Graveyard Keeper 2 Beginner's Guide: Week, Zombies and Factory

1. Plan your week — every day has a job

As in the first game, your key jobs only happen on certain weekdays. The week has six days, marked with sins and planets. According to a popular community guide on Steam, it looks like this:

Day	Where	What you do
Sloth (Moon)	port and market gates	battle day for the Town
Wrath (Mars)	church and crossroads	sermon; the nun tells you how many bodies you'll get this week
Envy (Mercury)	morgue and goddess statue	zombie resurrection; blue crystals drop from the statue
Gluttony (Jupiter)	the Astrologer	PR machine — raises your zombie limit
Lust (Venus)	Dockside Club	give Linda your green scrolls; deliver looter orders
Pride (Sun)	Town Warehouse	fulfil Town orders and collect warehouse income

Tip: Town battles only happen on one day a week, but the zombie-infested sewers are open for a fight any other day.

To get around, use Milestones — once unlocked, they let you fast-travel between locations. The original's Teleportstone is gone.

2. Zombies — your free workforce

Zombies work for you at stations, in the garden, in the factory and in battle. The key rules (from a detailed community guide based on the game's data):

• The station decides the talent. Like you, every zombie has five talents: orange (building, woodwork), red (smithing, furnaces), green (garden, kitchen), yellow (writing, sermons, printing) and blue (anatomy, alchemy). Pick the zombie for the station, not the other way round.
• A new zombie needs a tool. Freshly raised zombies have no talent points at all, while nearly every recipe asks for at least one. Give it a tool matching the station's colour — even a rusty one gets it started.
• Red skulls = perk slots. Each red skull on the body is one perk slot. White skulls do nothing for a zombie — they only matter for burial. Bodies you plan to raise should get red skulls; bodies headed for a grave should get white ones.
• The collar caps red skulls: bronze up to 5, gold up to 10, steel practically unlimited.
• Zombies bank their own tech points. When a zombie works a station, the points go into its own pool. You spend them in that zombie's tree.
• Specialise, don't spread. One talent per zombie beats a little of everything.

The zombie limit

The cap kicks in once you've done the Astrologer's PR ceremony. Raise it with the PR machine and the Good Fellow perk. Careful: exceed it and you get the "Excessive zombies" debuff, and your sermons lose effectiveness.

3. The factory — where to start

The underground conveyor factory is the sequel's biggest addition. Key rules from the top-rated factory guide:

• Zombies provide the power — for example, a zombie turning the carousel. Each station, conveyor and splitter costs 1 power; an underground conveyor costs 2 but spans 5 tiles.
• Chests use no power — alternate them with conveyors and use them instead of splitters to save power.
• Demolishing is free — destroyed factory buildings refund all resources, so experiment freely.
• Logs can't go into chests — they must ride a belt directly into the station that uses them.
• Build in stages. Start by producing kits to repair normal houses, then expand the factory for bigger buildings.

The developers promised more gears from zombies for conveyor belts, and update 1.010 increased them with the Belt Master perk.

4. Town battles

As the Grand Inquisitor you take the Town back from the zombies. Battles happen right on the streets, and each district has its own win conditions — on the Town Square you hold off waves from every direction, while on the central streets you capture control points.

• Prepare before the battle: build barricades and towers from materials, and position squads of zombie soldiers or lead them yourself under your banner.
• Pick your style: go all-in on archers, spiked barricades or combat potions.
• Your zombies grow stronger: since update 1.007 they earn red tech points for winning fights.

5. Rebuilding the Town and green scrolls

After you liberate a district, you bring it back to life. Green scrolls come only from repairing residential buildings in the Town (ruined houses have a blue wooden signpost). Hand them to Linda at the Dockside Club on Lust day — that raises Town quality and increases how many Likes you can collect for sermons. Repairing a house doesn't raise Town quality by itself; the bump only happens when you hand in the scrolls.

Bigger buildings pay more scrolls: a small house gives 1, a house 3, a large house 10 and a whole block 25.

6. How to cut down the grind

• Automate early — every station run by a zombie is work you don't have to do yourself.
• Keep the game updated — patches 1.008–1.010 lowered delivery requirements, increased rewards from orders and trading, and added up to 5 order slots (depending on the number of villagers).
• Plan your week — don't waste days waiting for a character who's only available on a specific day.

Hit a bug? Check our list of Graveyard Keeper 2 bugs and the patches that fixed them.

Pre-order bonus: the sauna and the outfit

If your copy came with the pre-order bonus:

• The Sauna is to the left of your base, over the bridge — you can reach it once the bridge is repaired. It gives a temporary buff.
• The Grand Inquisitor outfit is unlocked with the "Suit Up!" technology — then build a Dresser at home and change your clothes there.

There's currently no other way to get the bonus — it isn't sold as separate DLC on Steam.

Useful settings

• Character voices: switch between full voice acting and the original game's character "mumbling".
• Demo saves: your demo save carries over to the full game.

Start playing

Don't have the game yet? Read is Graveyard Keeper 2 worth it, or go straight to playing Graveyard Keeper 2 for less on a shared-library Steam account.