Bronze Ingot

Everything bronze in Graveyard Keeper 2 passes through the Bronze Ingot. It is what Bronze Nails and Bronze Detail are made of, which means it is indirectly what most of your buildings and every bronze tool are made of.

Two recipes produce it and they are not interchangeable. One runs on rubbish you pick up off the floor, the other on copper and tin you have to mine and wash, and they sit 50 apart on the technology tree.

The scrap route, and the furnace that comes with it

Three Bronze Scrap and ten Fuel give two ingots in nine seconds at Furnace I, paying 1 per smelt. Scrap is scavenged from broken barrels, trash piles and ruined shelves, so this route costs nothing but the fuel and the walking.

It arrives with Bronze Melting at 10, one node after the 5 that opens the branch, and that single node is a bigger moment than its price suggests. It unlocks the furnace itself, Firewood shed I and the kitchen’s own shed, which is the entire fuel system landing at once.

The furnace is the expensive half. Furnace I wants six Piece of stone and twelve Brick, so the clay and kiln chain has to be running before the metal one can start. The shed beside it is cheaper at ten Stick and two Bronze Nails.

The ore route sits behind the Details node

Bronze Forge opens the recipe players think of as the real one: three Copper Nugget, one Tin and twenty Fuel for four ingots in the same nine seconds. It costs 20, and the ordering is the part worth knowing.

Its prerequisite is the 30 node that grants Bronze Detail, which sits behind Bronze Melting in turn. The full path runs 5 to 10 to 30 to 20, so the ore route is 65 deep and Details arrive before it.

Twice the ingredients for twice the output means both routes cost exactly the same five Fuel per ingot. What changes is supply: scrap runs out when the ruins are clear, while copper and tin keep coming as long as you keep mining and washing sand.

What a bar costs in firewood

Fuel is a number on the shed beside the furnace, and both bronze recipes draw from the same pool. At five Fuel per ingot, and twenty Fuel for every two Firewood, a single Short Log run through a Chopping Spot covers about twenty ingots.

That ratio is why bronze never feels expensive and iron does. An Iron Ingot costs thirty Fuel for three bars, ten each, takes twelve seconds instead of nine, and will not run on Furnace I at all.

The perk that moves the numbers

Fireman adds one ingot to every smelt, and because it is a flat bonus it is worth far more on the smaller recipe. The scrap route goes from two to three, which is fifty percent, while the ore route goes from four to five, which is twenty five.

If you are still living on scavenged scrap, one rank of Fireman is the best return in the branch. Once you have moved to copper and tin the same point buys less, and the Blacksmith and Engineer perks on the anvil side become the better purchase.

How much to keep

An ingot is worth ten coins, stacks to thirty, and converts into either twelve nails or six details. Keeping a stack of thirty means you can answer almost any building requirement without a trip to the furnace, which matters more than the coins.

Below that, the thing to stockpile is Fuel rather than ingots. A full shed lets you smelt on demand; a pile of ingots beside an empty shed is a stack you cannot add to.