Clay

Clay is the quiet bottleneck of a Graveyard Keeper 2 base. Bricks are clay, plates are clay, the urn every barrel of cider ferments in is clay, and no recipe turns anything else into it. You dig it, or much later a zombie digs it for you.

The good news is that the pits behave like the copper veins rather than like the iron outcrops. A worked pit refills itself in the same spot, so the supply is a question of time and energy rather than of finding more ground.

A pit is six energy and four Clay

Each clay pit has three hit points and costs two energy a swing, so emptying one takes six energy and returns four Clay. There is a smaller version at two hit points that zombies can also work, and both refill after you leave them.

Clay is gated on Building mastery rather than Smithing, and it asks for two. If a pit will not let you dig it, a better shovel is the one thing that will not help, because shovels feed Farming while the pit measures Building. Put an axe or a Bronze Pickaxe on your belt instead, and the mastery guide has the full ladder.

Two technologies, and the first is cheap

Pottery I is the entry point and it is early, sitting behind The Concept of Stone at ten red and five green, which is 27 red and 7 green counting the path. It grants the Potter’s Wheel for two Wooden Plank and one Piece of stone.

Brick Making follows for another fifteen red and five green, bringing the total to 42 red. That one grants Brick and the Kiln, which costs four Piece of stone, five Clay and five Water to build.

What clay turns into

The Kiln is the reason most people are reading this: four Clay and twenty Fuel returns six Brick in eight seconds. The brick guide has the fuel arithmetic and the eighteen buildings that want the output.

The Potter’s Wheel is the cheaper half of the chain and the one people skip. Two Clay becomes three Clay Plate in three seconds, and once Ceramic Firing is bought at fifty five red, four Clay becomes two Clay Urn.

The urn is worth the detour. Ten recipes want one, and they are the drinking half of the game: alcohol, berry cider and everything fermented after them. The plate is narrower at three recipes, fired ceramics and both grades of melted fat.

Later on a Conveyor Furnace will take two Clay and one Coal and give back two Brick, one Tableware or one Clay Molds depending on what you ask it for. It automates, at the price of a worse clay rate and a coal supply, and coal has exactly one source in a zombie mine.

One Clay is five red and five green

Studying Clay at the Study Table takes one Clay, one Science and one Faith, runs for three seconds and returns 5 and 5. It is one of the thirty eight studies that charge Faith on top of Science.

That makes the first lump out of the first pit worth more on the bench than in the kiln, in the same way the first copper nugget is. Six energy of digging gives you four Clay, and one of those four is worth five red and five green on the bench.

Handing it to the dead

Zombie Digging turns clay into something you no longer do yourself. It costs fifty red and ten blue, which is 230 red counting everything in front of it, and it grants the Clay Digger Stand along with its sand equivalent and the Porter Station.

A stand produces one Clay every eight seconds without asking for a pit, an energy point or a mastery level. That is slower than swinging at a pit yourself and it never stops, which is the trade the whole zombie half of the game makes.