Graveyard Keeper 2: Advanced Tips and Tricks

Welcome to our Graveyard Keeper 2: Advanced Tips and Tricks.

Graveyard Keeper 2 throws a lot of systems at you at once. Gathering, crafting, farming, corpses, zombies, technology, church upgrades, quests, mastery, food, and the game’s various progression cycles all feed into one another. The simplest way to procrastinate in the game is by handling every system on its own. Instead, create a set of habits in which multiple systems progress at the same time: gather materials while traveling, leave crafting tasks running while exploring, have food prepared before you need it, upgrade tools as often as possible, and plan your travels to include quests and objectives.

Here are a few pieces of advice that tie those systems together along with some less obvious mechanics that may help you save a great deal of time.

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Build a Gathering Circuit Around Your Base

After reaching your village, going inside your house, and completing the introductory story and tutorial, start a gathering route that can be done regularly.

Gather the following:

• Berries
• Mushrooms
• Honey
• Logs
• And any other resource that is easily available in nature

There is a lot of space available in the area of your graveyard keeper property; hence, gather resources from there first before venturing out. Berries, mushrooms, and honey respawn after a certain period of time, according to the source. The source recommends checking the area every two or three days, so make sure that gathering is included in your routine. There is yet another pond besides the small fishing pond near the base, so make sure to check your surroundings before assuming you need to move further for gathering resources. Do not go back empty-handed when there is nothing to collect from your gathering route. Carry a log, cut down a tree, clear bushes, or do something useful. The beginning stages of the game reward players for making productive use of their time.

Clear the area around the graveyard first

When you require wood, stone or any other essential material, you should first clear the land surrounding the graveyard. You can eventually build throughout the cleared space, so gathering resources there provides a direct benefit. Clearing distant areas first can leave you with plenty of materials but nowhere useful to build.

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Keep Your Crafting Queues Running

Utilize crafting queues extensively. It is possible to put something on queue even if you don’t have all the ingredients needed at the moment of queuing. This allows you to have clear notes about what should be made and makes it possible to have production continuing automatically after the required ingredients become available.

It becomes especially useful for devices that need to obtain some of the resources from nearby storage facilities. For instance, if an automatic worker starts picking up leaves and putting them into the chest, you can put lots of compost to queue. The leaves are stored in the chest, and the compost will be made automatically without any need to wait next to the device.

Cooking is no exception. Put food to queue before it runs out. Collect berries in your inventory while moving around, take berries back when necessary, make dough in bulk, and let the cooking station work while you’re busy doing something else. The objective is to make production an automatic background process.

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Make Food Early and Use It to Extend Your Workdays

Begin food production as soon as possible. It is possible for you to live on berries, honey, prepared mushrooms, and other simple foods, but the efficiency of this food decreases as your workload increases. Foods enable you to work longer before sleeping. Start with bread production at the beginning and then berry pie as one of the convenient foods to be produced.

The basic chain of productions is quite simple:

• Grow wheat or buy it.
• Grind wheat into flour.
• Add flour and water to create dough.
• Make pies from dough and berries.
• Maintain queue of cooked dishes.

When you will have enough wheat, you will be able to cook enormous amounts of dough. Try making batches of about 100 doughs and maintaining cooking queue of pies constantly. Berry pie will be very useful for maintaining energy and will allow you to deal with insanity. You won’t need to worry about lack of energy much, having constant food source. It’s worth noting that there are some foods that give you temporary bonuses in different masteries. So, there are foods for improvement of writing mastery and there are foods for alchemy mastery. It will help you to be more successful in hard tasks in the discipline of your choice.

Vegetable salad will be very useful for you in advanced corpse surgery, as it gives temporary surgery mastery bonus.

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Harvest Honey Whenever You Pass It

Do not neglect bee hives. You can go near their nests to collect their honey without being attacked by them. In addition, Honey also provides an inspiration-related benefit. Since you find honey naturally in the vicinity of places that you pass through, include it in your gathering process.

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Organize Storage Before Your Base Becomes a Mess

Storage becomes more critical as your production increases. You can examine what is in the storage boxes in the same vicinity even if you are not standing next to the boxes. The storage information on your character window will help you determine whether you need a certain item without rushing to another storage place. This also applies to your home.

Use dedicated storage categories

Do not dump everything into a big hodge-podge of chests.

An example organizational structure may be:

• Wood
• Raw materials
• Metals/Glass
• Manufactured items
• Tools
• Flax/Other processed materials

The exact categories aren’t that important, as long as you have some organization which you can remember. You have quite a bit of building space near your home base, so you can set up several cheap storage chests near each other. Six or seven is recommended, depending on your needs.

Use automatic item movement

Storage also has an automatic movement function. Instead of manually dragging every item between your inventory and a chest, use the automatic transfer button to move appropriate items quickly. If you have accumulated a large inventory, going through your chests and repeatedly using this function can save considerable time.

Do not be afraid to rebuild your storage layout

Since chests are cheap, you have the option to dismantle them and redesign your storage system. However, tearing down buildings, tables, and other constructions gives back only fifty percent of the materials used in creating them. Layout your design, but remember that at some point you will have to redesign your base.

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Carry Something Useful Whenever You Travel

Consider any trip as a chance for resource transport. When moving towards your camp, consider bringing with you logs or any other resources. When moving away from your camp, consider carrying resources that can be transported to your destination. The same can be done when moving towards town. You may not be able to cut wood and mine in areas around town, but you can carry resources like berries and fish.

A storage chest can be very helpful when you have access problems. In the early game, you need to go to the morgue area to get a lot of resources and, by placing your storages nearby, you do not have to make any unnecessary trips.

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Use Your Inventory Shortcuts

The inventory contains more information than it initially appears to. There is no obvious traditional scrollbar for everything, but you can left-click and hold to reveal the different inventories available in the surrounding area.

You can also quickly transfer quantities using the number pad rather than dragging a slider. Enter the amount you want, and press Escape if you change your mind. Small interface shortcuts like these become increasingly valuable as your storage and production systems grow.

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Keep Food on Your Hotbar

There is no need for you to take breaks every time you need something to eat. You can have your food taken from the hotbar while you are still doing something else. In case the food is not yet in the hotbar, you can open your character inventory, get the food item, right-click it and add it to the hotbar.

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Spend Your Energy, but Manage Insanity

Use your energy rather than constantly stopping to preserve it. However, watch your insanity level. Insanity reduces your maximum stamina, and excessive insanity can interfere with recovery. If you run out of your energy entirely and have some food around, then eating before sleeping will become beneficial since you won’t have to fully regenerate your entire energy bar. Sleep regenerates your character’s health if he or she is tired, and this source makes it clear that you don’t have to sleep just because you have the opportunity.

If you sleep when you are not tired, you won’t decrease your insane status at all. The value of sleeping increases when you are actually tired. One important caveat to note is that sleeping saves your game. Therefore, it will be beneficial to go to bed even when you don’t feel the need for some rest since you are creating a save point.

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Take Your Time With the Game’s Cycles

Don’t freak out if you miss a chance. The game has cycles and some of its activities come back once you sleep and go through these cycles. Missing an activity doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve lost it forever.

In case if the cycle is already over, but you notice that you didn’t have the necessary resources to do something, you can go back to the main menu and sleep. Loading the game will enable you to restart the cycle from the previous sleep instead of losing it. In this way, the time system becomes significantly less annoying than you thought it was at first. Also, note that some activities are determined by certain days or cycles, so find out which activities belong to what cycle instead of wasting your resources on doing them at inappropriate times.

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Upgrade Your Tools as Soon as You Can

Tool upgrades are more important than they initially appear. Your skill determines what you can do, and better tools can give you the skill needed to access more technologies. If you are not able to make progress, take a look at the necessary workstation and see the locked recipes. You might need more skill instead of a normal resource.

Make sure to always upgrade your shovel, axe, pickaxe, and all your other tools. Never keep using worse tools when you can get better ones.

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Understand Why the Technology Tree Gets Locked

There are certain locks in the technology tree. Sometimes you come across skills that seem to be unlocked but you will find out there is a character icon blocking it. At such times, you are required to undertake a quest before unlocking the skill. Sometimes you will have to unlock a new region for access to certain technologies. Unblocking paths, clearing rubble heaps, building bridges and discovering new regions can unlock some research which could not be done before.

The main thing to remember is that if a technology is blocked, it doesn’t always mean that you have to research more points. Check the map and questline before grinding resources unnecessarily.

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Use Mastery-Boosting Talents Carefully

While investing in talent or progression points, focus on gaining mastery where it is possible. Gaining mastery helps gain more mastery-based progression and prevents you from waiting for Faith or any other materials needed to proceed further. The early game benefits from general mastery improvements because they affect multiple systems rather than solving only one narrow crafting problem.

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Learn the Alchemy Progression Before You Get Stuck

Alchemy contains one of the game’s less obvious progression gates. Firstly, you might be requested to make Dream Dust in your laboratory. The recipe is quite simple, however, the next stage will ask for an improved laboratory. It is especially true when it comes to the Preservative Potion. The formula needs three B runes, while your current laboratory lacks slots to create them all at once. The best thing for you to do is to improve your laboratory to Laboratory II.

Remember that sometimes a potion does not work even if you think that the ingredients are right.

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Build the Church Early

When you get access to the church, you should focus on upgrading it. We suggest investing in the church as quickly as possible and adding some useful structures to it, including:

• Candelabra
• Shrines
• Incense Burner
• Confessional
• Bench

For the first mass, you do not need to wait until noon, like in the original game. You should monitor the necessary indicator at the top of the screen and carry out the mass when the necessary symbol is unlocked. Upgrading the church helps produce Faith, which will be useful for other areas of technology and research systems.

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Manage Town Gratitude Efficiently

Town Gratitude is yet another way to get progression, so don’t waste it. Burial certificate gives one point if it is sold to the right person in the main inn. The same guy also sells a scroll that gives five Town Gratitude.

You can get more Gratitude by selling the correct crops and other things to the right merchant.

• Wheat
• Beets
• Carrots
• Onions
• Cabbage
• River fish fillet

Just look for things that the merchant wants. And of course you can earn rewards with Gratitude in quests, helping the town or selling enough things.

Do not waste excess Gratitude

If your present Gratitude value is close to its maximum, don’t make use of the item that gives more than your maximum value. For instance, if you are at nine out of ten and make use of an item whose value is five, then the additional value won’t go above the maximum.

Use the resources wisely especially when you are preparing for prayers. You should use only the basic prayer until the Gratitude value increases from ten to twenty since the high-level prayers could get wasted and may use up the resource unnecessarily. Always keep the prayers in the church.

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Create Five-Red-Skull Zombies Through Surgery

You can create extremely strong zombies rather than relying entirely on naturally generated corpses. Start with a corpse that already has a large number of red skulls.

When preparing a high-red-skull corpse for zombification:

• Preserve the valuable organs and fat.
• Eat vegetable salad before surgery to increase your surgery mastery.
• Remove bones when the procedure allows it.
• Use high-quality replacement organs where available.
• Reassemble the corpse for zombification.

Vegetable salad requires:

• 2 carrots
• 2 beets
• 2 onions
• At least 4 farming mastery to produce it effectively

The salad provides a temporary surgery mastery bonus of +3 for roughly seven and a half minutes, which can push early-game surgery mastery high enough to perform more demanding procedures.

Improve organs before inserting them

Organs can have different quality levels:

• Brown: +1 skull
• Silver: +2 skulls
• Gold: +3 skulls

You can use organ improvers to increase the potential of both white and red skulls. The white-skull organ improver from two Time Flowers and making the red-skull version with Flux and melted fat.

Vegetable seeds can be purchased from Herm’s shop, although planting them requires sufficient farming mastery. In the early game, buying onions is particularly useful because they are difficult to produce yourself at that stage. Bones can also be extracted and reused in other zombies. This lets you improve a weaker zombie by replacing an inferior bone with one carrying a more useful red skull.

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Do Not Ignore the Church, Graveyard, and Zombie Systems as Separate Mechanics

The most effective early-game loops span multiple systems.

• Corpse management creates burial certificates and decides if corpses become grave assets or zombie assets.
• Zombies manage farming, logistics, crafting, and production of resources.
• Farming provides ingredients to cook food.
• Food regains energy and can grant mastery perks.
• Mastery allows more technologies and helps with hard tasks.
• Church creates Faith.
• Faith enables research and advancement.
• Quests unlock new characters, zones, and technologies.

In other words, the game is easier once you create a loop rather than complete isolated tasks.

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Graveyard Keeper 2 rewards preparation more than rushing. The more you connect its systems, the less time you spend walking back and forth, waiting for resources, or wondering why something refuses to unlock.

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