Fuel

Fuel is the one resource in Graveyard Keeper 2 you cannot pick up, cannot carry and will never see in your bag. Sixty one recipes ask for it, every furnace and kiln and oven in the game runs on it, and nothing explains where it comes from.

Fuel is a number held by the building that burns it. Understanding that is the whole thing, because until you do, a recipe asking for 20 Fuel looks like a wall with no door.

What Fuel is

Every station that burns something has its own Fuel meter, and that meter is filled by a Firewood shed I standing next to it. You put Firewood into the shed, the shed converts it, and any burner nearby draws from the pool without you touching it again.

The conversion is fixed and generous: two Firewood become twenty Fuel. That ratio is why Firewood feels cheap and Fuel feels invisible, and it is the reason nobody notices the system until something refuses to craft.

A shed costs 10x Stick and 2x Bronze Nails, which is nothing, and there is a second one built for the kitchen so your cooking and your smelting do not compete for the same pile. Each one feeds only the stations beside it, so put them where the burning happens.

Where Firewood comes from

Firewood is cut at a Chopping Spot, which you unlock with the Chopping technology and build for a single Short Log. The technology costs 8 red and sits one node after The Concept of Wood.

One Short Log gives ten Firewood. Short Logs come from a Sawhorse, two per Log, so the full chain runs tree to Log to Short Log to Firewood to Fuel, and one Log is worth about two hundred Fuel by the time it reaches the shed.

The Chopping Spot also takes twenty Stick for the same ten Firewood, and that second recipe is the one worth knowing. Twenty Sticks and one Short Log both return ten Firewood, so whichever you have more of is the right one.

Sticks arrive two at a time from the Lumberjack stand whether you want them or not, so a zombie chopping wood is quietly producing a second fuel supply you were going to throw away. Twenty of them is ten Firewood, so a stand left running feeds the kiln without your touching a tree.

What burns the most

Smelting is where Fuel goes. An Iron Ingot costs 30 per craft, a Golden ingot the same, and a Lens also 30, which makes glassworking and metalwork the two habits that empty a shed.

Below those, a Brick and a Bronze Ingot take 20 each and Glass takes 10. Cooking is cheaper throughout, 10 to 25 a dish, but you do it far more often, so the kitchen shed drains faster than the arithmetic suggests.

The perk that only helps the kitchen

Heat Saver looks like the answer to a fuel problem, and it answers a different one from the problem most players have. It is a kitchen perk, and the furnace is where most players feel the shortage.

It cuts the cost on all thirty seven cooking recipes, taking Bread from 10 to 5 and a Berry Pie from 20 to 10. It does nothing at all for the twenty six that are not cooking, which includes every ingot, every brick, glass, lenses, brewing and the alchemy flasks.

The perk that does help the supply side is Axeman on the Building track, which adds five Firewood per rank to every chop. One rank takes a Short Log from ten Firewood to fifteen, which is a fifty percent raise on the whole chain rather than a discount on one end of it.

How much to keep

A shed holding a few hundred Fuel covers an evening of smelting, and the honest answer is that Fuel stops being a problem the moment you automate the wood rather than the burning. Before that, the discipline is topping up both sheds before a long session rather than during one.

Put a zombie on a Lumberjack stand, run its Logs through a Sawhorse and its Sticks through a Chopping Spot, and both fuel sheds fill themselves. Until then, cut Firewood in batches whenever you pass the Chopping Spot rather than when a recipe stops you.