Energy and Insanity: How to Restore Energy and Cure Insanity

Energy and insanity at a glance

How energy works

Energy is the Keeper’s wallet for manual labour. You pay it swing by swing: every tick of a manual craft, every axe stroke, every shovelful of somebody’s final resting place. Its ceiling is 100 minus your insanity, so at 25 insanity the bar can never pass 75, however many pies you swallow.

What costs energy and what is free

Three rules shape your whole day:

• An empty bar does not knock you out. The swing simply does not happen. No fainting, no penalty, just a Keeper staring at a tree.
• Overflow is lost. Energy above your ceiling vanishes, including when insanity rises and pulls the ceiling down. An 80-energy Burger eaten 20 points from the top wastes 60.
• Mastery is an energy discount. Each tick advances a craft by your mastery divided by the recipe’s requirement, rounded down and capped at 3. At double the requirement a craft takes half the ticks and half the energy; at triple, a third.

Talents that trim the bill

Several Keeper talents cut energy per tick on specific stations. They are cheap ways to stretch a bar you cannot raise. The full trees are in the talents and inspirations guide.

Best food for energy

Food refills energy instantly. This page ranks dishes by the energy they restore and by how much insanity they cost; for the best food overall and every recipe, use the cooking guide. The table ranks the dishes and drinks worth cooking by energy per serving, then shows what one batch is worth. Portions read base / with the perk: Cook for Kitchen Table dishes, Bread and Berry Pie; Cook II for most oven dishes.

Graded crops do not make stronger dishes, they make more of them: a gold Onion turns a 2-portion batch of Onion rings into 7. The Heat Saver talent cuts oven Fuel (Lasagna drops from 25 to 10). Want the whole ingredient tree for a batch? The crafting calculator breaks Burgers down to the last grain of Wheat. Every recipe and kitchen upgrade lives in the cooking guide.

What to eat at each stage

First days: Bread and Berry Pie. Repair the Kitchen Table (2 Wooden Plank) and the Kitchen Oven (2 Piece of stone) at home; both need Building mastery 3. Then build the bread chain:

1. Research Gardening, Millstone and Bread: 5 red and 40 green points from scratch.
2. Mill 4 Wheat into 5 Flour at the Millstone.
3. At the Kitchen Table, 6 Flour and 2 Water make 6 Dough.
4. Bake 4 Dough into 4 Bread at the oven.

Bread is only 18 a slice, but it goes into Burgers and Sandwiches, and its Dough into Lasagna and Berry Pie. Berry Pie gives 30 and takes 3 insanity off, and your first Berry Pie batch unlocks Pastries (Muffin and Croissant). Until your oven is running, Januarius at the Village Tavern sells both Berry Pie and Beer.

Mid game: unlock meat, then live on Lasagna. The meat recipes hide behind two free cooking technologies that you trigger by doing something slightly regrettable:

1. Eat one Flesh from your bag. It costs 10 insanity and reveals Oh no!: Baked meat and Sandwich.
2. Bake one batch of Baked meat. That reveals Anyway…: Minced Meat, Burger and Lasagna.

That one Flesh is the only one you should ever eat. Afterwards, grind Flesh at the Millstone: 1 Flesh makes 2 Minced Meat, and each Minced Meat with 3 Dough bakes 4 Lasagna. One Flesh therefore becomes 8 Lasagna, 400 energy for 8 insanity in total. Baked as meat, the same Flesh gives 80 energy for 20 insanity. Flesh comes out of corpses as a pocket item, but it is also a white skull, so only take it from bodies you will not bury (the corpse quality guide explains why).

Late game: Burgers and fish. A Burger is the strongest food you can cook every day: one Minced Meat makes 4 of them, 320 energy per batch. If you would rather keep insanity at zero, Baked fish, Baked salmon and Fish soup add none at all. Kitchen Oven II runs the same recipes with 5-second ticks, half the base oven time.

Buff foods worth a slot

Some dishes are worth eating for their side effect rather than their energy.

The Sauna, or why 10% matters

The pre-order Sauna grants Steamed Up: dishes, Bread, Cheese and Jug of Milk restore 10% more energy for 60 in-game minutes. When the buff ends, food energy does not return to normal; it stays 10% below normal. A Burger then gives 72 instead of 80, and a day on four Burgers loses 32 energy, every day the penalty lasts. Players disagree on whether a later visit clears it; loading a save from before your first visit is the only fix everyone agrees on. Version 1.008 does not fix it. Details and workarounds are in known issues.

What raises insanity

Insanity creeps up in small slices from grim work and in big bites from bad food.

Exhumation is the steepest grim job by far, five times the cost of digging per swing. Cremation, on the other hand, adds nothing: a body you do not plan to bury can go into the furnace with a clear conscience.

What insanity does to you

Insanity has exactly two effects, and both are about work:

• Every point removes a point of maximum energy. At 40 insanity you live on a 60-point bar. At the cap of 80, you get 20.
• At the cap, grim jobs are refused. The Keeper will not perform autopsies, dig, fill graves or set headstones until you bring insanity down. Nothing else happens: there is no other penalty.

The danger is quiet. Insanity never stops you outright before the cap; it just makes every day a little shorter. Treat it as lost energy and cure it as soon as a cure costs less than the energy it gives back.

Iron Will: a safety net with a catch

Iron Will is a Smithing talent (row 5, 1 Smithing inspiration point, after the fourth Smithing mastery node) that stops insanity at 70. Your maximum energy then never falls below 30. The catch: grim jobs are refused at the cap, so with Iron Will your graves and autopsies stop at 70 instead of 80. Take it if you would rather never drop under 30 energy; skip it if you run long autopsy or burial sessions and keep insanity down with drinks anyway.

How to cure insanity

The 3-bronze rule

At base price, every drink in that table costs exactly 3 bronze per point of insanity removed: Beer is 36 for 12, Mead 30 for 10, Apple Cider 21 for 7, bronze Wine 75 for 25 and gold Wine 105 for 35. So buy whichever drink is closest, not whichever looks cheapest. Shop prices move with each trader’s stock, so read these as base values. Two exceptions break the rule:

• Beer with Beer thirst halves the price to 1.5 bronze per point. Eat a Toast with onions (1 Onion and 3 Dough at the oven, revealed by your first Onion harvest), then every Beer you drink in the next 7 min 30 s removes 24. Two Beers in that window: -48 insanity for 72 bronze.
• Chocolate is a luxury. Four Cacao cost 12 silver, so a bar works out at 60 bronze per point. The 50 energy it adds softens the bill, but it is a treat, not a habit. It also arrives late: the recipe needs Kitchen Table II (the Kitchen II technology, 50 green and 10 blue) and a hidden Chocolate technology that only a late character quest reveals (see the spoiler at the end).

Pastries cost more per point than drinks, but they are also food, so a Berry Pie or Croissant refills your bar while it calms you down.

Stories: therapy that pays for itself

Every tick spent writing or improving a Story at the Writing Desk, in the Writing Basement, takes 1 point of insanity off. A Story needs the Books I technology, Book writing mastery 6 and 3 Faith, 2 Clean Paper and 1 Ink. Two bronze Stories improve into a silver one, two silvers into a gold, and Stories are the base of prayers, books and Newspapers. Unlike a drink, this cure leaves you with something you need anyway. Eat a Bowl of sauerkraut first for up to +3 Book writing.

Wine: drink it or sell it?

Wine is the strongest cure and a late one. Winemaking costs 175 green and 20 blue points. Six Grapes and 1 Empty Bottle press into 1 Grape Juice at the Vine Press, then 4 Grape Juice age into 4 Wine at the Wine Barrel (5 with the Wine Master talent); both stations stand in the Vineyard Basement. Gold Wine is also in demand: the Brewery pays about 75 bronze for the first bottle, The Lord’s Vintage asks for 2, and after Inflation every mercenary hire costs 3. Drink the grades your quests do not need. The wine and alcohol guide covers the whole chain.

Sleep and Lack of sleep

How the bed works

• Only your bed at home works. There is no other place to sleep.
• The bed refuses you at full energy, unless you have Lack of sleep.
• Time runs 50 times faster in bed. Going from empty to full takes about 6 in-game hours, so do not lie down right before something tied to a day, such as a Wrath sermon (see the weekly calendar).
• Getting up saves the game. There is no other regular save.
• Lying down collects loose tech points left on the map.
• A normal night does not lower insanity, whatever the tutorial suggests.

Update 1.008 fixed a crash on going to bed that could throw the Keeper out of bounds.

Lack of sleep

An in-game day lasts about 7.5 real minutes. Stay awake for two of them (about 15 real minutes) and you get Lack of sleep:

The tooltip claims work wastes more energy. It does not: energy costs stay the same, and the extra bill arrives as insanity.

The two-day rhythm

Since the bed only cures insanity when it ends Lack of sleep, the efficient pattern is to stay up for two in-game days and go to bed soon after the debuff appears. Do the math before you linger: at 0.5 insanity per energy point, spending 40 energy under Lack of sleep adds 20 insanity, exactly what the bed will take off. So once it shows, wind down: sell, sort chests, walk your rounds, then sleep. Keep your drinks for after you wake up, when they work at full strength.

The price of this rhythm is fewer saves, since the game only saves when you get up. Before anything risky, sleep anyway (spend a little energy first, since the bed refuses a full bar): a backup is worth more than 20 insanity.

Common mistakes

• Sleeping every night to “rest off” insanity. Plain sleep refills energy and nothing else. Only ending Lack of sleep removes the 20.
• Drinking cures under Lack of sleep. Every cure is halved. Sleep first, drink after.
• Baking Flesh instead of mincing it. Two Baked meat give 80 energy for 20 insanity; the same Flesh minced into Lasagna gives 400 energy for 8.
• Eating Flesh more than once. The first bite unlocks Oh no!; every bite after that is 10 insanity for 10 energy.
• Treating Soldier’s ale as a drink. It adds 20 insanity for 5 energy. Brew it for the Alcohol Baron bottle count if you like (no trader buys it), but never swallow it.
• Eating a big meal near the top of the bar. Overflow is lost. Save the Burger for when you are at least 80 short.
• Running into the cap mid-burial. At 80 the shovel stops working. Cure before a long day of graves or autopsies, not halfway through it.
• Visiting the Sauna. One hour of +10% food energy, then a lasting -10% on every meal that no patch has fixed yet.
• Waiting for Energy Potions or Deep sleep. Neither can be obtained in 1.008.
• Drinking the gold Wine your quests need. Drink bronze and silver; keep gold for The Lord’s Vintage and the mercenaries.

Where Chocolate comes from