Graveyard Keeper 2 Zombie Mastery and Perks — Full Breakdown

What is zombie mastery in Graveyard Keeper 2?

Zombie mastery is a five-line talent system your workers level on their own. The lines are Building, Smithing, Farming, Book writing and Anatomy, spread over roughly 85 nodes and 49–50 named perks. Mastery is set by the work station a zombie is standing at, never by the zombie itself.

That last point changes how you plan. Asking “which zombie should I send” is really asking “which mastery does this station feed”. The two available counts differ slightly: wikily lists 49 named perks, while a Steam guide that read the 1.004.x game files lists 50. The gap is the dual-line perk Factory Operative, which belongs to both Building and Smithing.

Which mastery does each work station use?

The station decides the mastery, every single time. A furnace or anvil trains Smithing, a woodworking bench or sawmill trains Building, a kitchen table trains Farming, a writing desk or printing press trains Book writing, and a formulation bench trains Anatomy.

Mastery	Nodes	Main stations	Affects quality?
Building	17	Woodworking bench, sawmill, Carpenter’s bench	Yes — Carpenter’s bench
Smithing	17	Furnace, anvil, smithy	No — speed only
Farming	17	Kitchen table, millstone	Yes — Kitchen table
Book writing	19	Writing desk, printing press	Yes — Writing desk and printing press
Anatomy	15	Formulation bench, embalming	Yes — Formulation bench

wikily also gives the full-tree tech cost for each line: Building 4,600 red, Smithing 4,450 red, Farming 4,650 green, Book writing 1,500 red plus 835 blue, and Anatomy 1,500 red plus 1,075 blue. Every line tops out at +9 from mastery alone.

How do zombies earn tech points?

Zombies earn tech points by completing batches at their station, and those points land in that zombie’s own private pool. Player-crafted points drop on the ground for you to pick up; zombie-crafted points never touch the ground and never reach you. The pool is personal, so you cannot move points from one zombie to another.

Batch produced	Station	Points to the zombie
Board	Sawhorse	1 red
Wooden Plank	Woodworking Workbench I / II	2 red
Flour	Millstone	1 green
Clean Paper	Writing Desk	2 red + 3 blue
Simple Candle	Formulation Bench	1 red + 1 blue

Points are awarded per completed batch, not per item produced. Across the game about 575 recipes carry a tech point reward, usually 1–6 points and occasionally 15. Nothing is spent automatically: you open that zombie’s Character or Perks panel and buy the node yourself.

How much do perks and mastery upgrades cost?

The first mastery upgrade costs 50 red for Building and Smithing, 50 green for Farming, and 25 blue for Book writing and Anatomy. The second level of each doubles to 100 and 50 respectively. Individual perk nodes use fixed price tiers of 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 400 and 500 points, all in a single colour.

Child nodes require their parent, so a wrong early pick locks that branch rather than merely wasting points. Community reports single out Apprentice Carpenter as a trap, because it does not lead on to Master Carpenter. For how the player-side point economy works, see tech points farming.

Do tools raise zombie mastery?

Tools add levels to one specific mastery, not to general work ability. A bronze axe gives +2 Building, a bronze shovel +2 Farming and a bronze hammer +2 Smithing, while a rusty axe or pickaxe gives +1 Building. Handing a bronze axe to a zombie at a writing desk gives you nothing at all.

That is why “my zombie is standing there doing nothing” is almost always a tool problem. Zombies start at mastery 0, and even basic recipes ask for 1–2 levels, so the tool is what pushes them over the requirement. The ladder per mastery runs from +1 at the rusty tier up to +6 at steel, except Book writing and Anatomy, which stop at +4.

Which stations care about mastery level for quality?

Only five stations use mastery to set product quality: Kitchen table, Writing desk, Printing press, Formulation bench and Carpenter’s bench. Everywhere else — furnace, anvil, sawmill — products have no quality tiers at all, so mastery only changes how fast the batch finishes.

Each of the five maps to a colour and a threshold set: Kitchen table is green with 1/4/7 for salads and sauerkraut, Writing desk is yellow with 1/6/10 early and 4/10/14 later, Printing press is yellow at 1/6/10, Formulation bench is blue with 1/4/8 for solutions and 1/6/12 for injections, and Carpenter’s bench is orange at 2/4/6.

So stacking a furnace worker to mastery 14 buys nothing but speed, while the same effort on a writing desk pays off directly. If your goal is silver or gold output, that is where the points belong. Product tiers themselves are explained on item quality tiers.

What limits a zombie’s mastery?

The red skull count on the corpse, and nothing else structural. Every perk node and every mastery upgrade you buy takes one red skull slot, so corruption on the corpse is the hard ceiling on how deep a tree you can afford. Collars set that ceiling: bronze caps at 5 red skulls, gold at 10 and steel at 99.

Collar tiers and how to raise red skulls are on corruption and red skulls, and the revival chain itself is on how to get zombie workers. Once the tree is planned, the stations and supply chain that feed it are on the zombie production line page.