Graveyard Keeper 2 item quality: how stars are earned

What to check, in order

1. 01

   Check whether the item even has star grades; most items do not.

2. 02

   Read the recipe’s mastery branch and requirement.

3. 03

   Equip tools and eat buff food until you meet the requirement.

4. 04

   Use two- or three-star inputs where possible; they start the job ahead.

5. 05

   For repeated batches, hand the bench to a zombie: it always makes three stars.

6. 06

   Keep grades in separate stacks and use the right grade for each recipe.

Which items have stars

Only a few item families come in grades. Each grade is a separate item with its own stack, its own price and sometimes its own uses. If a recipe asks for a two-star story, a one-star story will not do.

How a grade is earned

Each starred recipe has a number of steps and three success lines. Below the first line, the craft fails. Reach the first line for one star, the second for two, the third for three. Every swing either succeeds or fails, so the final grade is just a count of successes.

Mastery decides your odds. At or above the recipe’s requirement every step succeeds, so three stars are guaranteed. Below it, each swing succeeds with odds of about your mastery divided by the requirement. With zero mastery the job will not start at all.

Field note: A salad at Farming 2 against a requirement of 4 succeeds about half the time per swing. That usually lands on one or two stars, and occasionally fails completely.

Why stars matter: the price gap

The difference between grades is not cosmetic. For some items the price jumps tenfold per star. A three-star Story is worth a hundred times a one-star one. If you are crafting anything for money, closing the mastery gap first is the best investment you can make.

Stars also change effects. A three-star Vegetable salad gives +3 Anatomy instead of +1, and three-star embalming fluids add three skulls instead of one.

Head starts from good ingredients

Starred ingredients give a head start. A two-star material counts as one completed step and a three-star material as two. The bonus applies per ingredient slot, not per item, so one three-star pumpkin in a slot is as good as five.

Some perks add steps too. Sermon writer adds 2 steps to sermons, Telling tales adds 2 to Stories, and Like a King adds 2 to Stories and Newspapers. Those make three-star writing much easier before your Book writing mastery has caught up.

Let zombies make your stars

Zombie workers never fail a step. As long as they have at least 1 mastery in the right branch, so the job can start, the output is always three stars. That makes zombies the easiest way to mass-produce top-grade salads, sauerkraut, stories and embalming fluids.

Two conditions: the zombie needs the right tool for the bench, and its own mastery must be high enough for ordinary recipes in the chain to start. The zombies-not-working guide covers those checks.

Starred crops

Crops follow their own rule. Planting one- or two-star seeds gives a crop one star better, as long as the bed reaches its 11th successful growth step. Three-star seeds always give three-star crops. So a good bed and a clean planting slowly upgrade your whole seed stock over a few harvests.

Keep the three-star seeds. They are the shortcut to consistent top-grade cabbage, onion, pumpkin and grapes, which in turn give head starts to every dish you cook.

A worked example: three-star salad

A Vegetable salad needs Farming 4 and has 7 steps, with success lines at 1, 4 and 7. Cook it at Farming 2 and each swing has about a 50 percent chance. Seven coin flips usually land somewhere between two and five successes, so you mostly get one- or two-star salads, and once in a while a failure.

Now raise Farming to 4. A bronze shovel on the toolbar gives +2, the first Farming talent node +1, a Muffin another +2. That is 5, above the requirement, and every swing succeeds. Seven out of seven, three stars, every time. If one of the vegetables you use is two-star, the job even starts a step ahead.

The payoff is real. A three-star salad gives +3 Anatomy for a day, which is exactly the boost that makes clean heart and guts removals possible on a busy morgue day.

When a craft fails

A starred craft that ends below the first success line produces nothing, and the ingredients are used. That is why it is better to raise mastery first than to keep repeating a weak setup and hoping. Even a single extra point can move your odds a lot when the requirement is small.

Failed dishes do still pay technology points, so a botched cooking session is not a complete waste. Autopsies are the harsh case: a failed organ removal can destroy the organ or leave a Surgeon’s Error, so meet the requirement before cutting anything you care about.

Common questions