Vile, nasty, and undead — many words describe a Zombie, and “hard worker” is not one of them. However, when you have your hands full with farming resources and crafting items in Graveyard Keeper, Zombies are there to help you out!
Graveyard Keeper is a graveyard management simulator with plenty of NPCs. Each character serves a purpose in helping you progress in the main story of the game. One particular character you meet along the way is Gunter, a talking reanimated corpse who is said to be the only cognizant Zombie in the game, and he is the one who will lead you to the discovery of working Zombies.
Meeting Gunter
To find Gunter’s whereabouts, you will have to finish another NPC’s quest first. Snake is an NPC you need to convince to permit you to enter the church’s dungeon. After you have gained access to the dungeon, walk past the entrance, and you will watch a cutscene in which you notice that someone else is there before you. You will then discover Gunter tied up and all alone in a prison cellar.
Note: For console users, the only way you could meet Gunter is when you have the Breaking Dead DLC installed in your system. However, you will have no problem encountering him if you are playing on a PC.
Starting Gunter’s Questline
Gunter will start asking you to hit him with your sword. Since he has been in shackles in that prison cellar for a long time, he has developed an immense need to feel pain. Unless you hit him, he will not inform you of anything else about himself or the Zombie workers.
The chained-up Zombie will then become more talkative after you do his first bidding. He will tell you all about his brothers and suggest you make more of them to assist you with your chores. Gunter will advise you to get the Resurrection Table’s blueprint located in the cabinet on his left. If you check the cabinet, you will get the blueprint along with some Zombie juice. These items are highly essential in turning dead bodies into Zombies.
Making Zombies
Zombies are here to share some of your burdens as a Graveyard Keeper and perform some of the tasks you commonly do, giving you more time to focus on your other necessary chores. To get started making an unlimited army of Zombie workers, follow these steps:
- Firstly, you are required to build a Resurrection Table in the Morgue. The Resurrection Table is where you can put dead bodies to turn them into Zombies. This method will only work if you use a corpse with a good body quality, meaning you can only resurrect corpses with 90% or more body quality.
- Make a Zombie Juice in the Alchemy Table. The two ingredients you need to concoct a Zombie Juice are Human Blood and Health Powder.
- Finally, place the corpse on the Resurection Table. Before you can reincarnate it, you need to have 10 Faith Points and one Zombie Juice
Uses of Zombies
To put your Zombies to good use, you will need to build workstations they can man and operate.
When Gunter first informs you about his Zombie brethren, he will point you to the location of a Zombie who got stuck under a pile of rocks at the woods’ entrance. If you dig the Zombie out from that rubble, you will obtain your first worker Zombie and some blueprints to make Zombie Workstations.
Getting your Zombies to work in these stations is surprisingly easy. There will be no scratching, biting, or any violence involved in all of these. You will only have to press E to pick a Zombie’s lifeless body up and place it into any Workstation.
Below are the Zombie workstations you can build after you have unlocked their blueprints in the Technology Tree:
- Zombie Farm: The Zombie Farm will allow the undead to assist you in planting and harvesting crops. However, you are still required to supply them with seeds. For example, if you want your Zombie to plant carrots, you have to give it 24 carrot seeds first.
- Zombie Woodcutting: If you find chopping wood a bit tedious, your Zombies will gladly do the chopping for you. Getting this Workstation first can save you a lot of time and resources since it already has a built-in Timber Stockpile for storing wood and a Porter Station.
- Zombie Porter Station: One of the most convenient uses for a Zombie is to get them to carry resources from the Porter Station to the stockpiles in your Workyard. Even with their nimble body, they can lift wood or stones and bring them all the way to your house.
- Zombie Mine: The Zombie Ore mine has two stations wherein you can place two of your Zombie assistants. One can mine Iron Ores while the other can mine Coal. They will need a place to stow these items, so you are required to build a Stone Stockpile and a box beforehand.
- Zombie Stone Quarry: The Stone Quarry has four stations where two Zombies can gather stone, and the other two can acquire marble. Similar to the Ore Mine, you need to build a Stone Stockpile before your Zombies can get on with their tasks.
- Zombie Text Generator: Make your mindless undead workers write books at the Random Text Generator workstation. You will need to provide them with papers before they can start writing.
- Zombie Crate Factory: The Crate Factory has Zombies making crates to store the crops that you can sell to the Merchant for 10 Silver coins each.
- Zombie Vineyard (Stranger Sins DLC): Your Zombies can also help you to grow grapes and hops for your Winery. Unlike the Zombie Farm, the Vineyard has a Porter Station where you could order a Zombie to carry all your harvested grapes and hops into your cellar.
- Zombie Winery (Stranger Sins DLC): When you are almost at the end of the game, and you can produce gold-level quality items, having a Winery is guaranteed to rake in tons of gold. With the Zombie Winery, your undead assistant can make 40 bottles of wine in one sitting.
- Zombie Brewery (Stranger Sins DLC): Using Water and Wheat, your Zombie can make 10 mugs of beer in the Brewery.
Zombies can be very handy when you have been working hard on your chores, and you need to craft one item to finish a certain task, but you have run out of energy for it. Thankfully, Zombies can also work on normal Workstations like the Anvil or the Stone Cutter. You will have to place them on those stations, provide them with the needed materials for crafting, and they will do all the work for you.
The Working Dead
If you have already guessed, Zombies work slowly compared to how fast you can move. However, some Zombies with high efficiency can get their work done quicker than others. There is a method to improve the efficiency of your Zombie. To do that, you will need an Embalming Table and a few Fluids to modify their insides. By insides, we mean their White Skulls and some of their organs.
Having Red Skulls on a corpse buried in your cemetery is never a good thing, but it does not matter to a Zombie. What is more important this time is the amount of White Skulls they have. So, to add White Skulls to your Zombie, you have to remove its Blood and Fat and replace them with a Heart, Brain, and Intestines. You need to ensure that those three organs have three white Skulls variants in them. Lastly, apply a Lye Injection, Glue Injection, Silver Injection, and Gold Injection on a Zombie’s body at the Embalming Table.
The only downside in relying too much on your Zombie workers is you can not gather Technology Points from them doing all this automated work. Unlocking some of the blueprints and Technologies involving Zombies can also cost you plenty of Tech points; therefore, having them much later is still the most fitting way to play the game.
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