Town Gratitude

Town Gratitude is five Smiles you can carry. Using one drops five happiness into your pool on the spot, which makes it the only form of the stuff that sits in your bag instead of a meter. Nothing in Graveyard Keeper 2 crafts it, so the supply is fixed and worth understanding before you spend any of it.

You cannot make one

There is no recipe. No workbench produces Town Gratitude, no alchemy formula lands on it, no corpse carries one and no fish has ever come up holding one. It also cannot be destroyed, so the only thing you can do with a stack is spend it.

Three sources exist and that is the whole list: quest rewards, siege rewards, and one shop. Quests and sieges between them hold three hundred and nine of them across an entire save, which is one thousand five hundred and forty five Smiles, and once they are gone the shop is the only tap you can go back to.

Fifty two quests pay it, and the late ones pay triple

Quests are the largest source at a hundred and ninety units. The payout comes in three sizes and the split is almost even: twenty three quests hand over two, fifteen hand over four, and fourteen hand over six.

The six payers cluster late and they cluster around the palace and the workshop. Giving steel at the workshop, the Astrologer’s prosthesis and printing press errands, the organ conversations at the Crossroads and with the guards, the armor delivery in “Not in Shining Armor Yet”, Linda’s bottles and chocolate, the captain’s faith and the village money chest all pay six apiece. If you are hoarding quests for later, those are the ones worth saving.

Nothing marks these out in the quest log. The reward panel shows the item when you hand in, so the only way to plan around the six payers is to know which ones they are before you start.

Sieges pay the best rate in the game

Twenty three fights drop Town Gratitude, a hundred and nineteen units between them, and they fall into four bands. Seven of them pay eight, which is forty Smiles for one fight and the best single payout anywhere.

Two of those eight payers carry no defense power of their own, and they are not free. They are second waves that follow the fights at seventy two and eighty, so you reach them by winning those first and the eight is the back half of a longer fight. The rest of the band runs from fifty six to a hundred and sixteen, and one more fight pays seven at a hundred and four.

Below that, eleven fights pay four and sit between twelve and eighty eight defense power, and four pay three. The three payers are the sewer and the smaller skirmishes, and they make up for it with Keys for Looters. Most fights also pay Zombie goo alongside, and a few hand over a Defender’s Emblem or a Victory Banner.

Januarius is the only shop that stocks it

The head of the village keeps Town Gratitude on his shelf and nobody else does. He holds one at his first tier, two at his second and five at his third, so upgrading his shop multiplies your only renewable source by five.

That is the argument for putting his upgrades ahead of shops you visit more often. Every other source runs dry: quests get completed and sieges get won, and afterward Januarius is the whole economy.

What the Smiles are for

Sermons spend them. A service draws on your happiness and on your crosses at the same time, and the smaller of the two numbers decides how many parishioners turn up. Pour Smiles into a church with no crosses and nothing improves, which is the trap behind most disappointing ceremonies.

Day to day, most of your happiness comes from somewhere else entirely. Town orders are the main supply, and they can only be taken on Pride day. Selling goods that carry the happiness label fills a bar with each vendor, and that bar has a weekly ceiling of its own that resets every Pride day too.

Two perks move the needle on the recurring sources. Happy supplier pays more for town orders, and Likemaster hands some happiness back after a service.

The cap is the reason to bank it

Your happiness has a maximum, and hitting it wastes everything that arrives afterward. Three things raise it. Delivering Green Scroll to Linda on the Day of Lust raises it, the Happy Book perk raises it, and one late blessing removes the limit entirely.

Town Gratitude is how you get around that ceiling. Smiles in the pool are capped and Smiles in your bag are not, so an unspent stack is storage rather than idle currency. Hold it until a sermon or a demand needs the five.

One quest makes the case on its own. Gunter wants a large amount of happiness brought to him at the Astrologer’s Tower, and arriving with a stack of Town Gratitude in your bag turns a grind into a single conversation.