Graveyard Keeper is a great simulation game, with a macabre twist. And like in other simulation games, pretty soon you will be overwhelmed by all that needs to be done. After all, you want to have a great graveyard and a huge church, right?
Breaking Dead
The answer, if you have too much on your plate, is to get the DLC Breaking Dead, available in the Switch eShop. Need some extra help in Graveyard Keeper, feeling overwhelmed with all the tasks the graveyard keeper has to do, help is on the way in the form off Zombie workers in the DLC.
I would even go so far as to say that this DLC is a must have to fully enjoy the game!
After you have downloaded the DLC Gerry the friendly skull will advise you to go and look for Gunter as soon as you next step into the morgue. Seems easy, but you have to follow the Snake storyline to do so. Snake is the shady character that stand in front of the gate in your cellar. A downright menacing character, when you approach him he is rather gruff. Snake asks you a key to open the vault. If you’ve been to the Alchemist and have given him a skull, you’ll have gotten a key in return. It doesn’t work on the gate though.
Meet Snake, a very shady character
Snake can help: for 5 units of faith, he will give you instructions to turn the Keepers Key into a golden key. Go to the church’s cellar and the study table. Using another 2 other units of faith, the keeper key and the instructions, you can make the golden key. After that, follow Snake through the gate into the vault.
You’ll find two new things: a dungeon with several levels, and an undead person chained to the wall. This, my dear friends, is Gunter. Gunter informs you that you can use Zombie Juice on a corpse to turn it in to a Zombie. Very handy, but more important: he tells you where to find dig up your first Zombie. It’s to the north of your house. Just follow the road, and you will get to a rubble of rocks blocking your way. There are two piles of stones, once the first pile of stones is eliminated, you can work on the second and bring out the zombie in question. You now have your first zombie!
Put the Zombie to work
Not sure how to proceed? Just pick him up and put him down at the crafting station you want him to work on. Click craft, and he will get busy. Depending on his work ethics though. When you proceed on the path past the stone blockage you will find the Felling Site. A big tree that your Zombie can hack away on to your hearts content. You will never be short on wood again. First though, you have to unlock the required workshop that needs building in front of the tree in your Technology Tree by unlocking the Zombie Wood building blueprint. After that, the workshop needs 12x finch, 4x Nails, 1xAxe1 to be built. The workshop has room for two zombies.
Another very useful spot is on the north western side of the map. Just follow the path across the bidge in front of your graveyard to the north, and after clearing up some blockages, it will lead you to a little house. The Cabin is a very useful place, as you can sleep and gain health there as well. More importantly, it’s near the Marble Quarry and Ore mine. You can set quite a few Zombies to work here cutting stone, ore, marble and coal after you have unlocked the Zombie Quarrying Blueprint 1&2 and the Zombie Mining blueprint.
Build a Porter Station or two at the quarry after unlocking the Zombie Logistics blueprint on the tech tree, if you put a Zombie into the Porter Station he will transport the resources back to your house and yard and he even puts the supplies in the right place. You can do the same at the Felling Tree which has a built in porters station to get those big logs transported. As the picture below shows you can pick and chose what supplies you want the Zombie at the quarry’s porter station to deliver to your yard.
Create your own worker army
To do all of this, you are going to need more than the one Zombie that you dug up. You want to have a productive resource chain supplying you with continuous logs, stone, marble and Ore after all. Here’s how to make more of these busy workers.
In the morgue you can build a Resurrection Table after the tech Second Chance blueprint is unlocked. You can place a body on it. Either one you have dug up from the cemetery (one that has too many Red Skulls as it will help improve your cemetery rating) or you can use a corpse the Donkey has delivered. Using 10 faith and 1x Zombie Juice you can place a body on the resurrection table and turn them into a Zombie. Luckily you’ve gotten three Zombie Juice already so you’re good to go.
Zombie juice can be crafted at the Alchemy workbench and requires 1x Health Powder and 1x Blood. Health powder can be purchased from the Witch that lives in the swamp (across the same little bridge but then head West, after you’ve done her first quests). You can also make Health Potion yourself but then you need the Alchemy Mill. Cabbage, garden waste or pumpkin can then be turned into Health Powder. Each Zombie you create has a Stat called Work Efficiency based on how many White skulls it has, Red Skulls on Zombie has no effects what so ever, so don’t worry about red skulls, the more White Skulls a Zombie has the better they work. 1 white Skull is 2% efficiency up to the highest efficiency at 40% with 16 white skulls. I have found that a Zombie with around 7 or so white Skulls works fine and I’ve never ran out of resources.
Get the Zombies to a higher efficiency
To increase a Zombie or soon to be Zombies’ work efficiency you can place them on the Autopsy table and insert some body parts which have the random effect of adding white or red skulls. You can also modify the Zombies via the Embalming table once the Embalming 1 and the Embalming Liquids blueprints are learned.
Using Embalming Fluids will add white and some red skulls to the Zombie and as red skulls have no effect adding them doesn’t matter. Using the Alchemy table 1 and 2 and the Church Workbench you can make all the fluids used in embalming.
- Lyle Injection adds one white and red skull.
- Glue Injection adds one white skull
- Silver Injection removes on red skull and add one white skull.
- Gold Injection adds two white skulls and removes two red skulls.
The order you apply the embalming fluids doesn’t matter though if your zombie has no red skulls you won’t be able to use the Silver and Gold Injection.
Use Zombies in the garden or let them do Alchemy
Zombies can be used in the garden to grow crops for you, after you have unlocked the Zombie Gardening Blueprint. Build the zombie garden and place the Zombie in it and a menu of seeds you want to grow pops up, once you pick the seeds the Zombie will get to work. The zombie garden has three tiers Bronze, Silver and Gold and can be upgraded to each tier.
Once you unlock the Blueprint Zombie Alchemy workbench in the tech tree you can build the Zombie Alchemy decomposer table and the Zombie Alchemy Workbench. On these tables Zombies will make alchemy potions and powders in various quantities. Another thing Zombies can do for you is to write stories. If you supply them with paper, they are able to write stories of the lowest quality. But these can be turned into notes, which is a good way to get blue points.
Last but not least is the Keeper’s work yard where you can place as many zombies as you have need for on any of the wood, stone or metal machines and they will make firewood, stone blocks or what ever you have lined up for them to make. Between the Zombies at the Felling Tree and Quarry gathering and transferring those resources to your yard and a few Zombies in the work yard making items you can then focus on your Graveyard and Church. After all, you want to get home!
