Graveyard Keeper 2 Armor, Weapons and Towers: Outfitting Your Army

What Does It Take to Field an Army?

Graveyard Keeper 2’s war layer looks like a tactics problem and is actually a logistics one. The official description lists crafting armor and weapons, training troops, and building towers and fortifications as separate pillars — but they all draw from the same pool of materials, stations, and workers you already built for the graveyard.

That reframing matters, because it tells you where the bottleneck is. Battles are won or lost long before they start: by whether the anvil has produced enough bows, whether the barricades were built before you needed them, and whether the zombies marching out are carrying gear worth the corpse they came from.

For the fight itself — objectives, squads, and how battles resolve — the tower defense and battle systems guide is the right page. This one stays upstream, on what you have to make and in what order.

What Gear Does Your Army Actually Use?

Four categories come up across official material and community reporting:

The important thing about that table is that every row is a crafting recipe. There is no shop that sells you an army. Launch coverage shows squad equipment being produced at the anvil, and reports an achievement tied to crafting a substantial number of battle items — which is a useful hint about scale, because achievements are usually set where normal play arrives eventually rather than immediately.

That achievement is a reasonable proxy for how much material the military track consumes. If you want to see where you stand, the achievements guide tracks what the milestones require.

How Do Equipment Tiers Work?

Community coverage describes a clear upgrade ladder for the gear your zombies use, and the numbers attached to it are worth knowing even though they are community-reported.

Rusty tools are described as giving roughly a single point of work mastery. Bronze tools are described as giving two or more, which raises a zombie’s output and lets it execute better recipes besides. Better tiers — iron is named — continue the pattern, and the recommendation attached to it is pointed: before recruiting more workers, check whether the ones you have are properly equipped.

The reasoning generalizes past any specific number. If output tracks equipment quality, then a workforce of well-equipped zombies outperforms a larger workforce of badly equipped ones, while consuming fewer corpses, fewer Supply Station slots, and less of the simulation budget that the performance guide flags as the game’s real cost center.

There is a related ceiling worth understanding on the corpse side: community coverage reports that bronze collars, the first tier you get, cap a zombie at five red skulls. That is an embalming-system limit rather than an equipment one, and the embalming and red skulls guide covers it. The connection is that both systems describe the same idea — your army’s ceiling is set by the quality of what you put in, not by how many you field.

What Is the Right Order of Investment?

Working from the available evidence, the order that holds up is:

1. Get production self-sufficient. An army built on a hand-fed Supply Station will starve while you are away fighting. The zombie logistics network guide covers making the base run without you.
2. Equip the troops you already have. Upgrade tool and weapon tiers before adding bodies. Coverage treats this as the cheaper path to more output.
3. Build the fortifications. Barricades are described as crafted and placed before a fight rather than improvised during one, and the town’s defenses are a permanent structure the town rebuilding guide treats as part of reclamation.
4. Add troop variety. Pikes plus bows, melee plus ranged — community advice is consistent that a single unit type cannot carry a fight.
5. Scale the roster last. More soldiers cost more corpses, more gear, and more of everything above. Expand when a fight beats you, not before.

The squads and barracks page covers the roster side of that order in more depth, including how a soldier is a worker you permanently gave up.

What Is Honestly Not Documented?

Being straight about the gaps is more useful than filling them:

• No stat tables. Damage, range, armor values, and tower stats are not published anywhere credible as of the v1.0 launch. Any ranking you see is somebody’s impression.
• No recipe costs. The material costs of bows, armor, and barricades are not documented in our sources, so we cannot tell you what a full loadout draws from your stockpile.
• No tower taxonomy. Coverage refers to towers and fortifications as features without enumerating types or their differences.
• No verified battle-item counts. The achievement exists; what it demands in practical production terms is unconfirmed.

That leaves you with a method rather than a table: build a small force, gear it properly, watch which troops carry their weight, and reinvest in what works. Given the numbers are unsettled, evidence from your own save is worth more than any list — and the main zombie guide covers the workforce that produces all of it in the first place.