Tips for a fast starting early game
All Graveyard Keeper Guides:
- Graveyard Keeper World Map
- Graveyard Keeper Fishing Guide
- Graveyard Keeper Crafting Recipes
- Graveyard Keeper Tips for Beginners
- Graveyard Keeper Wild Bee Hives Map
- Graveyard Keeper Autopsy and Grave Rating Guide
- Graveyard Keeper Advanced Starting Tips and Tricks
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 and where.
+++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 sign.
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 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.
+++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 starting to cut/dig something, then open the menu and wait in the menu for as long as it’d regularly take to dig it, then exit menu and the next swing will finish it up, this way you can use 2 energy/dig and take less gametime ,provided you didn’t let go of the F key too early. 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, gather 6 stone and go to the tavern and talk to Horadric about the garden, the contract, and the meat, and then trade him the contract.
+++With the 6 stone, you can go sell it to Cory up to the north-west, and you’ll have the money to get a teleport stone from the inkeep on the first day(use to teleport, 3min cooldown), and some peat(16 or so) from the guy out back of the ranch.
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.
++You can give the beer to Gerry the next time you get into the morgue, but try to give it to him after talking to miss charm the next day, so you get a story from it.
++The next day after, go to town and talk to the merchant, accept his deal, ask where to get seeds, then accept his loan offer. The 5 silver will help enormously with buying seeds.
++On the way back home, Gerry will tell you about your basement.
6.Go into your basement, and after the cutscene plays, get the 2 sacks of flour, and clear all the broken barrels using the inventory trick discussed earlier to save on energy. then take the recipe from the chest and use it, it will allow you to cook apples and shrooms.
++After you sleep, IGNORE what yorick tells you to do. Keep the permission, you’ll do it later.
7.Now your goal should be clearing the bushes and stones around your work area, and getting 10 sticks. Unlock building>sawing and place the sawhorse down.
+++Try to repair your tools as soon as they reach about 9% or lower durability, to save you the time and hassle of having to repair them when out gathering stuff.
++Besides cake, which is a quest reward recipe for 5 honey, one can unlock muffins which are really cheap to bake(normal dough + honey for 4) and require buying a 2 silver recipe from the inkeep’s wife.
++More advanced players will choose to go for grape pies early, since grapes can be grown without the tech by just restoring some trellises, and planting 4 grape seeds with peat.
+Pies are amazing energy sources and moneymakers, don’t be afraid to buy the 5 eggs and bucket of milk(you can use a bucket to get 5 jugs) for the pastry dough as baking and selling 6 bronze grape pies a week to horadric will more than make up for the cost, and net you decent money, as well as a great energy source.
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 shovel durabilty though).
+++Always try to be somewhere near home when dusk comes (red portion of sundial). If the donkey arrives with a corpse, get that corpse ASAP and put it on the autopsy table in the morgue. This will GREATLY prevent the corpse from decaying. 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. Before leaving the house area, make sure your shovel is above 8% durability, if not sharpen, then go to the morgue and commence autopsy.
++Removing blood and fat is a given, since they improve the corpse (-1red +1 white skull each). Blood is essential for speed potions(basically crack,once you use them once you can never go back…) so hoard it all. Fat is moderately useful for making low tier candles and oil, but it’s arguably better to just buy the oil from Dig. Just extract one fat and delete the rest:
+To delete items from corpses, and thus not risk getting surgical errors while still getting the corpse ready, simply queue the fat for removal, and then from the building table( you need to restore it first) simply double click removal on the autopsy table this will save you the time and 12 energy it’d take to remove the fat, but destroy it in the process…
++Removing bones has no effect on the corpse,unless you get surgical error, so get at most 1 for studying it after church is unlocked, for blue points, but leave them alone otherwise.
++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.
++Upon unlocking organs, remove and keep at most 1 of each just to scan them. (waste of space otherwise, and their alchemy components can be outsorced easily and cheaply)
++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 if you extract a skull afterwards and you’ve done no surgical errors, the corpse will still be at 4 white skulls.
++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 most 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.After Sawing, keep gathering sticks, cut trees and work on making flitch from logs until you have 20 red tech points.
10.Unlock building>woodworking FIRST, before smithing>primitive forging(anvil) and place the woodworking table. 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. Don’t worry about using the planks, you will need a total of 64 planks just for the 2 confessionals and 4 benches in the church.
11.Get smithing>primitive smithing, and place down your anvil, then gather the stone required for a furnace(if you haven’t already) and place it.(Take care that in your starting space you can fit 2 furnaces. This is important, as you will want to have as many furnaces as possible built on your yard, totalling 6 after you expand)
12.Gather iron from the back of your house, there should be a total of @ 32 pieces of iron to be obtained, more or less. Then get firewood tech, make some firewood, enough for smelting 2-3 iron bars at least.
13.After you get the iron, make it into iron parts, and with 10 wood wedges, 2 planks and 4 iron parts go clear out the pathway north-west, to the quarry. This will get you access to a coal mine you will ABUSE for fuel, and also some infinite resources you’ll use later. Make sure to repair the building table there.
++The big tree on your way there and the poison gas mine will come into play a bit later, after you talk to Gunther… you’ll meet him after you unlock the dungeon, but Garry must have a conversation with you first, otherwise the cutscene won’t trigger(I’ve actually unlocked the dungeon so fast that Garry gave me the cutscene a bit later afterwards, but generally this won’t be the case)
14.Once you have about iron to spare, unlock smithing>Tools, and start working on replacing your toolset, afterwards you should sell the old rusty tools for 75 copper each at the blacksmith, no matter their condition(durability)
15.Unlock theology>simple gravestones and make wooden crosses for every body you’ve buried so far. This + repairing the right graves, removing the bushes and planting 5 flower beds, along with decent body preparation will ensure way more than 5 gravescore the first week.
++A lot of people unlock stone working early to make stone tombstones. In my opinion this is a mistake, as iron is not really super hard to get for nails, and you expend valuable tech points and yard space, not to mention wasting stone you should be gathering for more furnaces, and the energy expenditure in all roughly favors making wooden crosses.
16.By now you should’ve gotten anatomy>hard spares already, you can safely take 1 skull off of a botched corpse(preferably the one you didn’t exhume yet with the permission yorick gave you, the first ever corpse you buried is perfect for this, any corpse will do for yorick…). Skin it too, and remove the bone(and maybe the organs if you got the greens by digging the bushes in the graveyard).
17.After your graveyard is in order, and with a bit of time on your hands before church opens, unlock nature>decay and with a couple sticks, build 1-2 compost heaps on the far left(best place to put them) You will want 5 in total later. If you haven’t already, buy 8 carrot,wheat and cabbage seeds, and 4 beet seeds from the farmer south of the wheatfields. be sure to ask him about farming too, he’ll give carrot cutlets, an awesome early energy source.
++To mitigate the cost of seeds, ALWAYS fertilize with peat, and sell him 6 cabbage, carrots and beets when going to buy seeds from him.
18.From now on, you should make it a priority to make wooden crosses for each corpse.
++Fences are not really worth it until you get building>stoneworking II and theology>carved gravestones for those awesome +3 fences and by that time you’ll also start making the +3 gravestone II’s(the ones with RIP on them)
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, the next time he swings around. Plant those asap, as you will need to pay the donkey 5 carrots/ corpse delivered later, paid in batches of 10. Stepping in the dung will make the player to slide around, and is annoying.
+++ 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 cake recipe.
20.At this point, if all went well, the first week should be over, and the church should be opened to you, granting you 3 faith and access to the church basement.
21. With all your body parts you got so far on you and the 3 starting faith, go to the church basement, start clearing the broken bookshelves. Hopefully you get lucky and get 1 bronze chapter, or something you can easily discompose into science. If you do, research any 3 of skin, skull, fat, blood, bone, in this order of priority to get 60 blue points. If you failed to find any chapters/pages, you could restart the day(savescumming) or you could unlock bookwriting>paper crafting and build the church workbench to make paper.
++In any case, you will want to leave your bodyparts in this chest, as you’ll use them later for alchemy, and this way you’ll also guarantee going through the church every day to check confessionals for stories and faith, before dropping off bodyparts and teleporting home to sleep/save.
++Cake or Pie buff gives +1 blue point per every researched item, but the buff itself is not really useful, given to how hard faith is to accumulate early and the other uses for it…
22.With the 60 points you just got, unlock comfort of faith,power of faith, and inborn blacksmith, and build all the church benches in the church, totaling 32 planks and 32 nails. Then build the confessionals, they cost 16 planks and 6 advanced iron parts but they’re worth it. Your final church score will be 19, 1 short of 20.
++Ideally you could buy a book from the astrologer after you hand him over the skull(+25 blues for 5 silver), or prepare to ask the bishop for the clay bowl quest AND complete it in the same day next sermon day, to get 5 blues to unlock light of faith, and with 6 iron parts build a chandelier I, getting you to 20 church score.
+You get 1 faith for every 4church score, and faith is king.
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 be 7, and your income should be equal to your grave score x3 copper coins.
25.With this faith, you have the option of researching lots of blues, or you have EXACTLY as much as it’d take to convince snake to give you the plans(5) and research the key(2), unlocking dungeon on week 3.
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.
++Salt is only good for sauerkraut, and you need 1 for merchant quest.
From now on, you’re on your own, but I will leave some general tips in the next section.