Before you play the Graveyard Keeper game, you will definitely want to know these simple but useful tips and tricks. If you have any tips feel free to share with us!
Things To Know Before Playing
- Blue xp mostly comes from researching body parts and such on the church basement's study desk. If you need science just make a bunch of paper out of corpse skin and pump those into the desk. Later the best source is to make piles of medium tier stone grave markers.
- Chests will provide items for the crafting areas that they are located in, example is that any chest in the working area outside the house will give to the furnaces and saws, but not to the nearby garden. The storage area below the house can be filled up with chests if you really want to but they don't provide to the rest of everything. Mostly it's just used for wine making casks.
- Bodies are a bit complex and checking the wiki is advised (same with alchemy, do NOT try to guess the patterns yourself) but as a rule of thumb you want to pull out the blood and fat of every body you get. Other parts either increase red skulls or randomly will give big adds or big removals depending on the part. One note is that the brains and intestines don't stack so just grind them up as you take them out. Basically you want to look at each corpse and see how many skulls it has total. Take out the fat and blood of the ones that are decent (at least three white skulls and minimal reds) and just harvest the ones that are crap. You don't want to bury every body because if they only have one or two white skulls (or God forbid none) they will barely add anything to your graveyard and will eventually just need to he exhumed.
- Despite what he says, the tavern keeper will trade your burial certificates for cash. A lot of people mistakenly assume they have to unlock the church first.
- Shops restock their supplies over time. Until they restock, the more you buy the higher the price. Buy only what you need when it comes to basics like nails and iron parts, and your money will stretch further.
- There’s no real time pressure to the game, just scheduling issues to meeting certain NPCs and handling corpses. In fact, traveling to meet certain NPCs is the biggest time sink. Leave early.
- Make sure you continue to make some money throughout the game. Grinding out cash can take a bit of time, and you will need a decent amount of gold by the endgame (I think a little over 10g).
- To help with earning money, most of the people selling stuff will buy specific things from you. The notable early options are the bartender buying bread, and the farmer buying basic vegetables (the ones without stars). When selling, the price slowly gets driven down, and increases slightly each week. So only sell a small amount of anything each week, or you will crash the price and it will take a long time to recover.
- Cremating a body gives you a burial certificate. So burn the bodies that you break down for parts, or screw up making better.
- Bodies with 0 red skulls get an inherent +2 bonus when buried.
- Try to work on all the main quest givers at a roughly equal pace. The quests start relying on being at certain points with other people. With many quests requiring you to wait a week to progress the quest, this can really slow down the endgame if you have been focusing on one quest chain at a time.
- Related to the above, don’t ignore the singer. Her quest chain is important.
- If you need blue xp in the early/mid game, make a bunch of glass or stone grave decorations. They may only give a couple of xp each, but the materials for them should be easy to get large quantities of.
- There is an unlimited supply of stone, iron ore, coal, and marble. You have to deal with obstructions to get to them, so be sure to explore.
- In relation to your specified gotcha: When you upgrade the church, the bishop requires you get the second tier of citizenship before you can preach again. To get that, you have to pay like 50s in taxes one time. I think that is about the only thing that will actually prevent you from being able to do something for a time. Everything else is going to be at worst having to grind out some xp to unlock some skills you haven’t done yet.
- The better quality sermons require more points in your church to automatically succeed. Also, the sermon bonuses are the only way to reliably craft gold star items in the late game. In addition to the increased donations and faith the better sermons offer.
- Blue points: you can start generating them slowly when you upgrade your graveyard to finer quality stone decorations. You can also buy a book from the Astrologer once every week for another source of blue. It’s expensive enough you don’t want to rely on it, but cheap enough you can afford to, especially since you can buy just one a week, and a better graveyard means more sermon money.
- The first church upgrade (opening it) means no more free corpses, but that’s more a relief than a problem. The Donkey leaves a little gift behind to help you get started and the hippie east of town sells what else you need. As for the second upgrade, the asshole doesn’t tell you about the citizenship requirement until it’s too late. It’s not a fail state but it will prevent you from further sermons. I found a few convenient ways to fix my income but if you want to be prepared just check the mailbox.
- I recommend opening up three or nine plots in the farm with carrots. When I harvest I trade just enough to the farmer to replace lost seeds, and the remainder go either to the donkey or carrot cutlets, which occasionally get sold to the tavern or just plain eaten, because collecting mushrooms got old. Between basic sermons, burials, and carrot sales, I could afford to buy the various knowledge books, which really sped things up to the point where I had to figure out what the hell to do again.
- If you can afford them, the perks are a great help in reducing your busywork and upgrading the craft stations helps a lot with your efficiency, leading to to less hassle. They’re nothing especially important, just it adds up quickly. You’re under no time pressure but it helps a lot.
- When the time comes to start repairing things and such, just carry twenty flitch, nails, etc. It’s less of a hassle than remembering everything you need and anything leftover will be useful elsewhere.
- Remember there is no real fail state, any pressure you feel is self imposed, even the crops don’t need tending.
Source: https://gameplay.tips/guides/10132-graveyard-keeper.html
More Graveyard Keeper guilds
- All Guilds
- Graveyard Keeper - Autopsy and Grave Rating Guide
- Graveyard Keeper - Recipes
- Graveyard Keeper - All Stranger Sins Achievement Guide (DLC)
- Graveyard Keeper - Making Gold
- Graveyard Keeper - Wild Bee Hives Map
- Graveyard Keeper - Advanced Starting Tips
- Graveyard Keeper - First Week Guide (Church, Tech and Workshop)
- Graveyard Keeper - Beatrice's Offer: What to Choose (Game of Crone DLC)
- Graveyard Keeper - How to Get 16 White Skull Corpse