Graveyard Keeper Graveyard Keeper - Advanced Starting Tips

An extensive guide I've written and tested containing lots of tips and tricks to help new players and advanced players alike.

Other Graveyard Keeper Guides:

First Week Guide (Church, Tech and Workshop).
Autopsy and Grave Rating Guide.
Wild Bee Hives Map.
Making Gold.
Recipes.

Tips For A Fast Starting Early Game

1. Starting a new game, dig up Gerry, and before talking to donkey and progressing further, you can actually explore the game world to get familiarized with the map layout and talk with the various npcs to get an idea of who is what.

+++ Time will not start to progress until the bishop tells you to pick up your tools from the graveyard trunk.You can also pick up a few quests during this time frame to be completed later on and read the garden and graveyard signs.

2. Take the corpse in the morgue, cut the flesh, and go in the backyard. Once there, go to the sign on the left. It'll tell you to talk to a member of the inquisition

+++ You will probably do that during the first week, but make sure you get there BEFORE the sun is in or past the middle of the sundial because, while time is frozen during cutscenes, npcs can still move, and the donkey spawns exactly when the sundial indicates past the sun, behind the stables the merchant sits by.

3. Bury the corpse. The bishop will tell you to fix the graveyard, but do not bother cleaning it up of bushes yet. Only remove bushes that are in the way of your graveyards.

+++ You will want to leave 2 tiles of space between most graves in tight formation, since there's limited space to build flowerbeds (5 slots in the starting space), and those cost 2 red flowers, 1 peat and 2 stone, and provide +2 gravescore each. Getting the materials to build one and noticing where they can be built can help with this.

+++ Keep the F key pressed after harvesting something with your tools, you will either automatically walk to the other ones and dig up a MUCH greater chunk of them, possibly instantly, based on how long you kept F pressed before you got to them, or you will get to decide where/what to dig, conserving time and energy. This doesn't work for things that don't require tools, like berry bushes and mushrooms.

++ Your tool durability will decrease based on actions performed, and not time spent on actions, thus you will neither lose nor save on durability with this trick.

4. Talk to the bishop about the certificate, after which the day timer actually starts ticking. Get your tools from the chest, go to the tavern and talk to Horadric about the garden, the contract, and the meat, and then trade him the contract.

+++ Try not to exhaust unnecessary dialogue options as they could provide you with stories later on after unlocking a cheap blue point tech.

5. Go to the blacksmith, give him the letter, sharpen your sword, try to be energy efficient when dispatching the slimes, hp doesn't matter as long as you don't die, just line them up so you swing at both at once, and then turn the quest in.

+++ Now with the sword there are 4 barrels that can be destroyed around the village, for flitch and possibly iron parts.You will have spotted them earlier when exploring the village.There's 2 extra guaranteed in the tavern, talk to horadric to get beer, destroy those 2 barrels and look in your inventory. If you managed to aquire at least 6 metal parts, you can go home, otherwise try to buy some from the blacksmith.

++ Edit: as of patch 1.023 the blacksmith quest awards 5 metal parts, so getting the 6 for the anvil and woodworking bench is almost guaranteed. Buying an iron ingot would be ideal as a first purchase.

++ You can give the beer to Gerry the next time you get into the morgue.

++ On the way back home, Gerry will tell you about your basement.

6. Sleeping has been changed since the alpha, and it now no longer matters when you sleep. Sleeping is the most cost efficient way to regain energy and should always be preferred instead of eating foods, unless the player character is far from home or in a hurry.

+++ Edit: as of patch 1.023 all tools, but most importantly starting tools have been massively buffed. Clearing the basement with the starting axe is now a decent idea. Since the basement is right under your house, it is possible to save the game(by sleeping) before clearing it, and reloading if you get few iron parts. On rare occasions it is possible to get 5 or more iron parts.

7. Now your goal should be clearing the bushes around your work area, and getting 10 sticks. Unlock the first wood technology and place that down. Afterwards, go to the North-East and gather berries from all the bushes

+++ Don't touch honey trees until you can actually use the honey to cook, or are really close to unlocking the church. After you unlock the insects tech, harvest honey every opportunity you get.

++ Besides cake, which is a quest reward recipe, one can unlock muffins which are really cheap to bake and require buying a 2 silver recipe from the inkeep's wife.

+++ You will be eating raw berries mushrooms and apples when you need energy early game.

8. Go cut the grove of trees on the way from your house to the morgue, that's gonna be your primary source of trees. Make sure to dig up the stumps too, that will ensure the trees will regrow and provide you with enough red points to unlock "soft spares".

+++ For green points, harvest any and all mushrooms and berry bushes, and if really desperate, look for vine bushes that can be dug up for 5 green points each(they eat alot of energy and shovel durabilty though).

+++ Always try to be by the lantern when dusk comes (when it lights up). If the donkey arrives with a corpse, get that corpse ASAP and put it on the autopsy table in the morgue. This will prevent the corpse from decaying badly. You can then sleep if you need energy, sharpen your shovel if it's below 8%, or operate on the corpse if you have more than half your energy bar.

+++ If you've slept before autopsy, you can simply reload if you mess up now. Before leaving the house area, make sure your shovel is above 8% durability, if not sharpen, then go to the morgue and commence autopsy.

++ Important - as of version 1.023, there is still a BUG in the game where if you exit and reload a savegame without properly restarting the game first, npcs might have their inventories frozen (they won't restock) and if loading an entirely different savegame, they might arrive on the wrong days too.

++ Removing blood and fat is a given, since they improve the corpse (-1red +1 white skull each). Fat is really important for making candles, boost fertilisers, oil, etc. once alchemy is unlocked.

++ Removing bones has no effect on the corpse and they are required in vast quantities later on in alchemy. Try to get bones if you have the energy/time to spare.

++ Removing flesh, skin and skull will always have undesirable effects on a corpse, so only remove those if the corpse is to be disposed of, preferably cremated.

++ The starting corpses will be crappy 1red/2white corpses, after removing fat and blood you will get them to -1red/4white. You can't see the negative red on the corpse, but burying them will result in a grave that starts at 1 quality and can go up to 4 max.

++ If you have unlocked Important parts later on, before removing fat and blood from the corpses, you can try removing the Heart, then the Brain, then the Intestines in that order. For all corpses, only 1 organ is the correct one to remove, the others will damage the white skulls a lot. If you pick the wrong one, try the others to see which was the correct one, then restart the game, the organs will have the exact same effects for that corpse. This is however not recommended early game as the chance to "fail" at removing organs properly is really high.

Tech Tree And Fast Progression

9. Unlock Sawing, and keep gathering sticks, cut trees and work on making flitch from logs until you have 20 red tech points. If your axe breaks, don't bother repairing it.

10. Unlock wood working FIRST, before anvil. It requires 2 iron parts, but you should have those from the blacksmith's slime quest. Making planks rewards 2 red points/ plank at a cost of 5 energy, and it's the fastest way to get red points early game. This is how you will make all your red points to unlock anvil and tool smithing.

11. Count your remaining iron parts, you will need a total of 4 for the anvil. If you took care to bring 6 parts back from the first time you went into town, you should have enough, otherwise go buy some.

12. Wait for early morning, and with 1-2 certificates from all the burials so far in hand, go trade them for money and sell all your starting tools(except the hammer and sword) and with the rest of the money buy ALL the iron ingots you can afford (at least 6, at most 8 ingots).

+++ To cover the cost of a new set of tools, a total of 5 ingots and 1 iron part are required. You can buy these from the money you'd get from selling your starting tools alone, and have a few coppers left over, so even if you get insanely unlucky and get no corpses in the first week (like me), you will still be able to change your tools.

+++ If you have 10 copper left over, go to the ranch and buy 5 peat from the peasant at the back, and gather 10 red flowers in the area.

13. With this, head back home, place your wooden anvil, and start making your tools 1 at a time, first shovel(so you can bury stuff), then axe, and finally pickaxe. This should easily be acomplishable before the first ingame week is over.

+++ With the new tools, you can finally go into the basement and clear it of all the debris ALOT more efficiently(keep F pressed to "charge your axe" between clears of debris for even faster clearing.

14. Now your next technologies to get are Firewood and the first grave decoration tech.

+++ With the axe you could now start making firewood for cooking, but it's probably a better idea to make 10 wood wedges, 4 planks and 4 iron parts, and go clear the wall to the north-east of your house. Clearing it will take about 2 whole bars of energy, but you will be able to find coal if you go to the north-west , hug the river and cross the bridge, and then go directly north to the mountain face.

++ Iron, marble, stone and coal veins can all be found there, along with a second house the player can use to rest and build crafting stations at.

15. Start building that furnace asap, it requires 6 iron parts, 14 stone and 4 flitch, but it will allow you to process the iron ore at the back of your house, in the small swamp there. If you're missing iron parts, buy some iron from the blacksmith.

16. By now you should get hard spares already, you can safely take 1 skull off of a botched corpse (preferably the one you didn't exhume yet, the first ever corpse you buried is perfect for this). Skin it too, and remove the bone.

17. Start tending your grave, with the kits you have, repair the stone cross, stone headstones and the simple stone fences you can , repair 2 wooden crosses. Remove the remaining stick-bushes in the graveyard, remove unnecessary damaged wooden fences and whatnot (you will be able to make firewood out of them) build the 5 flower beds.

18. From now on, you should make it a priority to make wooden fences for graves, since they cost a mere 1 plank each, and give +1 for the graves. Wooden crosses are actually a very good choice too, as they only cost 1 plank and 1 nail each, and they take 3 times less energy and time to craft as opposed to stone tombstones. You can recycle them later on as well. This should easily get you to +5 graveyard score or higher by the end of 2nd week, unlocking the church and faith.

19. After unlocking the church, the donkey will give you a "present" in the form of a pile of dung with carrot seeds inside it. Plant those asap, as you will need to pay the donkey 5 carrots/ corpse delivered later, paid in batches of 10.

+++ You will also need to visit Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, and buy a bottle of seed oil from him. You can also deliver 5 honey to him while you're at it, to unlock the awesome cake recipe. Buy some eggs and milk on the way back if you do.

20. Make sure that by next week's sermon, you get your graveyard quality as high as possible, as it will directly impact the amount of money you receive from sermons from now on.

21. With some 3 body parts in your inventory (that you hopefully keep stored in the graveyard chest after every autopsy) an empty energy bar, the 3 starting faith and a cake in your inventory, go to the church basement, eat the cake, start clearing the church basement (ruined bookshelves and such). You are guaranteed to get 1 bronze chapter. Decompose it to get 4 science points and research body parts while the cake buff lasts to get a good starting amount of blue points.

22. With the points you just got, unlock "inborn blacksmith" this will allow you to get more iron parts for every iron bar you use. Also get comfort of faith, and build all the church benches in the church, totaling 32 planks and 32 nails.

23. Go to town on sloth day(moon day). Grab the skull you probably should've gotten by now, go sell your certificates, and go to the lighthouse.

+++ Gather apples from the 2 apple trees that can be gathered from, and then dig up the 3 stumps in the area, those will grow back as gatherable apple trees for further visits.

+++ The astrologer will give you the old key and ask you for the diary, but will not be available to trade with unless you visited miss charm and got told by the writer that the astrologer sells writing supplies.

24. The next day, do the sermon. Your total faith will either be 2 or 4, depending on whether you succeeded, and your income should be equal to your grave score x3 copper coins. Congradulations, you just held your first proper sermon by week 3.

25. With 10 red points, unlock the church workbench under the "writing" tab, and look at what you need to build it. Get everything for it and build it once you need the pigskin for the furnace 2 upgrade.

+++ you can use 5 bat wings to craft the pigskin required.

26. Keep burying every corpse with 2 or less red skulls. Any botched corpse you can cremate at the cost of 8 wood billets once you unlocked the tech for it. This allows you to gain 5 ash, 1 salt, and most importantly, a burial certificate for it.

From now on, you're on your own, but I will leave some general tips in the next section.

More Tips

+++ Important early: The merchant's offer for a loan of 5 silver should be accepted immediately, as the money can then be used to get a teleporter stone for 2 silver(mandatory item). The rest of the money can be used to buy 4 bronze quality grape seeds every week when he has 8, costing 1 silver 80 copper total, and the pie recipe for 1 silver from the tavernkeep's wife.

++ Grapes can be grown without the need for their tech by just restoring some trellises, using peat(really important, saves you on seeds, you can buy it from the guy behind the ranch for 2 copper each early game) and planting them. The resulting grapes should be made into grape pies (this might require buying an egg and a milk jug once a week for pastry dough).

++ The resulting pies can be eaten or sold for a profit of about 55 copper each at the tavern. Selling 6 every week ensures a profit of above 3 silver, enough to cover the costs and generate a considerable surplus.

+++ As far as church decorations go, getting 2 confessionals is really worth it early on, as they each improve church score by 5 and sometimes provide stories and 1 faith, while being relatively cheap to build.

+++ The game currently DOES have a craft x function in it, but it's poorly implemented in my opinion. Before you select a recipe, fuel, or whatnot, you can click on the arrows on the side to "multiply" the cost and effect of said item. Mostly only good when cooking or melting metals, as it automates them.

+++ Priority should be given to unlocking the Circular Saw tech, as it will allow you to fully repair the shortcuts inside your basements, connecting your laboratory and mortuary.

+++ Speaking of shortcuts, it is faster to get into town by going into your basement and following the tunnel to the east, this will permanently unlock the shortcut trapdoor behind the bushes.

+++ It seems that the trunk costs in various locations differ in the amount of iron parts they require. For instance, a garden trunk is 2 iron parts, a graveyard trunk is 7 parts, a basement trunk is 3 parts and a workyard trunk is 4 parts.

+++ Provided you checked the sign by the church on the left in the early game, you can claim that burial site by talking to the inquisitor, accepting his friendship and giving him 20 firewood the next time you meet with him.

++ This will allow the player to have a maximum graveyard capacity of 88 corpses, from an initial 42, thus allowing your graveyard to eventually have at least 440 quality.

+++ The combo prayer should be unlocked in tech as soon as possible, and crafted, as it will greatly improve the income and faith generation for the player. Crafting it can be done by buying a chapter from the astrologer for 3 silver and making a soft cover. Then you assemble the book, and finally 7 faith is required to make the prayer.(It will require 15 church score to be 100% success)

+++ Unlocking the dungeon earlier on might be a decent idea, as it costs a total of 7 faith points (talking to miss Charm is not needed, 5 to persuade Snake, and 2 to inspect the key) The dungeon is a good source of various materials, plenty of bats inside for making paper, and the urns now drop various useful items including different quantities and qualities of seeds.

++ Once you get a healing potion from one of the urns, you can also repair the bridge that leads to the swamp (1 plank 4 flitch 8 nails) and go talk to Clotho. She will unlock the alchemy and embalming tech branches for free for the player, but you will be able to access her trading services only after you give her the healing potion.

++ The shortcut to clotho is quite cheap and can be made with 10 nails 3 planks and 6 flitch.

+++ Recently honey has been made consumable (can be eaten for +3 hp and +15 energy).

+++ Recently the starting tools have been buffed considerably, in the past they were the worst pieces of garbage imaginable and it was required to make the transition as fast as possible to iron tools, by selling the old tools and buying enough iron from the blacksmith to make them.

++ This strategy is no longer really necessary, and it might now be better to just start your iron production slowly with a furnace and the iron ore behind your house, and then evenutally get new tools. The tradeoff is that this way you get your new tools later, but you get to keep or spend the ~5 silver from the old toolset some other way.

Tech tree choices that should be avoided or prioritized and why in the next sections.

Anatomy

1. Do not rush important parts early game, it used to be a decent strategy for getting your church open after the first ingame week, by abusing save and reload, but it is now counterproductive, as after church is open, the donkey charges carrots, and actually getting an organ to extract cleanly is really unlikely to happen.

2. Gentle Butcher and the Surgery techs both actually fully eliminate the chance of screwing up the removal of a part, thus get Butcher as soon as you can afford it, makes life much easier. Get Surgery only after unlocking Dark Bodies from inquisition quest though.

After unlocking alchemy (by talking to Clotho in the swamp).

3. Do not invest into Alchemy Storage and the other techs until you're ready to create your alchemy stations and have wooden beams accessible.

3,5. Note: It is necessary to have both tier 1 and tier 2 alchemy workbenches built at the same time, as it is currently not possible to craft 2 reagent recipes in the tier 2 bench.

4. Getting Embalming Liquids early might seem kinda pointless (most embalming fluids require tier 2 alchemy workbench), but if the player has blue points to spare in the mid-game, unlocking Embalming and Embalming 2 allows access to Fridge Pallets, which as of 1.024 are cheap(flitch, nails, and complex parts) to make and provide room for 2 corpses, for indefinite storage.

5. Embalming Liquids 2 and 3 should only be gotten once the player has constructed an alchemy workbench 2, and more importantly, when the player starts receiving corpses with 4 or more red skulls.

Theology

1. Power of faith: get this tech for the confessional alone, after getting light of faith and confort of faith.

Shrines are frigging useless at the moment, being unreasonably priced (they require beams) and giving less (3) than confessionals (5).

2. Softness of faith should only be gotten once the player gets the merchant to provide tier 3 goods, and only if the player has unlocked Assembly Stand tech in building

3. Price of faith: Pretty good tech to prioritise early-mid game, as it boosts money income, and the player can easily make a combo prayer(15-30-60 per quality Church score required). For the starting bronze quality, all that's needed is making a soft cover and making a chapter (or buying it from the astrologer). This would require Writing, Books, and Paper Crafting techs as a minimum from the writing tab.

4. Incense techs require smooth stone x12 each for the first one, and smooth marble x6 for the 2nd one. The first one provides 1 passive Church score, and with incense(3 incense/each) a total of 3. Making incense is really easy and requires basic alchemy setup (alchemy workbench and grinder) you will be buying oil from dig, and using order dust from white flowers. The tier 2 censer starts at 3 church score, and with tier 2 incense, goes up to 7.

-- Tier 2 incense requires alcohol, which means you will need Strong Alcohol tech unlocked, and is also crafted at alchemy workbench 2.

5. Do not get Graveyard Enchanchement (misspelled?) and the following techs after Cremation. Cremation is a really good tech to have early, but what follows it is really difficult and not worth bothering with even in the late game.

6. Try to postphone unlocking Stone Gravestones early if possible, as getting it early before Stone Carving 2 gets you very little to work with(stone grave fence only).

Writing

1. Inventing Stories, Writer's Inspiration Playwright- Should all be obtained further on, when the player is interested in finally aquiring a gold quality prayer book.

2. Old books are still useless...

3. Paper Crafting should be gotten as a priority, after being able to produce the complex iron parts necessary to build the workbench.

4. Get writer's inspiration only when you have access to lenses (Assembly Stand).

5. Paper Production is a luxury tech, one can obtain bat wings easily by going at dusk (until midnight) in the swamp to the north(3 bats), or on the hill to the north-west(3 bats), and further past the blockage (4 more) daily, for plenty of paper early game.

Farming And Nature

1. Simple and complex fertilizer techs, as well as the Gardening tech should only be gotten once the player has an alchemy worktable 2 available BECAUSE:

-- The boost fertilizers only increase the speed at which crops grow, and while they can be gotten earlier with only a tier 1 alchemy worktable, they are generally useless, as time is not important when growing crops (you plant and forget, come harvest next week or when you stumble across the grown crops)

-- High quality fertilizers ONLY affect crops with quality. Growing wheat, carrots, etc. should only be done with peat as fertilizer, since the quality fertilizers require ash to make, and are only needed when trying to boost your seed's quality and get more gold seeds.

-- As with quality fertilizers, the farmer perk only affects seeds with quality to them. Carrots, wheat, and whatnot will forever give the player 4 or less seeds, and only peat seems to give them an improvement in seed yield.

2. Master Gatherer: I've taken this tech early in 2 of my early game tests and figured out one thing: This perk is completely garbage. What it does is increase the amount of stuff you get from gathering flowers, berries and mushrooms by 1, and unlocks red mushrooms. This is bad early BECAUSE:

-- For berries that's a really marginal increase, and once the player has actual good food (or honey 4 dayz) , berries should only be gathered in case of missing a few green points.

-- Red mushrooms are mostly useful in mass producing quality fertilizer II and are not necessary otherwise

++ This tech does seem to make it possible to get double butterflies/moths from flowers, but getting those is kinda pointless, unless needing the chaos extract, as for fishing there's plenty of maggots from farming

-+ Double mushrooms is most of the reason why this could be good, as early game, baked mushrooms are an ok food until better stuff is unlocked, but it has such a short lasting window of usefulness that it doesn't matter much.

Basically get this tech once you have alchemy workbench 2 accessible, and only when you need the fertilizer.

Important Edit

3. Grape farming: This tech allows you to build trellises for growing grapes, after you've completed the required inquisitor quest.

-- You can grow grapes even before completing the Inquisitor's quest for unlocking the vineyard building bench, by just restoring some of the damaged trellises. This also bypasses the need of obtaining this tech early on.

++ With peat and bronze quality grape seeds (buy 4/week) you can get an easy source of food, as they can be made into grape pies (1 siver recipe) for a better usage of pastry dough.

++ 6 grape pies can be sold weekly for a tidy profit of 3 silver and 25ish copper at the tavern

++ Try to repair the shortcut behind the house to witch hill as soon as possible, as it is now quite cheap.

++ The follow-up tech of winemaking is god tier for food production, as there seems to be still no balancing to drinks in the game, you can guzzle alcohol without repercussions.

4. Beekeeping and Insects: Beekeeping: This tech is misleading, as you can gather honey without this tech, just that the beeswax doesn't have a chance of dropping until you get it. Insects: Pretty much only required once alchemy is obtained of if the player needs to fish early game and wants a *free* fishing pole (for 6 moths).

4,5. Bee Domestication>Bee Friend: These techs are for those who are too hipster to grow grapes.

-- Building the beehouses is a total pain as they each require 20 bees, which can be rarely obtained from beehives.

-- Also the wax drop rate is totally crap, wtf game?

++ BeeFriend is basically the main reason why you'd get these techs, as it makes bees no longer damage you and doubles the honey you get/ gather, totalling a net gain of 50 energy obtained/gather as oposed to 20 (if the honey is eaten raw).

++ The 2 honey trees to the north-west + the 4 honey trees scattered in the hill on your way towards the mining camp are a good source of farmable honey, especially if going to mine coal or going to the mining camp.

5. Brewing: needed only once the quest for the inquisitor requires you to provide beer and burgers (both gold quality) for the witch burnings. This quest however is really important, but you should only get it once you have gold quality onions and can make tier 2 fertilizer to get gold quality hops.

5,5. Digestion: this tech is kinda useless, it offers 2 alternatives for obtaining alcohol in the followup tech, but it isn't even required to get Strong Alcohol tech, one can skip it after Winemaking(which is required and really good)

6. Blending: Winemaster perk is not worth the cost. Currently (as of 1.024) it just gives you higher chance to make higher quality alcohol BUT:

-- This can be counterproductive, as from silver grapes, instead of making silver wine(needed for quests) you might accidentally make a gold quality batch.

++ It is advisable to simply "breed" alot of gold quality grape and hops seeds using tier 2 quality fertilizer, and then one can alternate between using gold quality fertilizer every 3-4 growth cycles and peat in between to keep the seed count stationary.

Smithing

1. Glass should be unlocked after unlocking "The concept of dirt", by talking to the episcop the week after you unlock church. Making glass takes time and energy digging the sand, but awards an easy early game source of blue points.

++ A fully repaired iron shovel digs 39 sand before breaking, while a steel shovel digs about 100 sand. It is advisable to take this into consideration as you might end up wearing out your whetstone, and they're expensive early.

2. Imborn blacksmith: this tech is a good quality of life improvement, as it indirectly increases the longevity of your iron supply and lowers energy and time costs spent manufacturing at the anvil.

-- However, by the point that you can grab this tech, you should have unlocked the path to the mountain already, have ample coal supplies and made yourself an ore storage and stone cutter up the mountain rendering iron an infinite resource. It is totally possible to play the game without this tech.

3. Weapons>Martial Skills: These skills should be avoided, you don't need "good" equipment too early on, and you'll end up unlocking Steel Weapons separately anyway.

++ It is entirely possible however to not craft a single weapon though as there is a merchant that comes at night above the lumberjack in the village and sells weapons and armors.

++ BUG (placeholder?) The recipe for Steel armor is really cheap, costs some sticks and iron parts, as oposed to iron armor which costs lots of skin.

4. Engineer: You'll need this after you're halfway the marble tech tree and it helps slightly when making books and jewelery. Getting it early = shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon.

5. Rules of Burning: This tech is total bullcrap at the moment, all it does is adds a recipe for all the furnace tiers that offers the option to make double the ingots of iron at a time, for 1.5 of the fuel it'd take normally. HOWEVER:

-- It is highly recommended to improve yard space and construct a total of at least 3 furnaces anyway, to provide a good source of points early and to get stuff done faster. This also bypasses the need of getting Advanced Smelting until later on, after you've unlocked Precious Metals.

-- You get fewer red points in total if you smelt iron in doublebatches.

6. Glassblower 2: the complex conical flasks require tier 2 furnace to craft, and are required once the player is ready to tackle alchemy. The lens requires assembly table to craft, but that doesn't matter much because lenses are mostly used to make steel chisels for working marble busts, which means you got those techs by then anyway.

7. Iron Castings: Prioritize this tech after Circular Saw in building tab, but before Assembly table.

Try to keep at least one of your furnaces at tier 2 (if you want to be able to fully expend iron ore, make exact amounts of glass, etc.)

Building

1. Sawing and Woodworking should be the first techs you get, period. Woodworking allows you to make flitch into planks, which is the fastest, cheapest, least energy demanding, non-tool damaging, red point source available.

2. Unlock firewood tech after building your first furnace, so you can clear the blockage to the north-west that prevents you from getting to the (coal,iron,stone,marble) extraction area, and get Mining tech before going there, so you can use coal instead of firewood for fuel, because screw firewood, wedges are the reason you get this tech.

3. Woodcutter: You get this tech mostly just so you can fully clear the graveyard's left side and your base area's dead trees. Until you need to do that, don't bother, waste of blue points.

4. Precious Metals: Get this tech before unlocking the Steel techs, as it's impossible to make steel without making graphite first, also the chances to get precious nuggets earlier won't hurt.

5. Circular Saw: Get this tech once you're sick and tired of not having a shortcut to your church's basement, basically when you start thinking about building your alchemy laboratory and spending more time there.

-- Note: getting to Snake is possible earlier, as the first blockage from the basement of the house is cheaper to remove, not requiring beams, thus unlocking the shortcut to the town does not require it.

-- Issue:Mortuary is poorly designed, and the tunnel to it takes alot more time than just getting to it from outside.Also repairing the hatch might cause more harm than good, as it will inevitably increase the player travel distance to retrieve the corpse.

6. Related Ore: Bad tech atm that clutters your inventory space and is only useful in alchemy later on, or if you want to get to the miner and gems> Best Friend techs in the late late game.

7. Stone carving 1 and 2 : I personally try to get these both at the same time, as only with stone carving 2 can you start churning out proper gravestones really efficiently. RUSH these before the steel techs, and get Stone Gravestones at the same time. This will provide lots of red points and useful grave decorations.

8. Tricks of the Trade: Albeit relatively cheap at the point of reaching this tech, it's situational. You will want to get it mostly only after getting to the Grave Monuments tech, as it will allow you to make 2 carved stone out of 1 smooth stone, effectively making the angel statues really cheap, fast and easy to make source of blue and red points. Get this once you have a good supply of faith and most of your faith needs have diminished(12 for quests + researching body parts + researching gravestones so far).

9. Assembly Stand: This table is necessary to make steel equipment and lenses, jointings are needed for lategame stuff, etc.

+- Plank red points are lowered to 1/plank at this station, not that it matters much at this point.

10. Marble techs: Unlock them only after you are able to embalm corpses with all white skull bonus substances, as the marble stuff do NOT reward blue points on crafting(as of 1.024) and can only be studied for the blue points roughly paying back their blue point cost, while providing an overkill of grave decoration until the later stages of the game.

Cookery List And Sources

The important cooking recipes are:

Simple and Tasty: You get this from your basement chest. Decent once you get firewood/coal

++ You get apples every time you go to the lighthouse (there are a total of 5 gatherable trees there, but 3 start out as chopped, and you should shovel the stumps up so they regrow)

++ Mushrooms are a good early source of green points, however digging green vine-bushes is more effective early on and, later on , farming will provide enough green points for all your green needs, as well as better food options.

++ You can also buy apple saplings from clotho the witch for 3 silver each, after you provide her a health potion (cauldron route is long and tedious, and stupid, faster to get a potion from the dungeon for her...)

+ If you do visit Clotho, be sure to buy 6 frogs each trip, you will need 12 total for a quest for perfume later on. Frogs can be fished, but it's tedious and you could catch better fish in that time spent.

Cake+: Obtained from Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, he asks for 5 honey.

Cake is always gold quality, requires pastry dough(+1 egg,1 milk /4 dough) 5 berries (cost is negligible as player will be gathering any and all berry bushes early game anyway) and 1 honey.

++ The main reason why this recipe is good to get is that the buff it provides is only given by pies (mid game) and it allows obtaining extra blue points(+1-3) per each item researched, but provided you always consume cake or pie before researching, you will end up with quite a considerable amount of blue points, especially when researching stuff for alchemy.

Good Carbs: Pasta is crap, but lasagna is really good. Both these recipes are unlocked by giving an iron axe to the woodcutter stationed north of TRES the carpenter. They give a buff that makes working with an axe or stone easier.

Jelly:One of the starting recipes you get as soon as you kill the slimes for the blacksmith. DO NOT make these, as it takes more time to make them than energy you would gain by sleeping or doing something productive like processing dough/flour in the meanwhile...

Vegetable Dishes: A tech you unlock after you speak with the farmer about crops, the carrot cutlet is the only good dish, and is really easy to make, provided you buy seeds regularly from him and use peat.(Try to buy at most 12 seeds/ week every 2 weeks)

Sweet Baking (2silver): Muffins are great. 4 dough 1 honey = 20x4 energy.

Pies (1silver): Get after you have grapes, replaces cake.

Soups: You get this by giving clotho a silver star pumpkin. Really good cheap food, they provide a bonus that doubles the rate at which you regain energy in sleep, but getting a silver pumpkin early might be a reason why you end up skipping them in favor of pies/wine.

Tasty and Healthy(X): Don't buy this, not worth it.

Fish Delicacies(X): Don't buy this, not worth it, by the time you have the fishing rod and bait to catch good fish, you'll have moved on.

Beer Snacks: These recipes are unlocked for free after getting your first onion and talking to the inkeeper. The onion rings are a decent value recipe by themselves, and supposedly they buff beer restoration values?

Fish Dishes: The fisherman teaches you this for free. Fish fingers required for an achievement...

Fish soup is a pretty good food source if you like fishing... (the buffs themselves are completely trash tier as fishing is stupidly easy though)

++ Fishing by the waterfall, across the river, with bait, you can catch red fillet x1 fish(bronze quality) by fishing close range, and white fillet x3 fish by fishing long range.

Fish Kebab: You get this by delivering some silver star red fillets to the gypsy baron(lol). Don't even bother doing the quest if you don't intend to fish a lot. The quest is easier to complete with the tier 2 or 3 fishing rod using steel lure.

Nectar of the Gods: You get to make mead, 50 water + 3 hops + 1 honey(wtf devs, nerf this, make it cost more, also make honey inedible again wtf) = 10 mead, which at gold quality is a measly +3 life +20 energy (devs plz buff this after increasing the costs, it's worse than beer, what's the point)

You get this recipe after you hold your first witch burning "sale", where you serve 10 gold quality beer and 5 gold quality burgers for 33 silver, 2 or 3 times (i forgot). You then deliver 1 beer to the inkeeper and he'll allow you to go take his mead recipe from upstairs in his room...

Source: https://gameplay.tips/guides/2817-graveyard-keeper.html

Graveyard Keeper - Advanced Starting Tips