Graveyard Keeper 2 Item Quality — Bronze, Silver and Gold

What are the item quality tiers in Graveyard Keeper 2?

Three: bronze, silver and gold. Quality is carried in the item’s name — Wine (bronze), Wine (silver), Wine (gold) — and it changes what the item sells for and what it can be used for. Only star recipes can produce anything above bronze; every ordinary recipe always outputs the plain version.

You will also see body parts with grades attached, which are the same three tiers applied to organs pulled during an autopsy. Quality never appears on a stack — a pile of 12 Iron Nails is a single entry, while two Stories of different quality occupy two inventory slots and count as different items when you research them at the Study Table.

Grades also decide what an item is allowed to become. Several alchemy formulas accept only a named grade, and some ingredients change how many runes they carry depending on the star on the item, so the same physical material is not interchangeable across tiers.

Which recipes can produce silver and gold items?

Only the star recipes, and the list is short. It covers every prayer, Story, Newspaper, the corpse and zombie preservatives and injections, every seed-planting recipe, Vegetable salad and Bowl of sauerkraut, and all autopsy operations. Everything else — planks, nails, ingots, bricks — has no quality tier at all.

Notice what is not on the list. Most of the crafting chain that consumes your day produces flat bronze goods, so chasing gold quality on a stack of Iron Nails is not a thing. The crafting stations list shows which stations own the star recipes; the Writing Desk carries most of them, and its location is covered in the writing desk guide.

How does the star craft system actually work?

Each tick is rolled separately. A star recipe lets you start even when your mastery is below the requirement, and after that every tick either succeeds or fails. A failed tick still consumes a tick of progress but does not count toward quality, so a botched job costs the same time and energy as a clean one.

The recipe card states the payoff directly: how many successful ticks produce a silver result and how many produce gold. Land below the silver number and you get bronze.

What happens if you craft below the mastery requirement?

On an ordinary recipe, nothing happens at all — the station refuses with a Not enough mastery message and you cannot start. Star recipes are the deliberate exception. They let you work under-levelled and pay for it with failed ticks, which is why a low-level Writing Desk session can still produce a usable prayer.

Does mastery change how fast a station finishes?

Yes. Progress per tick equals your mastery divided by the recipe’s required mastery, rounded down and capped at 3. At double the required mastery you finish in half the ticks and burn half the energy, which makes levelling a mastery branch a straight throughput upgrade rather than a convenience.

The three cases worth remembering: equal mastery means 1 progress per tick, double mastery means 2, and triple or better means 3. The cap is why pushing a mastery far past three times the requirement stops paying for itself.

Which star recipes have which silver and gold thresholds?

The first table lists the Writing Desk and kitchen star recipes, with the number of successful ticks each tier needs. Two prayers are missing because their cards never roll quality. The second table covers the autopsy operations, which use the same mechanic with their own numbers and are the star crafts you run most often early on.

Product	Use	Silver threshold	Gold threshold
Basic Prayer	Sermon; unlocks the prayer line	6 successful ticks	10 successful ticks
Faith Prayer	Sermon; Faith income	8 successful ticks	12 successful ticks
Money Prayer	Sermon; coin income	8 successful ticks	12 successful ticks
Combo Prayer	Sermon with a combined blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Combat Prayer	Sermon; combat blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Harvest Prayer	Sermon; growth blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Prayer for Repose	Sermon; corpse quality blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Prayer for Excellence	Sermon; bonus mastery blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Prayer for Likes	Sermon; Likes blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Hypno Prayer	Sermon; zombie-related blessing	10 successful ticks	14 successful ticks
Story	Writing material for prayers and books	6 successful ticks	10 successful ticks
Newspaper	Printing Press output; sold in bulk	6 successful ticks	10 successful ticks
Solution for Corpses	Embalming fluid	4 successful ticks	8 successful ticks
Solution for Zombies	Embalming fluid	4 successful ticks	8 successful ticks
Injection for Corpses	Embalming injection	6 successful ticks	12 successful ticks
Injection for Zombies	Embalming injection	6 successful ticks	12 successful ticks
Vegetable salad	Food	4 successful ticks	7 successful ticks
Bowl of sauerkraut	Food	4 successful ticks	7 successful ticks

Prayer for Storms and Prayer for Old God are the two prayers whose cards carry no silver or gold threshold, so do not expect a quality roll from them.

The autopsy operations follow the same pattern with their own numbers, and they are the star recipes you will run most often early on:

Autopsy operation	Output	Silver threshold	Gold threshold
Remove skin	Skin	3 successful ticks	5 successful ticks
Remove bones	Bones	4 successful ticks	7 successful ticks
Remove skull	Skull	5 successful ticks	9 successful ticks
Remove heart	Heart	6 successful ticks	11 successful ticks
Remove brain	Brain	7 successful ticks	13 successful ticks
Remove guts	Guts	6 successful ticks	11 successful ticks

The seed-planting recipes are also flagged as star crafts, but their cards carry no silver or gold tick numbers, so plan your seed quality from the seed item itself rather than expecting a crafting roll.

Do ingredient quality and item quality affect anything else?

Yes, in two ways. Star recipes read the quality of the materials you feed in, so a silver Story helps a prayer and a silver seed helps the bed. Separately, alchemy cares about quality because bronze, silver and gold versions of some ingredients carry different rune counts, and specific formulas demand a specific grade.

Body parts follow that rule too. Only gold-quality Heart, Brain and Guts carry runes, which is why a haphazard autopsy habit quietly starves your alchemy recipes later. The rune system and the formulas that need matching grades are covered there in detail.

Is item quality the same as graveyard quality?

No, and mixing them up wastes resources. Item quality is the bronze, silver and gold star on a physical object, affecting its price and its alchemy runes. Graveyard quality is a separate score built from skulls, wreaths, gravestones, fences and decorations, and it drives sermon income and the Likes cap.

Neither number converts into the other. Piling gold-quality items into your inventory does nothing for your graveyard score, and a high graveyard score will not improve the odds of a successful tick at the Writing Desk.