Stick

Forty recipes and buildings in Graveyard Keeper 2 want a Stick, and there is no recipe that makes one for you. You cannot queue them at a bench and no technology unlocks them, though Herm sells them from his first tier if you would rather buy than gather.

They arrive as litter. Fell a tree and the Log is what you carry away, while the sticks are what you leave on the grass, which is exactly the habit that leaves players short three hundred of them later.

A Stick sells for one coin and stacks to fifty. The pile is worth carrying even when you have no immediate use for it, because the things that want sticks want them in fours and tens.

The one recipe is run by a zombie

A zombie posted to the Lumberjack stand is the only thing in the game that produces sticks on purpose. Its cycle takes eight seconds and returns one Log and two sticks, so they are a byproduct there too, just one that lands in a container instead of on the floor.

The stand is two Wooden Plank and six Brick, and no technology unlocks it, which puts it behind the clay and kiln chain rather than behind spheres. Pair it with a Timber stockpile and both halves of every cycle land somewhere you can reach.

That is the real answer to running out. Chopping by hand and bending down for every stick is slower than the stand doing it while you are somewhere else, and Logger on the zombie side speeds the whole cycle rather than the drop.

Firewood is where most of them go

The Chopping Spot has two recipes for Firewood and they pay identically. One Short Log gives ten firewood, twenty sticks give ten firewood, both in five seconds at two energy a tick, and both pay 1.

Twenty sticks sounds steep next to one Short Log until you remember where each comes from. A Short Log is half a Log you had to carry and cut at a Sawhorse, while the sticks were going to rot on the ground, so the stick recipe is the one that costs you nothing.

Getting there is cheap. The Concept of Wood costs 2 and 2 and gives you the Sawhorse, then Chopping at 8 gives the Chopping Spot, which is a single Short Log to build.

Everything with a handle

Thirty of the remaining recipes are the tool and weapon lines, and they are consistent. Two sticks for an axe, a pickaxe, a hammer or a shovel, two for a sword, and four for either chisel, across all three metal tiers.

Bows and pikes want them too, and so do nine buildings: the Sawhorse, the four firewood sheds, the spinning wheel, the millstone, the vine trellis and the garden compost pile. Nothing here takes more than a few at a time, which is how the total sneaks up on you.

They are also an alchemy ingredient

Sticks carry one green rune, which makes them a legal input to the alchemy system rather than purely a crafting material. They are the cheapest green rune in the game at one coin, and they stack to fifty.

That matters when a formula needs green and you would rather not spend something better on it. The rune only shows up once the item has been studied, so a stick is worth putting on the Study Table early for a reason that has nothing to do with points.

How many to keep

Fifty covers a full set of tools with room to spare. A few hundred is only worth holding if you are feeding them to a Chopping Spot, and at that point they should be arriving from a stand rather than from your own pockets.

The habit worth forming early is picking them up as you go. Every tree you fell for planks is already dropping them, and walking past is the only way this item ever becomes a problem.