Graveyard Keeper 2 Beginner Guide

Wood processing is the single most important early unlock. Wood and planks feed almost every early recipe and building, so being short on them blocks progress on every other front.

Pottery comes second because it gates fishing, and fish-based food is a large step up from berries and mushrooms.

Tech points come from labour, so the fastest route is to unlock as you work. Chopping wood and mining stone and clay generate the red points that the Building and Metallurgy branches consume.

The recommended opening buildings are a Mason's Bench, a Sawmill, a Compost Bin, a Garden Plot and a basic Workyard. Finishing one workyard building, one agriculture building and one town service building beats half-building five things.

Build the Wooden Anvil early — it only costs 1 Short Log, made at a Sawhorse, plus 1 Stone. It turns Bronze Scrap into Bronze Nails at six nails per scrap, which unblocks several later buildings.

The Firewood Shed sits in the Metallurgy branch and costs 10 Sticks and 2 Bronze Nails. Without it you have no Fuel, and without Fuel the Furnace, Kiln and Kitchen Oven do nothing.

Trash piles and broken barrels around your home are free materials. With an axe equipped you can break them for Bronze Nails, Bronze Scraps and Boards, and they tend to appear in clusters of two or three.

Those early nails should be treated as seed capital rather than spending money. Get the anvil up first so scrap becomes a renewable nail supply, then spend freely.

Scavenging is explicitly part of the demo's content, so you can do all of this before the full game and keep the results.

Berries and mushrooms are the first food sources, but they restore very little. Cooking raw crops instead of eating them restores far more energy than the raw ingredient does.

Raw crops also sell to the village shop, so early on you are constantly choosing between cash and uptime. Sell when you need silver for a building, cook when you need to keep working.

As your food improves, the gap between sleeps grows, and the whole opening starts to feel less cramped.

Insanity rises slowly whenever you work with the dead — harvesting, prepping or burying bodies — and it rises quickly if you push through exhaustion.

Exhaustion is signposted by a ZZZ icon in the HUD after roughly two in-game days without sleep. Sleeping before that icon appears will not reduce insanity, so time your rest around it.

Berry Pie is the on-demand fix. At the Kitchen Oven, 4 dough and 6 berries make four pies, each removing 3 insanity and restoring energy, and tavern beer works as a fallback.

Do not bury bodies the moment you receive them. Corpse quality is a net score of white skulls minus red, and stripping corrupted organs during autopsy raises the net white count that burial rating rewards.

Do not stockpile materials expecting recipes to appear. Recipes come from tech tree spending, not from inventory.

Finally, play the free demo first if you have not bought the game. It covers roughly 3–4 hours up to the introduction of The Town, and the save carries into the full release on the same platform.

Every heat-based station runs on one shared resource called Fuel: the Furnace, the Kiln and the Kitchen Oven. The Kitchen Table does not need it.

Fuel is made in two steps. A Short Log chopped at a Chopping Spot yields 10 Firewood, and 2 Firewood convert to 20 Fuel at a Firewood Shed.

The trap is that a shed only supplies stations in its own area, so you need one outdoors for the furnace and kiln and one indoors for the oven.

Firewood Shed I caps at 100 Fuel and Shed II at 500, so plan an upgrade before you start smelting in volume.

Two zombie workers come from the main story, not from a recipe. Follow the quest about a locked hatch inside your house, clear the junk below and speak to the Plague Doctor.

Build a Zombie Supplier Station to assign them, and remember that a zombie with 0 Work Mastery will stand at a bench doing nothing.

Mastery comes from equipment: hand the zombie a tool or weapon first. An early axe gives +2 Mastery, enough to open up some jobs.

More workers than your starting two require the Reanimation perk from the Anatomy and Alchemy branch plus a dedicated underground room.

Corpse quality is scored as white skulls minus red skulls, and removing corrupted organs during autopsy raises the net white figure that burial rewards.

But corruption is not simply bad any more. Zombie workers develop better skills the more red skulls their original body had, so some bodies are worth keeping dirty.

That makes each corpse a decision: bury it clean for graveyard rating, or route it toward your workforce.

Since the size and prosperity of The Town determine how many corpses you receive and how good they are, this loop only grows in importance.

Several mechanics are tied to specific days of the week, so planning a week at a time beats reacting task by task.

The developers kept that rhythm deliberately, even though quest characters now stay at their usual locations instead of visiting once a week.

Fast travel runs on Milestones between locations you have already unlocked; there is no Teleportstone this time.

Finally, do not expect a cheat menu to bail you out — the game has none, and automation is the intended relief valve.