Graveyard Keeper 2 energy and insanity explained
Your maximum energy is 100 minus your insanity. If food stops filling the bar, the ceiling has dropped. What pushes each number up and what brings it back down.
The short answer
Your energy cap is 100 minus your insanity. Grim work like digging graves and autopsies slowly raises insanity, which shrinks the bar, and no amount of food will fill the missing part. Lower insanity with beer (−12), chocolate (−20), croissants and berry pie, or by sleeping off Lack of sleep (−20). Normal sleep refills energy but does not touch insanity.
VIEW IMAGE ↗What to check, in order
- 01
Look at insanity as well as the energy bar; the bar’s maximum is 100 minus insanity.
- 02
Stop eating once the bar reaches its current cap; extra food is wasted.
- 03
Use beer, chocolate, croissants or berry pie when insanity is the real problem.
- 04
Sleep before two in-game days pass, to avoid Lack of sleep.
- 05
If you already have Lack of sleep, sleep until full: that removes 20 insanity.
- 06
Hand repetitive grim work to zombies; they never drain your energy.
Why the energy bar stays low
- 01
Current energy
What you can spend
- 02
Insanity
Reduces available headroom
- 03
Rest & resources
Inspect recovery options
- 04
Usable ceiling
Read both parts of the bar
Field Guide schematic · read alongside the checklist. Not an in-game screen.
The cap: 100 minus insanity
Energy and insanity share one bar, and that is the source of most confusion. Your maximum energy is 100 minus insanity. You start the game with 10 insanity, so your bar tops out at 90 from day one, and only 4 energy in it.
Insanity can climb to 80, at which point your cap bottoms out at 20 and grim work is blocked entirely. The Iron Will talent lowers that limit to 70, so your cap never falls below 30. Either way, by the time the bar looks alarmingly short, you have been ignoring insanity for a while.
| Insanity | Maximum energy |
|---|---|
| 10 (game start) | 90 |
| 30 | 70 |
| 50 | 50 |
| 70 (limit with Iron Will) | 30 |
| 80 (normal limit) | 20, and grim work is blocked |
What raises insanity
Anything to do with the dead adds a little per swing. One grave is nothing; a week of autopsies and burials adds up. Exhuming old graves is the heavy one, a full point per swing. Some foods add a lot in one go, so read a tooltip before you eat raw flesh or baked meat in a hurry.
| Activity or item | Insanity added |
|---|---|
| Digging or filling a grave | 0.2 per swing |
| Crafting gravestones and fences | 0.2 per swing |
| Autopsy and pocket-picking | 0.3 per swing |
| Exhuming a grave | 1 per swing |
| Eating Flesh | 10 |
| Eating Baked meat | 10 |
| Drinking Soldier’s ale | 20 |
What lowers it
Only a few things bring insanity down, and normal sleep is not one of them. Beer is the easy early option: the yard chest has one at the start, and Januarius sells it. Chocolate is the best single item, restoring 50 energy and removing 20 insanity. Croissants and berry pie do both jobs in smaller amounts, which makes them excellent everyday food.
| Item | Energy | Insanity |
|---|---|---|
| Beer | −12 | |
| Chocolate | +50 | −20 |
| Berry Pie | +30 | −3 |
| Croissant | +20 | −5 |
| Bread | +18 | |
| Sleeping off Lack of sleep | Full | −20 |
Field note: Berry Pie is the best early everyday food. Berries grow on bushes all over the map, and the Cook talent turns a batch of 4 pies into 6.
A day’s insanity budget, worked out
Say you process one body on a delivery day. Picking two pockets and taking out three organs is maybe twenty swings at the Autopsy Table, about 6 insanity. Digging and filling the grave is another twenty-odd swings at 0.2, roughly 4 more. Carving a gravestone and fence adds a couple. Call it 12 insanity for one body, done by hand.
Three bodies a week is around 36 insanity, which takes your cap from 90 down to the mid-50s inside a single week if you never treat it. One beer and a couple of croissants undo most of that. That is why the habit worth forming is a small cure after each burial, not a big rescue once the bar looks tiny.
Exhuming is the exception that wrecks the budget. At 1 insanity per swing, digging up an old grave for organs can cost more than a whole week of normal burials. If you are exhuming for a zombie project, have chocolate ready.
Field note: Lack of sleep makes every number above worse, because each energy point spent adds another half point of insanity on top. Sleeping on schedule is the cheapest insanity cure there is.
How sleep really works
The bed refuses you when energy is full, unless you have Lack of sleep. When you do sleep, the world runs about fifty times faster and you wake as soon as energy reaches your current cap, roughly six in-game hours at minimum. The game saves when you wake.
Normal sleep refills energy and nothing else. It does not reduce insanity. That is the trap: players sleep more, wake with a full but short bar, and think the game is broken.
Lack of sleep
Stay awake for two in-game days, about fifteen real minutes, and you get Lack of sleep. While it lasts, every point of energy you spend also adds half a point of insanity, and anything that reduces insanity only works at half strength. It quietly doubles the cost of a busy day.
The cure is to sleep until full. That removes the debuff and takes 20 insanity off, which is the one time sleep does help with insanity. Some players use this deliberately, but the half-strength cures and extra insanity along the way usually make it a poor trade.
Spending energy well
Each manual action costs a fixed amount of energy per swing, and if you do not have enough, your keeper simply skips the action. There is no knockout. Extra mastery is the best energy saver in the game: at double a recipe’s mastery requirement, each swing does two steps, so the job takes half the swings and half the energy.
Zombies are the other answer. They have no energy bar at all and do not drain yours, so the jobs that cost you the most, felling, mining, digging, are exactly the ones to hand over first.
- Upgrade tools on your toolbar to cut swings per job.
- Keep a stack of berry pies or croissants on the hot bar.
- Save chocolate and beer for insanity, not for topping up energy.
Common questions
Why does another meal fail to fill the bar?+
The missing part is capacity lost to insanity, not energy. Food cannot go above 100 minus insanity.
Does sleeping reduce insanity?+
Not normally. Only sleeping off Lack of sleep removes insanity, 20 points.
What is the fastest insanity cure?+
Chocolate, −20 in one go. Beer, −12, is the most available early.
What happens at 80 insanity?+
Your energy cap is 20 and grim work such as autopsies and burials is blocked.
Do zombies use my energy?+
No. Zombie workers have no energy cost for you or for themselves.
Can I run out of energy mid-job?+
Your keeper just stops swinging when energy is too low for the next action. Eat something and carry on.
Is it worth taking Iron Will?+
If you do a lot of autopsies and burials yourself, yes. It lowers the insanity limit to 70, so your energy cap can never fall below 30.
Are there energy potions?+
They exist in the game files in three grades, worth 20, 50 and 100 energy, but the community database lists no way to obtain them in the launch build. Plan around food instead.
Sources & further reading
Recipes, costs and timings were cross-checked against the references below and the official patch notes. Numbers can shift with updates, so the in-game recipe window always has the final word.
- Community databaseGK2DB: energy and insanity
- Community databaseGK2DB: food items
- Community guideGK2DB: your first week
- Guidegames.gg: beginner tips (sleep and food)
- Community FAQWikily: what restores energy and reduces insanity
