Graveyard Keeper 2 Production Calculator (2026) — Tick Math

What does this Graveyard Keeper 2 production calculator do?

It works one craft like an autopsy: pick a target output, set the maker mastery and the quantity you want, and the ledger reports steps per tick, ticks per craft, batches needed, total energy and an estimated wall-clock time. Below that, the per-step card converts ticks into seconds, and the upstream panel walks one level up the chain to flag which input step is your bottleneck.

How the math works

The engine implements the game’s own formula, cross-checked against community wiki data: every tick advances floor(mastery ÷ requirement) steps, capped at 3. Twice the requirement halves the ticks, three times cuts them to a third. A part-filled final tick still consumes the tick — the calculator rounds up for you. Total energy equals energy per tick times the ticks actually consumed, so the faster you craft, the cheaper the craft gets.

Zombies are not a special case: research found no zombie speed multiplier anywhere, so the same formula applies — a zombie simply brings its own mastery from the zombie tech tree, plus tool and perk bonuses.

Reading the bottleneck panel

The upstream panel takes every input of your chosen recipe and finds its producers in the cross-checked table, ranked by base ticks per unit. The slowest one wears the bottleneck badge — that is the station worth upgrading first, whether with a perk like Axeman (Firewood ×1.5) or a mastery bump. Inputs with no producer in the table say so honestly: you gather or buy them instead, and the table never claims a recipe exists when it does not. Steel Ingot is the famous case — it has no craft recipe at all, which is why our Steel Ingot guide starts with the bad news.

Tips for planning a full chain

• Target the mastery breakpoints. m6 on a m3 recipe means 2 steps per tick — the biggest single speed-up you can buy from the tech tree.
• Energy follows speed. Because energy scales with ticks consumed, a higher mastery also cuts the energy bill of every craft.
• Mind the pause rule. Menus and the inventory freeze time for you and your zombies alike, so idle planners lose nothing.

For factory-scale throughput — presets, units per hour and units per day — switch to the factory production calculator. If your bottleneck is bodies rather than benches, the how to make zombies guide covers recruitment, and Flax shows a full field-to-fabric chain you can trace input by input.