Well, that’s why this technology takes a thousand years to develop. The first incremental steps are always accidental, and it always starts superstitiously. Like, “Hey use this magic dirt here with this magic fuel and the pottery gets orange when wet”. “Hey this magic pottery doesn’t crack when we heat it a lot like the normal stuff does”. “Hey shards of this magic pottery hold an edge!”… and so on.
It’s a very slow process to get the weird new result, then eventually work our way back to what the sources of the new effects are, and how to recreate them anywhere. For thousands of years, humans did a lot of things without necessarily understanding why it all worked.
