Every recipe has a length in ticks. Each tick worked costs the recipe's energy per tick, so the energy for a whole craft is the energy per tick times the ticks actually spent.

Every station except the Beehive uses one of the five masteries: Building, Smithing, Farming, Book writing or Anatomy. A recipe lists the mastery level it needs. Below that level a normal recipe cannot be worked at all ("Not enough mastery"). At or above it, each tick adds the crafter's mastery divided by the required level, rounded down and capped at 3, to the progress bar.

Star crafts (prayers, stories, newspapers, embalming solutions and injections, planting seeds and two dishes, Vegetable salad and Bowl of sauerkraut) and autopsy work can be started below the required mastery. Each tick then succeeds with a chance that grows with the crafter's mastery against the requirement; a failed tick still uses up a tick of the craft. The result's quality depends on how many ticks succeeded: the recipe card lists how many successful ticks give silver and gold.

Finished crafts pay out red, green or blue tech points, shown on every recipe card. Tech points buy technologies, and technologies unlock 355 of the 416 recipes and 176 of the 194 buildings. The tech points page lists every other source.

75 recipes need an extension built next to the station: a Tool Rack or Fine Tool Rack beside the woodworking and stonemason benches, a Hardening Bucket beside the anvils, Bellows or a Casting Table beside the furnaces, and the attachments of the factory benches. Without it those recipes cannot be crafted; each station page lists which recipes need which extension.

Furnaces, the Kiln, the Kitchen Ovens, the Distillation Cube, the barrels, the Compost Piles, the Bioreactor and the Crematoriums craft over time once a recipe is started, and a planted bed grows on its own. Fuel is an ingredient on every Kiln, Kitchen Oven and Distillation Cube recipe, on most Furnace recipes, on the Brewing Stand's and on Chocolate at Kitchen Table II; a Firewood shed in the same area turns every 2 Firewood into 20 Fuel.

Zombies can be put to work at 46 of the 84 stations and start a normal recipe only when their own mastery reaches its requirement. Factory benches (Assembly benches, Smithies, Kitchens) need a zombie to work and must be linked by conveyor belts; they make supplies and kits. The zombies page covers zombie workers in full.