  1. Open the seed map, choose your profile and type your world’s seed.
  2. Turn on Minerals and search the ore filter for kaolin.
  3. In the filter, set a minimum temperature of 18 °C and a minimum rainfall of 300 mm: everything too cold or too dry for kaolin dims.
  4. Turn on Terrain to see, approximately, where the ground lies near Y 86 to 98, then walk to a marker and look for Blood Lilies.

Markers are predictions from the seed, not guarantees: the map hides those whose measured hit rate is below the threshold in the ore filter (90% by default), so some real patches do not show.

Values on this page are read at build time from the same game data the map and the forge calculator use. Found a mistake? Open an issue.

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