Dough

Dough is made at the Kitchen Table, and almost nobody finds it there. You go looking at the oven because that is where bread is, you go looking at the Millstone because that is where flour is, and the step in between sits on a third bench you already own.

It has no technology of its own either. Dough arrives bundled with a node called Bread and Pie, so searching the tree for the word turns up nothing.

Three benches, in this order

Wheat goes to the Millstone and comes out as Flour. Flour goes to the Kitchen Table with water and comes out as dough. Dough goes to the Kitchen Oven and comes out as whatever you were trying to bake.

The exact numbers are four Wheat for five Flour, then six flour and two Water for six Dough, then four dough and ten Fuel for four Bread. Every step wants Farming two and nothing more.

The front of the chain is a garden bed

Wheat is grown rather than found. Four Wheat seed go into an empty garden bed, the planting takes four seconds and the growing takes twelve, and both want the same Farming two the rest of the chain does.

What you get back is set by the bed rather than the seed. The bed’s own crop value decides the yield, which is why fertilizer and a better bed matter more than anything you do at the mill, and each rank of the Farmer perk adds one Wheat on top.

A Wheat seed costs two coins at a counter, so the whole economy starts from something you can buy by the handful. Keeping one bed on wheat permanently is enough to keep the oven running.

Forty green buys the whole chain

Three nodes at the bottom of the farming branch cover all of it. Garden Bed is 5, Millstone and Flour is 5 and 10, and Bread and Pie is 25.

That is 40 and 5 for the entire bread economy, which is about as cheap as the technology tree gets. Millstone and Flour hands over the bench and the flour recipe together, and Bread and Pie hands over dough and bread together.

The naming is the whole problem. Nothing in the tree is called dough, so the node that gives it to you reads as though it only concerns the finished baking.

Nine things are made of dough

Bread is the obvious one and the plain one: four dough and ten Fuel for four loaves, eighteen energy each. That is the bulk food of the early game and the reason to run the chain at all.

The rest are worth more than bread for the same dough. Berry Pie adds six berries and pays thirty energy with three insanity removed, Muffin takes milk, Croissant takes an egg, and Lasagna takes minced meat for fifty energy.

Three onion toasts round out the list, one per onion grade. If you have the extra ingredient, baking anything other than plain bread is the better use of the dough.

Two perks change the arithmetic

Left alone the chain runs four Wheat to five Bread, which is ninety energy from four crops. It is a good return before anything is optimized.

A zombie with the Miller perk turns the same four wheat into eight flour instead of five, and the Cook perk adds two loaves to every batch of bread. Between them the same field of wheat feeds you about half as long again.

The Heat Saver perk cuts the fuel instead, halving the ten Fuel a batch of bread burns. That one matters more than it looks, because fuel is the part of the chain you have to keep making rather than growing.