Ink

Ink is what the entire writing half of Graveyard Keeper 2 runs on. Forty five recipes call for it, and twenty three of those are Prayers, with another eight Books and four Scrolls behind them.

The recipe looks trivial. One Ash, one Water, one Melted Fat give four jars in six seconds at a Writing Desk. Two of those three are close to free and the third is one of the most expensive things you will make all game.

Where to get it

Two ways, and most players only find the first. You make it at a Writing Desk, which lives in the writing basement under your house, and one craft gives four jars in six seconds at Book writing mastery two.

The desk is cheap and early: four Wooden Plank, six Bronze Nails and one Polished Bronze. It comes from Writing Basic, five red and five green, which is a root node with nothing in front of it, so the whole writing half of the game is open from your first spheres.

If the desk is not an option yet, the basement is the reason. It is not there from the start: the Plague Doctor walks you into it early, first to open the closed hatch in your new home, then down into the dungeon underneath it.

Wow, our very own dungeon! How cool is that?!

I think it’s actually a pretty big one. Maybe even connects different places underground.

Can you imagine how many interesting things might be hidden in the dungeon of a mysterious Inquisitor’s base?

The Plague Doctor, on finding the basement

What stands between you and the room is one blockage, and his next step asks you to clear it. That costs three Bronze Detail and three Wooden Plank at Building mastery three, and the room behind it is the Writing Basement.

The hidden cost is the fat

Melted Fat is distilled at the Distillation Cube, and every batch burns twenty Fuel along with two Clay Plates. That is the same fuel price as a Brick, spent on an ingredient most players never think about.

There are two ways to make it and one is clearly better. One Fat yields four Melted Fat, while three Seed oil yields only three, and both burn the same twenty Fuel and two plates. Fat is the better input by a third, and Seed oil is worth milling at the Millstone only when you have no corpses to render.

Cube distillations raises the yield on both routes, taking the Fat recipe from four to seven. Since the fuel cost does not move, that perk nearly halves what a jar of Ink costs to produce.

Ash comes from bodies

Ash comes from one place only. You get it by cremating corpses at a Crematorium I, which produces five Ash and a Salt per body, rising to seven at the second tier.

That makes Ink one of the places where the graveyard and the library meet, and it means your writing throughput is limited by how many bodies you are willing to burn rather than bury. A corpse cremated is a corpse that never raises your graveyard rating, so the two uses genuinely compete.

Cremator doubles the return, taking a body from five Ash to ten and the second tier from seven to fourteen. On the Anatomy track it sits alongside the perks you were probably taking anyway.

Water is the easy one. It costs nothing, stacks to 999, and is never the reason you have run out.

What Ink is for

Prayers dominate, at twenty three of the forty five, and they are the reliable way to turn writing into faith. Books account for eight more, Scrolls four, and the rest are one-offs like dictionaries, glossaries, primers and the two Science Kits.

Everything in that list flows through the same desk, so Ink is the single item that gates the whole output. Stockpiling it is more useful than stockpiling any one of the things it becomes.

Scribe and Good press each pay four yellow talent experience while you work, one at the Writing Desk and one at the Printing Press. Neither adds a jar to the output, so they level a writing build faster rather than produce more from the same ingredients.

How to keep it flowing

Run the Crematorium whenever you have bodies you were not going to bury well, and keep the Distillation Cube fed with Fat rather than Seed oil. Those two habits cover the ingredients that run dry.

Past that, Ink is a fuel question, so the firewood chain is what to fix. A Lumberjack stand and a Firewood shed running in the background will do more for your writing output than anything on the Book writing track.