Graveyard Keeper 2 Bronze Nails — Every Source in the Early Game

Bronze nails are the material Graveyard Keeper 2's early game leans on hardest — the carpentry workbench, the stonemason workbench, the firewood shed and the hardened barrel all want them, and running dry stalls nearly every build. They come from two routes: looting the junk lying around your new home, or forging your own once a basic anvil is up.

Quick answer

Chop broken barrels with an axe and tidy junk piles by hand to collect bronze nails, or forge them at the wooden anvil — 1 bronze scrap becomes 6 bronze nails.

Looting barrels and junk piles

The fastest early source is the clutter scattered around your new home. Broken barrels and junk piles spawn in groups of two or three, and both contain nails:

• Broken barrels — keep an axe equipped and chop them open. Each drops bronze nails, bronze scrap and wooden planks.
• Junk piles — tidy them with the keeper's bare hands (no axe), collecting bronze nails and bronze scrap together.

These clusters are everywhere: around the inquisitor's base, near your house, across the surrounding land, and inside the village. Clearing them also grants the Junk Fighter series of inspirations, raising your metallurgy skill as a side effect — the mess literally levels you.

Forging nails at the wooden anvil

Once the local barrels are gone, switch to production:

1. Unlock the first metallurgy node in the tech tree, Bronze Working — it's the prerequisite for building the wooden anvil.
2. Open the blueprint table in your main yard and place a wooden anvil. It costs 1 short log (made at the sawhorse) and 1 stone.
3. Forge at the anvil: 1 bronze scrap → 6 bronze nails per craft. Scrap comes from the same barrels and junk piles you've been clearing.

Later in the game, additional recipes open that let you forge nails from bronze ingots and other materials, but scrap-to-nails carries the entire early game on its own.

Both chopping and forging burn energy, so eat decent food before long smithing sessions — our cooking guide covers the meal pipeline.

What bronze nails are used for

Expect to spend nails on most early and mid-game construction, starting with:

• Carpentry workbench
• Stonemason workbench
• Firewood shed
• Hardened barrel

You'll know the supply is healthy when those recipes stop showing their missing-material warnings. Keep the salvage route and the anvil running side by side and the early game never stalls on nails again.