Brick

Brick is the wall most Graveyard Keeper 2 bases run into somewhere in the middle of the tech tree. Eighteen buildings want it, including both furnaces, the Distillation Cube and the Brewing Stand. The moment you decide to upgrade your smelting or start distilling, you need a kiln and a clay supply.

It is also the first recipe that forces you to work out what Fuel is, because a brick cannot be fired without twenty of it. Nothing in the game explains where Fuel comes from.

Making bricks

Bricks are fired at the Brick Kiln, which you build for 4x Piece of stone, 5x Clay and 5x Water. That cost is deliberately modest and none of it needs a kiln to produce, so the kiln is meant to be one of the first real production buildings you put down.

The recipe is 4x Clay and 20x Fuel for 6x Brick in eight seconds. It returns one red tech point per batch, so brick production quietly funds the research branch that unlocked it.

The automated recipe is worse

Once you are running conveyors a Conveyor Furnace can make bricks too, at 2x Clay plus 1x Coal for 2x Brick. It automates, which is the point, but the clay maths does not favour it.

The automated route costs half as much clay again per brick, and swaps Fuel for Coal, which is a separate supply line to keep stocked. Clay is gathered rather than crafted, so it is usually the real bottleneck, meaning automating bricks makes your actual constraint worse. Keep firing by hand at the kiln and point the conveyor furnace at something else.

Research path

Brick Making sits four nodes deep in the Building branch, and the whole path costs 42 red and 12 green spheres from a fresh save. Nothing on the way is optional, since each node is the prerequisite of the next.

Red is the cheap color early, since chopping and woodworking both pay red tech points. That makes this a realistic first few hours target rather than a mid game one.

The Fuel cost, in logs

Twenty Fuel is the heaviest fuel cost of anything the kiln makes, and Fuel is a charge held by the building rather than anything you carry to it. A a Firewood Shed attached to the kiln converts 2x Firewood into 20x Fuel automatically.

One shed keeps the whole ceramics line going, because the kiln fires two other things from the same supply. Ceramic Plate takes 3x Clay Plate and 10x Fuel for three in five seconds, and Ceramic Urn takes 2x Clay Urn and 15x Fuel for three in six.

Why it gates so much

The full list of what consumes Brick is in the panel above, but the shape of it matters more than the count. The heavy consumers are the buildings that make everything else, so brick tends to gate a whole tier of your base rather than one structure.

You cannot smelt, distill, brew or do serious alchemy until you have solved bricks. Building the kiln early and leaving it fed is one of the better opening decisions in the game.

Figures read from the Graveyard Keeper 2 game files.