Graveyard Keeper 2 bread: dough, oven and fuel

Your next steps

1. 01

   Unlock the Bread technology.

2. 02

   Grow Wheat, or buy Flour from the Baker in town.

3. 03

   Grind 4 Wheat into Flour at the Millstone.

4. 04

   Mix 6 Flour and 2 Water into Dough at the Kitchen Table.

5. 05

   Bake 4 Dough with 10 Fuel in the Kitchen Oven.

6. 06

   Keep a stack on the hot bar and save some for bait and pies.

The bread chain

Bread is the first proper production chain most players build, and every step lives at a different station. If the oven sits idle with fuel loaded, the problem is nearly always an earlier step: no Dough, because there is no Flour, because the wheat is still in the ground.

Field note: The yard chest starts with 100 Water, which covers a lot of dough. When it runs low, the well in the garden is there for cooking water.

Getting the inputs

Wheat is the easiest crop in the game: Farming 2 to plant, and a base garden bed grows it in about 16 real minutes. Since you need 5 Wheat for Herm’s quest anyway, plant a couple of extra beds and you will have flour to spare.

If you want to skip a step, the Baker in town sells Flour, Dough and Bread at every tier. Flour is cheap at about 5 copper and Dough about 10, which is handy before your garden is going.

Fuel is the input people forget. The oven is indoors, and an indoor station needs its own Firewood Shed inside the house; an outdoor shed will not feed it. The shed turns 2 Firewood into 20 Fuel.

What bread is for

Bread restores 18 energy, 20 with the Steamed Up perk. That is fine but not exceptional, and most players soon prefer berry pie or croissants. Bread’s real value is as an ingredient. Breadcrumb Bait, the first fishing bait you unlock, is made from it: one Bread makes four bait at the Kitchen Table once you have Fishing II and Farming 2. Sandwiches combine Bread with Baked Meat.

Your house chests start with 8 Bread, which is a nice cushion for the first few days. Do not eat the whole stack before you have checked whether you want it for bait.

Other things dough makes

Once you have a Dough supply, a whole menu opens up. Berry Pie is the standout early food: it restores 30 energy and removes 3 insanity, and berries grow on bushes all over the map. Croissants restore 20 energy and remove 5 insanity. Muffins give a +2 Farming buff for a day, which is excellent before a planting session.

Cooking, mastery and recipes you have not seen yet

Cooking sits in the Farming branch, so your shovel on the toolbar is what counts at the Kitchen Table, not your axe. Bread itself is an ordinary recipe: meet the requirement and it bakes. Two dishes, Bowl of sauerkraut and Vegetable salad, are starred recipes at Farming 4, where low mastery means fewer stars or a failed dish. Failed dishes still pay their technology points.

Cooking technologies are not bought in the tree. They are granted by events, such as the first harvest of carrots, beets, cabbage, onions or pumpkins, which teaches you to cook that vegetable. If a recipe is missing, the fix is usually to grow or find the ingredient for the first time rather than to spend points.

The Cooking tab in the tech tree is always visible, so you can check which dishes you have and which are still waiting for their trigger.

The Baker in town

The Baker is one of the town shops you rebuild. At tier I it sells Bread, pies, muffins, croissants, Dough, Flour, eggs and salt. Tier II adds milk, flesh and spices, which unlocks muffins and croissants for players without their own animals, and tier III doubles the stock. The upgrades ask for Flesh, 4 for tier II and 8 for tier III, which you get from bodies anyway.

The Baker only buys one thing: Fabric. So the shop is somewhere to buy, not to sell your surplus loaves.

Field note: Buy Dough from the Baker when you need pies in a hurry. It skips the Millstone and Kitchen Table steps entirely.

Automating the kitchen

The Kitchen Table and Millstone are both stations zombies can work, using a shovel for the Farming branch. Put one on the Millstone and one on the Kitchen Table, add a porter in the kitchen zone, and Dough appears by itself. Each area needs its own porter, so the kitchen porter will not feed the garden or the yard.

Kitchen zombies had genuine bugs at launch, losing ingredients or refusing placement. Update 1.006 fixed those, so make sure you are up to date before you decide your kitchen layout is the problem.

• Millstone zombie: shovel; Wheat to Flour.
• Kitchen Table zombie: shovel; Flour and Water to Dough.
• Kitchen porter: moves materials inside the kitchen only.

Talents and achievements

The Cook talent raises berry pie batches from 4 to 6, which makes it one of the better early talent picks if you rely on pies for energy. Steamed Up adds a little extra energy to baked food.

Every dish counts toward the Master Cook achievement, which wants 100 cooked dishes. Bread batches are an easy way to tick it along. One known bug: a one-star pumpkin soup does not count, so use other recipes for the tally.

Common questions