Melted Fat

Thirteen recipes want Melted Fat, and the game gives you two ways to get it. One is a shop that has to be built first. The other is a building behind a reputation gate, and most players meet the shortage long before they meet the gate.

Nothing else produces it. No node drops it, no body carries it, no quest hands it over, and no other bench will make it however far up the tech tree you climb.

The route runs through Albert, the plague doctor, which is the part nobody guesses from looking at a jar of fat.

The recipe, and the two ways to feed it

Melted Fat is made at the Distillation Cube and nowhere else. One Fat, two Clay Plate and twenty Fuel return four in six seconds, and the craft pays 1 and 1 back.

There is a second recipe for anyone farming rather than butchering. Three Seed oil in place of the Fat returns three instead of four, over eight seconds, for the same two Clay Plate and twenty Fuel.

Fat itself comes off bodies on the autopsy table, so the supply is the graveyard rather than the garden. Seed oil comes off a Millstone, four of any seed for two oil, which is the route if corpses are scarce and crops are not.

Albert is the gate, not the tech tree

Alchemy, Distillation is the technology that unlocks the cube, and it costs almost nothing: 5 and 5. Alchemy, Basic sits above it and costs nothing at all.

What sits above both is a reputation lock reading ten with Albert, the plague doctor. That is the real price of every jar of fat you will ever own, and it is paid in favours rather than spheres.

The cube then costs two Wooden Plank, two Bronze Detail and twelve Brick, which is an afternoon rather than a project. It lives in the Alchemy Lab with the rest of the alchemy benches.

What thirteen recipes do with it

Polishing is the group people meet first. Polished Bronze, Polished Stone and Polished Marble each take one, and between them they gate the Writing Desk, Furnace II, the Sewing Table and most of the graveyard’s better monuments.

Oiling is the second. Oiled Plank and Oiled Beam both want one, and oiled wood is what the later buildings are made of.

Then the writing and the dead. Ink takes one alongside Ash and Water, and the Formulation Bench spends it on Simple Incense, Fancy Incense and both of the corpse treatments.

Two more are quiet and worth knowing. Lacquer and Paint both take one, and a door in the resurrection basement wants one to open, which is the only time the game asks you to spend it on a lock.

It carries 3 in runes for alchemy as well, which is a high red reading for something this cheap to study.