Jack

Jack is the workshop foreman, and he is the single hardest gate in Graveyard Keeper 2. Three separate technologies are locked behind his reputation, and none of them can be bought with spheres at any price.

He is also the reason people give up on the Factory without realising what stopped them. The node in front of it costs nothing and asks only for 50 reputation with him, and nothing on it explains that the answer is a person rather than a number.

What his reputation buys

Three nodes, and they are spread far enough apart that you meet him as a gate three separate times. Each one is a zero-sphere node whose only requirement is the number, so no quantity of technology points substitutes.

The saw is the one worth hurrying for. It turns one Log into four Wooden Planks in four seconds at Building mastery four, six planks with Carpenter, and planks are the currency of every build desk in the game. Before it you are splitting logs one at a time.

How to raise it: ten at a time

Reputation with a named character moves in flat steps of ten and nothing else touches it. There is no gift system, no daily, and no way to trade your way up. You either finish a quest that pays him or your number stays where it is.

Jack has around twenty of those payments across the story, so roughly a hundred reputation is available against the seventy he asks for at most. The slack is real but the early ones are not optional, because the Circular Saw at forty is four payments on its own.

Two of those are worth planning around. The supplies order step wants town orders filled before he will talk, which is a production problem rather than an errand, and the Factory tour asks you to have a working Factory before he will come and look at it.

Jack’s Back in Business is the one that reads as broken. Only the Market Square Purge clears the zombies it means, and winning that still does not tick it, because the quest closes on a conversation and he is standing in the Town Warehouse rather than in the workshop you just emptied.

He sells nothing at all

Jack is registered as a vendor with three tiers like every other trader, and every one of those tiers is empty. Herm carries fifty five items and the town alchemist a hundred and three; Jack carries none.

So there is no shop to level up and no stock to wait for. His tiers exist for the conversation, and everything you want from him arrives through reputation instead.

The Factory is his idea

The reason he gates the Factory is that the whole thing is his project. His problem is workers, yours is that you have a yard full of workers who do not need paying, and the questline is the two of you working that out.

There’s nobody anymore who wants to work in a good old manufactory.

This might surprise you, but… I have plenty of workers willing to work at my factory.

Your factory? With conveyor belts and automated workbenches?

Yeah… a real underground facility…

Jack and the Keeper, on the calculations

That conversation is also where the steel problem starts, which is what his third lock is about. The finest steel comes from the Royal Foundry on the north side of town, reachable only through a water tunnel, and somebody has seen smoke coming out of it recently.