Finding high quality water, clay, and soil

Category:Guide
Quality is an ever-present challenge for denizens of the Hearthlands. All hermitages, villages, and kingdoms strive to increase the quality of their goods. In past worlds, the maximum quality of finished goods was limited significantly by the scarce supply of high quality water, soil, and clay. In the early weeks of new worlds, the most ambitious players would rush to raise their Survival and scoured the map for high quality 'nodes' of water, soil, and clay.
Now, in W10, the quality of soil and clay is limited only by your progress in farming and hunting. Because these resources are used ubiquitously in most crafting trees, you can get very far by raising soil and clay quality. However, high-quality water is still only accessible through high-quality water nodes and wells.
==Water==
Discovering high-quality water nodes is both simple and extremely tedious. There are three strategies:
Take a water-container (such as a Bucket, Kuksa, or Waterskin) and sample the quality of the water in a nearby river. If the quality of the water is 10, then there is no source nearby and you must travel farther and sample again (keep in mind that water quality is hard-capped by Survival). If the quality is above 10, then a water node is nearby. At that point, one must sample the water in many locations until you find the point of peak quality - the center of the node. 
Build a Well and test the quality. If the quality is unsatisfactory, you can purchase Hearth Magic and spend 20000 EXP (doubling every additional use) to cast 'Dig Deeper' and raise the quality of the well water. This is largely considered a non-viable strategy, considering the steep EXP cost and the very small quality-increase it confers. This method is only useful if you are fortunate enough to own a very high-quality well where a small marginal increase in quality offers a trading advantage.
Boat up a river until you find a mountain, and then search for the headwaters. The headwaters are a type of localized resource that offers spring water, a special good that offers benefits for tree-farming and, naturally, works like normal water. The quality of spring water tends to be much higher than normal, at least above Q30. 
==Soil==
Raising the quality of soil was made very simple after the addition of the Compost Bin in the "Market Garden" update. Simply take your highest quality crops (likely carrots or beets) and then place them in the bin. After some time, the bin will fill with Mulch, whose quality is the based on your crop quality soft-capped by the bin's quality. 
High-quality soil can also be found in nodes, much like water. However, the Compost Bin makes nodes effectively obsolete, as it's incredibly rare to find Q100+ soil nodes, while many villages can manage to raise their crop quality past 100 in the span of a couple months. 
==Clay==
The best way to obtain high-quality clay is to develop your combat stats and kill an animal which drops high-quality bones (such as a Bear, Mammoth, or Troll) and then craft Bone Clay using the bones and either Pit Clay or Cave Clay.
It may be useful to settle somewhere near a clay pit, in order to constantly have a sizable supply of Pit Clay on-hand.