Red skulls taking up space?

[ThemePark]

So I watched Floydson play this game a while ago, and have been thinking of getting it. One thing I'd wanna do, is to fill the graveyard with zombies, just for the lulz of having a zombie graveyard. Though I read in a recent thread, that red skulls decrease the grave quality, but does nothing for the zombie efficiency.

But that goes me wondering, do red skulls take up possible space for white skulls? I.e. can I add another white skull to a body if I remove a red skull. Or to put it another way, the maximum white skulls a body can have, is apparently 26. But does that mean that body cannot have any red skulls, as there's room for a max of 26 skulls in total, or can it have 26 white skulls as well as any number of red skulls?

[Fargel_Linellar]

Not really. You will probably need to play the game to understand exactly how the game works in regards to skulls.

With BSS specifically, you can add up to 3 red skulls (and white skulls) to organ and soft parts.

There's also less limit on red skulls, as you can make "Surgeon's mistake" which add a red skulls (and remove 1 white skulls).

So if you really want a corpse with a maximum of red skulls, you will have to give up on reaching 26 white skulls.

But for the fun you could make a max efficiency zombie (26 white skulls) also still have a huge amount of red skulls.
Injections would be neutral (+1, +2, -1 and -2)
4 soft parts with 3 red each = 12
3 organ with 4 red each (would be painful to get, but possible) = 12
Removing the skull = +1

So a maximum of 25 red skulls (while keeping 26 white skulls).

[Ani Blade]

You're forgetting about Dark Injection, it just adds two red skulls.
So by that math it would be 27 red skulls then.

[Ani Blade]

On an entirely different note. Ensure you open the church BEFORE you go on a quest to bury nothing but garbage corpses. Apparently you can softlock your game otherwise.
Also just note that burying nothing but poor quality corpses means earning no money from sermons (graveyard rating dictates donation money, interior church rating determines how much faith you get which is needed for many different things).

[ThemePark]

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

Not really. You will probably need to play the game to understand exactly how the game works in regards to skulls.

With BSS specifically, you can add up to 3 red skulls (and white skulls) to organ and soft parts.

There's also less limit on red skulls, as you can make "Surgeon's mistake" which add a red skulls (and remove 1 white skulls).

So if you really want a corpse with a maximum of red skulls, you will have to give up on reaching 26 white skulls.

But for the fun you could make a max efficiency zombie (26 white skulls) also still have a huge amount of red skulls.
Injections would be neutral (+1, +2, -1 and -2)
4 soft parts with 3 red each = 12
3 organ with 4 red each (would be painful to get, but possible) = 12
Removing the skull = +1

So a maximum of 25 red skulls (while keeping 26 white skulls).

Well no, it's not about achieving max red skulls, I was just wondering if having any red skulls would keep me from getting a max efficiency zombie worker. The plan is simply to retire old zombies as I make better ones, by burying them, rather than throwing them into the lake, just for the fun of having an undead graveyard, rather than a dead one.

And thanks Ani Blade, I'll keep a mental note of the money/faith thing once I buy the game and start playing it, so I can figure out if the zombie graveyard is really worth it for my playthrough.

[Ani Blade]

Also, you can improve zombies. You can swap organs in and out like puzzle pieces. So you can't really have a bad zombie in that sense (and it takes 10 faith to make a zombie, so early on it's trickier).
To get 26 you also need the BSS DLC, which actually makes it much easier to just improve them in general. In part because you can use a piece of equipment from that DLC that shows you what the skull count is on body parts (the only other way to easily see skull counts is from a perk you buy waaaaay later into the story).

The game also has... four tiers of corpses. Early corpses don't actually have proper stats often. They can have organs that have no skulls on them at all.
As you improve the church/progress, your tiers increase naturally, and you get bodies with 7+ skulls on them at the end.

[Fargel_Linellar]

Originally posted by Ani Blade:

You're forgetting about Dark Injection, it just adds two red skulls.
So by that math it would be 27 red skulls then.

I counted the dark injection.
+1 from lye injection
+2 from dark injection
-1 from silver injection
-2 from gold injection
So neutral in total.

[ThemePark]

Originally posted by Ani Blade:

Also, you can improve zombies. You can swap organs in and out like puzzle pieces. So you can't really have a bad zombie in that sense (and it takes 10 faith to make a zombie, so early on it's trickier).
To get 26 you also need the BSS DLC, which actually makes it much easier to just improve them in general. In part because you can use a piece of equipment from that DLC that shows you what the skull count is on body parts (the only other way to easily see skull counts is from a perk you buy waaaaay later into the story).

The game also has... four tiers of corpses. Early corpses don't actually have proper stats often. They can have organs that have no skulls on them at all.
As you improve the church/progress, your tiers increase naturally, and you get bodies with 7+ skulls on them at the end.

I was under the impression that you cannot max out the earlier zombies, i.e. that their max is lower than 26, as per the tier system you mention. But can any zombie (in time and after unlocking stuff, of course) then be maxed out to the 26 skulls? Or can that only be done once you get those bodies with 7+ skulls?

[DWS]

Each zombie can be maxed out later on, as you can replace any body part with a better one. You will find that it is cheaper to upgrade the brain, heart, and intestines of zombies that already have 2 or 3 white skulls.

Don't worry about it too much. You'll see that it doesn't make much sense to hoard a lot of zombies early in the game. At some point you'll just collect the 3 large organs with 2 or 3 white skulls and either put them into zombies, disregarding the amount of red skulls, or you put them into clean corpses (26 white skulls, no red ones) for the graveyard.

You can also use zombies with low or none efficiency for transport tasks. For the transporters, it doesn't matter how efficient they are, they won't run faster with none or with 26 white skulls.

[Ani Blade]

Originally posted by Fargel_Linellar:

Originally posted by Ani Blade:

You're forgetting about Dark Injection, it just adds two red skulls.
So by that math it would be 27 red skulls then.

I counted the dark injection.
+1 from lye injection
+2 from dark injection
-1 from silver injection
-2 from gold injection
So neutral in total.

Sorry, my brain read that wrong somehow then.

[RequiemsRose]

Usually my older crappier zombies get "retired" into being porters or assigned to workspaces I really dont care about the efficiency on because I have more of whatever they are producing than i can reasonably use in a timely manner anyway (like i usually have a zombie assigned to just perpetually break down stone blocks, marble blocks, and ore over at the quarry, couldnt care less how fast they do so). The red skulls don't make a lot of difference when it comes to those uses for zombies, but you have to "beat" the number of red skulls to get a net positive from graveyard decorations if you stuff that zombie in the ground (so if your corpse or zombie has, lets just say, 3 red skulls with no modifications, you wont see a positive grave rating unless your decor is worth at least 4). Mind you, what options you have available are also partly determined by what DLCs you have as well, like I lack the BSS DLC so that 26 skull limit is something I can't even approach in my own game.

[ThemePark]

Originally posted by DWS:

You can also use zombies with low or none efficiency for transport tasks. For the transporters, it doesn't matter how efficient they are, they won't run faster with none or with 26 white skulls.

Thanks DWS, this was something I was not aware of, and while I still wanna build my zombie graveyard just for the hell of it, I take this to mean that I can assign any zombie that would give the graveyard a negative impact due to too many red skulls, to transport, and put any surplus positive impact zombies in the grave yard. At least, that's gonna be my gameplan once I buy the game.

And thanks to everyone, this has given me a lot of info and insight into how I wanna play the game.