Advanced Starting Tips (Updated: Game of Crone!)

An extensive guide I've written and tested containing lots of tips and tricks to help new players and advanced players alike. Now updated and curated, holds information relevant to the Breaking Dead, Stranger Sins and Game of Crone DLCs. Feel free to ask in the comments if you don't understand how something works, and I'll try to explain when I have the time.
At the time of updating this guide, Better Save Soul dlc is out, however I could not find the time to play it yet.

Tips for a fast starting early game

1.Starting a new game, dig up Gerry, and follow his instructions.
Optional: Calendar time will not start to progress until the bishop tells you to pick up your tools from the graveyard trunk. Before talking to the bishop, consider exploring the map, learning the npcs and picking up the local quests to get a head start.
+++ One can take the wooden repair kits from the trunk and sell them to Tress for 50 copper (buying excess sticks so the trade goes for exactly 50 copper) and selling the certificate gained from burying the corpse to be able to afford the teleport stone before time is unfrozen. This cuts on invaluable time traveling in the first few days. Visiting the lighthouse is also a good idea now, as it's quite far and takes a long time otherwise.

2.Take the corpse in the morgue, cut the flesh, and go in the graveyard. Once there, go to the sign on the left. It'll tell you to talk to a member of the inquisition

+++You will probably do that during the first week, but make sure you get there BEFORE the sun is past the middle of the sundial because, while time is frozen during cutscenes, npcs can still move, and the donkey spawns exactly when the sundial indicates past the sun, behind the stables the merchant sits by.

3.Bury the corpse. The bishop will tell you to fix the graveyard, but do not bother cleaning it up of bushes yet.

+++You will want to leave 2 tiles of space between most graves in tight formation, since there's limited space to build flowerbeds (5 slots in the starting space), and those cost 2 red flowers, 1 peat and 2 stone, and provide +2 gravescore each. Getting the materials to build one and noticing where they can be built can help with this.

4.Talk to the bishop about the certificate, after which the day timer actually starts ticking. If you haven't already, get your tools from the chest and go to the tavern and talk to Horadric about the garden, the contract, and the meat, and then trade him the contract if you haven't already.

+++Also consider gathering some stone (6-12 is probably fine) and selling it to Cory for some early starting money. With that, you can buy some peat (12-16 is fine) and if you didn't want to sell your wooden repair kits earlier, you'll finally be able to buy the teleport stone.

5.Go to the blacksmith, give him the letter, sharpen your sword, try to be energy efficient when dispatching the slimes, hp doesn't matter as long as you don't die, just line them up so you swing at both at once, and then turn the quest in.

+++Now with the sword there are 4 barrels that can be destroyed around the village, for flitch and possibly iron parts.You will have spotted them earlier when exploring the village.There's 2 extra guaranteed in the tavern, talk to horadric to get beer, destroy those 2 barrels and look in your inventory.
++You can give the beer to Gerry the next time you get into the morgue, but try to give it to him after talking to miss charm the next day, so you get a story from it.
++The next day afterwards, go to town and talk to the merchant, accept his deal, ask where to get seeds, then accept his loan offer. The 5 silver will help enormously with buying seeds and getting you started. You only need to pay him back to advance his trading company quest, but that costs 53+ silver to unlock anyway.
++In front of the garden, by the road, after completing the slime quest for horadric, Gerry will tell you about your basement.

6.Go into your basement, and after the cutscene plays, get the 2 sacks of flour, and clear all the broken barrels, then take the recipe from the chest and use it, it will allow you to cook apples and shrooms.
++After you sleep, IGNORE what yorick tells you to do. Keep the permission, you'll do it later.

7.Now your goal should be clearing the bushes and stones around your work area, and getting 10 sticks. Unlock building>sawing and place the sawhorse down.
+++Try to repair your tools as soon as they reach about 9% or lower durability, to save you the time and hassle of having to repair them when out gathering stuff.

++Besides cake, which is a quest reward recipe for 5 honey, one can unlock muffins which are really cheap to bake(normal dough + honey for 4) and require buying a 2 silver recipe from the inkeep's wife.
++More advanced players will choose to go for grape pies early, since grapes can be grown without the tech by just restoring some trellises, and planting 4 grape seeds with peat (week 2+ merchant should sell them, buy only 4 of each though).
+Pies are amazing energy sources and moneymakers, don't be afraid to buy the 5 eggs and bucket of milk(you can use a bucket to get 5 jugs) for the pastry dough as baking and selling 6 bronze grape pies a week to horadric will more than make up for the cost, and net you decent money, as well as a great energy source.

8.Go cut the grove of trees on the way from your house to the morgue, that's gonna be your primary source of trees. Make sure to dig up the stumps too, that will ensure the trees will regrow and provide you with enough red points to unlock "soft spares".

+++For green points, harvest any and all mushrooms and berry bushes, look for vine bushes that can be dug up for 5 green points each(they eat a lot of shovel durabilty though). Your graveyard's left side has them.

+++Always try to be somewhere near home when dusk comes (red portion of sundial). If the donkey arrives with a corpse, get that corpse ASAP and put it on the autopsy table in the morgue. This will GREATLY prevent the corpse from decaying. You can then sleep if you need energy, sharpen your shovel if it's below 8%, or operate on the corpse if you have more than half your energy bar.

+++If you've slept before autopsy, you can simply reload if you mess up. Before leaving the house area, make sure your shovel is above 8% durability, if not sharpen, then go to the morgue and commence autopsy.

++Removing blood and fat is a given, since they improve the corpse (-1 red +1 white skull each). Blood is essential for speed potions and needed in quests, so hoard it all. Fat is moderately useful for making low tier candles. Later on, when you no longer need it, you can just delete it:
+To delete items from corpses, and thus not risk getting surgical errors while still getting the corpse ready, simply queue the fat for removal, and then from the building table( you need to restore it first) simply double click removal on the autopsy table(don't actually remove your table). This will save you the time and 12 energy it'd take to remove the fat, but destroy it in the process...

++Removing bones has no effect on the corpse,unless you get surgical error, so get at most 1 for studying it after church is unlocked, for blue points, but leave them alone otherwise.

++Removing flesh, skin and skull will always have undesirable effects on a corpse, so only remove those if the corpse is to be disposed of, preferably cremated.

++Upon unlocking organs, remove and keep at most 1 of each just to scan them. (waste of space otherwise, and their alchemy components can be outsorced easily and cheaply)

++The starting corpses will be crappy 1red/2white corpses, after removing fat and blood you will get them to -1red/4white. You can't see the negative red on the corpse, but if you extract a skull afterwards and you've done no surgical errors, the corpse will still be at 4 white skulls.

++If you have unlocked Important parts later on, before removing fat and blood from the corpses, you can try removing the Heart, then the Brain, then the Intestines in that order. For most corpses, only 1 organ is the correct one to remove, the others will damage the white skulls a lot. If you pick the wrong one, try the others to see which was the correct one, then restart the game, the organs will have the exact same effects for that corpse. This is however not recommended early game as the chance to "fail" at removing organs properly is really high.

Tech tree and Fast progression

9.After Sawing, keep gathering sticks, cut trees and work on making flitch from logs until you have 20 red tech points.

10.Unlock building>woodworking FIRST, before smithing>primitive forging(anvil) and place the woodworking table. Making planks rewards 2 red points/ plank at a cost of 5 energy, and it's the fastest way to get red points early game. This is how you will make all your red points to unlock anvil and tool smithing. Don't worry about using the planks, you will need a total of 64 planks just for the 2 confessionals and 4 benches in the church.

11.Get smithing>primitive smithing, and place down your anvil, then gather the stone required for a furnace(if you haven't already) and place it.(Take care that in your starting space you can fit 2 furnaces. This is important, as you will want to have as many furnaces as possible built on your yard, totalling 6 after you expand)

12.Gather iron from the back of your house, there should be a total of @ 32 pieces of iron to be obtained, more or less. Then get firewood tech, make some firewood, enough for smelting 2-3 iron bars at least.

13.After you get the iron, make it into iron parts, and with 10 wood wedges, 2 planks and 4 iron parts go clear out the pathway north-west, to the Quarry. This will get you access to a coal mine you will ABUSE for fuel, and also some infinite resources you'll use later. Make sure to repair the building table there.
++The big tree on your way there and the poison gas mine will come into play a bit later, after you talk to Gunther... you'll meet him after you unlock the dungeon, but Garry must have a conversation with you first(he'll say you look tired), otherwise the cutscene won't trigger.

14.Once you have iron to spare, unlock smithing>Tools, and start working on replacing your tool set, afterwards you should sell the old rusty tools for 75 copper each at the blacksmith, no matter their condition(durability).

15.Unlock theology>simple gravestones and make wooden crosses for every body you've buried so far. This + repairing the right graves, removing the bushes and planting 5 flower beds, along with decent body preparation will ensure way more than 5 gravescore the first week.
++A lot of people unlock stone working early to make stone tombstones. In my opinion this is a mistake, as iron is not really super hard to get for nails, and you expend valuable tech points and yard space, not to mention wasting stone you should be gathering for more furnaces, and the energy expenditure overall favors making wooden crosses.

16.By now you should've gotten anatomy>hard spares already, you can safely take 1 skull off of a botched corpse(preferably the one you didn't exhume yet with the permission yorick gave you, the first ever corpse you buried is perfect for this, any corpse will do for yorick...). Skin it too, and remove the bone(and maybe the organs if you got the tech and haven't extracted organs yet).

17.After your graveyard is in order, and with a bit of time on your hands before church opens, unlock nature>decay and with a couple sticks, build 1-2 compost heaps on the far left(best place to put them) You will want 5 in total later. If you haven't already, buy about 16 carrot, 8 wheat, 12 cabbage seeds and 4 beet seeds from the farmer south of the wheat fields. Be sure to ask him about farming too, he'll give carrot cutlets, an awesome early energy source. At most, buy 16 of any seed type weekly, to ensure he manages to restock by next week and that seeds don't get to cost too much.
++To mitigate the cost of seeds, ALWAYS fertilize with peat, and sell him 6-12 cabbage, carrots and beets when going to buy seeds from him.

18.From now on, you should make it a priority to make wooden crosses for each corpse.
++Fences are not really worth it until you get building>stoneworking II and theology>carved gravestones for those awesome +3 fences and by that time you'll also start making the +3 gravestone II's(the ones with RIP on them)

19. After unlocking the church, the donkey will give you a "present" in the form of a pile of dung with carrot seeds inside it, the next time he swings around. Plant those asap, as you will need to pay the donkey 5 carrots/ corpse delivered later, paid in batches of 10.
+++Stepping in the dung will make the player slide around at slightly faster speed than walking, so some people prefer to leave the dung as is for novelty reasons.
+++ You will also need to visit Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, and buy a bottle of seed oil from him. You can also deliver 5 honey to him while you're at it, to unlock the cake recipe.

20.At this point, if all went well, the first week should be over, and the church should be opened to you, granting you 3 faith and access to the church basement.

21. With all your body parts you got so far on you and the 3 starting faith, go to the church basement, start clearing the broken bookshelves. Hopefully you get lucky and get 1 bronze chapter/notes, or something you can easily discompose into science. If you do, research any 3 of skin, skull, fat, blood, bone, in this order of priority to get 60 blue points. If you failed to find any chapters/pages, you could restart the day(save scumming) or you could unlock bookwriting>paper crafting and build the church workbench to make paper.
++In any case, you will want to leave your bodyparts in this chest, as you'll use them later for alchemy, and this way you'll also guarantee going through the church every day to check confessionals for stories and faith, before dropping off bodyparts and teleporting home to sleep/save.
++Cake or Pie buff gives +1 blue point per every researched item, but the buff itself is not really useful, given to how hard faith is to accumulate early and the other uses for it...

22.With the 60 points you just got, unlock comfort of faith,power of faith, and inborn blacksmith, and build all the church benches in the church, totaling 32 planks and 32 nails. Then build the confessionals, they cost 16 planks and 6 advanced iron parts but they're worth it. Your final church score will be 19, 1 short of 20.
++Ideally you could buy a book from the astrologer after you hand him over the skull(+25 blues for 5 silver), or prepare to ask the bishop for the clay bowl quest AND complete it in the same day next sermon day, to get 5 blues to unlock light of faith, and with 6 iron parts build a chandelier I, getting you to 20 church score.
+You get 1 guaranteed faith for every 5 church score, modified by prayer bonuses, and faith is king.

23.Go to town on sloth day(moon day). Grab the skull you probably should've gotten by now, go sell your certificates, and go to the lighthouse.

+++Gather apples from the 2 apple trees that can be gathered from, and then dig up the 3 stumps in the area, those will grow back as harvestable apple trees for further visits.

+++ The astrologer will give you the old key and ask you for the diary, but will not be available to trade with unless you visited miss charm and got told by the writer that the astrologer sells writing supplies.

24.The next day, do the sermon. Your total faith will be 7, and your income should be equal to your grave score x3 copper coins.

25.With this faith, you have the option of researching lots of blues, or you have EXACTLY as much as it'd take to convince snake to give you the plans(5) and research the key(2), unlocking dungeon on week 3.

26.Keep burying every corpse with 2 or less red skulls. Any botched corpse you can cremate at the cost of 8 wood billets once you unlocked the tech for it. This allows you to gain 5 ash, 1 salt, and most importantly, a burial certificate for it.
++Salt is only good for sauerkraut, and you need 1 for merchant quest.
++Ash is very important, and you will need immense quantities of it for fertilizer.

From now on, you're on your own, but I will leave some general tips in the next section.

More Tips

+++Priority should be given to unlocking the Circular Saw tech, as it will allow you to fully repair the shortcuts inside your basements, connecting your laboratory and mortuary.

+++Speaking of shortcuts, you can get into town by going into your basement, repairing and following the tunnel to the east, this will permanently unlock the shortcut trapdoor behind the bushes (still faster to teleport though).

+++It seems that the trunk costs in various locations differ in the amount of iron parts they require. For instance, a garden trunk is 2 iron parts, a graveyard trunk is 7 parts, a basement trunk is 3 parts etc. (devs plz)

+++Provided you checked the sign by the church on the left in the early game, you can claim that burial site by talking to the inquisitor, accepting his friendship and giving him 20 firewood the next time you meet with him.
++This will allow the player to have a maximum graveyard capacity of 88 corpses, from an initial 42. This will allow the player to bury plenty of corpses to reach 200 gravescore, bypassing the need for embalming for the main quest.

+++Unlocking the dungeon earlier on might be a decent idea, as it costs a total of 7 faith points (persuading miss Charm is not needed). The dungeon is a good source of various materials, plenty of bats inside for making paper, and the urns drop various useful items including different quantities and qualities of seeds(delete the generic and bronze seeds though, waste of inventory space).
++ Once you get a healing potion from one of the urns, you can also repair the bridge that leads to the swamp (1 plank 4 flitch 8 nails) and go talk to Clotho. She will unlock the alchemy and embalming tech branches for free for the player, but you will be able to access her trading services only after you give her the healing potion.
++ The shortcut to Clotho is quite cheap and can be made with 10 nails 3 planks and 6 flitch, but only from Clotho's side, so you gotta go through the spiral maze at least once.

+++The donkey will come 5 times a week if provided enough carrots, so it is in your best interest to keep those bodies coming and supply enough carrots for the donkey ( you'd need at least 4 crops of carrots growing to consistently feed the donkey), as this also means you will be able to get more certificates faster, and maybe cremate some corpses for ashes (you'll need ashes for quality fertilizers).
++Build a pallet as a priority. It's cheap, costs only 6 flitch 4 nails, and allows you to have 2 corpses out at a given time, so if you've not managed to bury your initial corpse before sundown, the donkey will still start delivering the 2nd one, thus not wasting the potential for another corpse.
+This also means you can autopsy and bury 2 corpses at once, by pushing one with you on the ground and carrying the other, saving time.

+++Digging sand becomes faster and easier, the more glass techs you have unlocked. At glassblower I you dig 5 sand per operation, and at glassblower II you get 10, which drops as a stack and no longer pushes you aside... (stupid item colision...)
++Glass awards 1 red point each, BUT making glass cones provides blues too, so mass producing those is a neat idea for a passive point income.
++A recipe with ruined books and sand is available at the writing desk, and allows you to scavenge some paper from ruined books, with sand, giving some blue points too. Earliest you can do this is by the end of 2nd week, as only then will bishop teach you building>"The concept of dirt" for sand and clay extraction

+++You can make MORE money from mass producing and selling steel shovels to blacksmith at tier 3 per day than you could by selling crates to the merchant every week. Tool values do not decrease according to how many you sold. The only limitation becomes the amount of steel you can process and sticks(which you'll have to cut small trees for).

+++After you get zombies unlocked, and you're thinking about setting them up at the quarry, make sure to build at least 1 trunk there. Miners will get clogged up on coal while digging iron blocks in the mine. Preferably build the ore storages, stone storages, and 1-2 stone cutters there as well, to save space in your main yard. Visit the quarry after loading a savegame, otherwise they won't be working (probably not "loaded in").

+++Do not shy away from making zombies early, that's when they're most useful. As long as the zombie/corpse has no surgical errors, you will be able to improve the corpse later, to make the zombie better, but if you've got faith to spare, no sense not having it work for you. Bad zombies (with surgical mistakes or low white skulls) can be used as porters, as zombie work efficiency is irrelevant for porters.

+++Zombies can reach a max of 40% efficiency, but only when transplanted all 3white organs(which are rare btw) from other corpses. 3-white organs are very rare, and it takes a long period of time 'till bodies with 3 white start showing up (after dark organs tech is unlocked).

Tech tree choices that should be avoided or prioritized and why in the next sections

Anatomy

1.Gentle Butcher and the Surgery techs both almost fully eliminate the chance of screwing up the removal of a part, thus get Butcher as soon as you can afford it, makes life much easier. Surgery is kinda useless as by the time you can get it, you'll have burgers to munch on, from inquisition quest line.

After unlocking alchemy( by talking to Clotho in the swamp ):

2.Do not invest into Alchemy Storage and the other techs until you're ready to create your alchemy stations and have wooden beams and advanced glass cones accessible.

3.It is necessary to have both tier 1 and tier 2 alchemy workbenches built at the same time, as it is not possible to craft 2-reagent recipes in the tier 2 bench, only 3-reagent ones.

4.Getting Embalming Liquids early might seem kinda pointless (most embalming fluids require tier 2 alchemy workbench), but if the player has blue points to spare in the mid-game, unlocking Embalming and Embalming 2 allows access to Fridge Pallets, which are cheap(flitch, nails, and complex parts) to make and provide room for 2 corpses, for indefinite storage.

5.Embalming Liquids 2 and 3 should only be gotten once the player has constructed an alchemy workbench 2, and more importantly, when the player starts receiving corpses with 4 or more red skulls.
++Embalming is not necessary to beat the game, but it does help with improving your corpses enough that marble decorations become useful(those aren't necessary to beat the game either), and can further improve your...tireless workers.

Theology

1.Softness of faith should only be gotten once the player gets the merchant to provide tier 3 goods( for silk), and only if the player has unlocked Assembly Stand tech in building (for jointings).

2.Smell of faith should only be unlocked once the player has alchemy table I, the hand mixer and mill built. Pheromones requires access to alcohol, smooth marble and alchemy workbench II(which takes wood jointings, requiring building>assembly stand). You CAN however use the incense II in the tier 1 censer, so you could make use of this tech partially if you don't have marble available yet. ++It is important to note, incense is NOT better than simply having candelabras with good candles in them, it is simply a cheaper/easier way to get higher church score with less work, as incense is faster and cheaper to mass produce than candles. Candles require wax, which forces the player to buy 12 wax weekly from beekeeper and visit the beehives(if built) once a day.

3.Prayer for prosperity is one of the best prayers early in game. It has decent stats for a starting prayer, but also provides blessings of commerce. These items can be sold to merchants for 1 silver to speed up their progress to leveling up(You can get the miller and farmer to tier 3 from just selling them 1 of these). Other npcs might take a few to reach higher levels though (blacksmith barely reaches level 2 after selling him about 3 of these).
++This allows you to unlock powerful trading offers earlier, as well as decide when said merchant levels up( for instance, leveling up the blacksmith to tier 2 will allow you to sell steel and complex iron parts to him... but since right after level up his stock will only be 1 of each, his buy price will be WAY higher, you can prepare for this and sell a good 15 of each and make a killing, roughly 70 silver early)

4.Price of faith: mediocre tech, kind of a waste of 20 blue points early, the cardinal perk only makes it so you get 1 more copper for each grave score point you have. Get this perk only when you can confidently make a gold star combo prayer (60 church score required for success) as that's the best money and faith prayer in game, or when your grave score is at least higher than 100. Until then, the only 2 prayers you'll want will be a prayer for prosperity and a (bronze) prayer for inspiration.


5.Cremation is a really good tech to have early, Graveyard Enchanchement(misspelled?) should be gotten as soon as the player is able to cut the big trees and has lots of stone and peat (300+). As for the rest of the techs afterward maybe get them late game to make your graveyard look that extra bit nicer...
++With "Graveyard Enchanchement" tech, the player can build lawns, which vary in size but give anywhere from 2-4 gravescore each, cost only peat and stone, and it is entirely possible to get 300+ gravescore by plastering them all over your graveyard and forgetting about burying and decorating corpses altogether.

6.Try to postphone unlocking Stone Gravestones early if possible, as getting it early before Stone Carving 2 gets you very little to work with(stone grave fence only).

7.Shining of faith requires access to either gold and jewelery table, OR lots of money to buy the gold fittings from the merchant (and moneylender if refugee camp is developed enough -GOC dlc).

8.Marble gravestones are not necessary to beat the game (get them only if you have nothing else to do with your points)

9. Superpower of faith is hella expensive, but gives confessional II, which is really affordable to build, and provides 2 faith and silver-gold stories on interaction.

10. With GOC dlc active, helping the "Undertaker" NPC and completing her questline will unlock a lot of various new gravestone decorations, the best of which will cost marble, gold fittings and 3 gold star marble busts to make. They also don't require knowing the prior gravestone technologies.
+++ Making the gold star marble busts should be done in bulk, preferably after holding a sermon prayer for excellence, as having that prayer active will ensure 100% gold star chance, provided the other tech perks are already owned.
++The prayer for excellence is only worth it if making more than 45+ busts while under its effect, as otherwise it's more cost efficient faith-wise to just use the combo prayer(which has a higher faith output) and stomach the 20% chance of failure. The buff also slightly helps with assembling books.
++Only prayer for excellence's buff actually works, there are other items in the game that supposedly give the same buff (like cheesecake, a recipe gained from helping the camp chef, but those buffs are bugged and don't actually do anything)

Writing

1.Inventing Stories, Writer's Inspiration Playwright- Should all be obtained further on, when the player is interested in finally acquiring a gold quality prayer book.
++Writer gives a 30% bonus, Playwright gives 60% bonus, building a desk II instead of desk I gives an extra 20%, and if under the effects of prayer for imagination, you can get an extra 70%.
+This means that you will be able to turn bronze stories 70% into silver pages, and combine those into gold chapters sometimes, so try to only use bronze stories early, before you get this setup, as silver is guaranteed gold.
+When making chapters, try to mix and match silver and gold pages, to save on gold pages used.

2.Old books can be salvaged with some sand at the desk, for some early paper and blue points (after bishop teaches you how to gather sand...)

3.Paper Crafting should be gotten as a priority, after being able to produce the complex iron parts necessary to build the church workbench.

4.Writing supplies should be gotten once you're able to make ink (alchemy workbench I). Before then, you can make yourself bronze quality prayers by just buying a bronze chapter from astrologer, saves you the need to buy this tech and costs roughly as much as the ink and feathers would otherwise...

5.Books tech is really only needed for prayer for imagination and the combo prayer. Until you have enough blues to unlock playwright as well, avoid getting this.

6.Get writer's inspiration only when you have access to lenses (Assembly Stand).

7.Paper Production is a luxury tech, one can obtain bat wings easily by going at dusk( until midnight) in the swamp to the north(3 bats), or on the hill to the north-west(3 bats), and further past the blockage (4 more) daily, for plenty of paper early game.
++That being said, this tech requires at least alchemy workbench I, to make white dye for the paper. It also consumes lots of wheat, so preferably an automated means of farming wheat is secured.

8.Complex printing press is a scam. I've tested this time and time again. both presses are identical, they take the same reagents to make flyers, they take the same energy, they do so at the same speed. Unless grabbing it for completion's sake, waste of points to get this...

Farming and Nature

1.Simple and complex fertilizer techs, as well as the Gardening tech should only be gotten once the player has an alchemy worktable 2 available BECAUSE:
--the boost fertilizers only increase the speed at which crops grow, and while they can be gotten earlier with only a tier 1 alchemy worktable, they are generally useless, as time is not important when growing crops ( you plant and forget, come harvest next week or when you stumble across the grown crops)
--High quality fertilizers ONLY affect crops with quality. Growing wheat, carrots, etc. should only be done with peat as fertilizer, since the quality fertilizers require ash to make, and are only needed when trying to boost your seed's quality and get more gold seeds.
--As with quality fertilizers, the farmer perk only affects seeds with quality to them. Carrots, wheat, and whatnot will forever give the player 4 or less seeds.
++ Using gold star quality fertilizer is preferred for growing your seed count. Silver star quality fertilizer is easier to make, and only uses half the ash, but each fertilizer yields 0-1 extra seeds, while the gold star quality fertilizer yields anywhere from 1-3 extra seeds per crop per growth cycle.

2.Master Gatherer: I've taken this tech early in 2 of my early game tests and figured out one thing: This perk is completely garbage. What it does is increase the amount of stuff you get from gathering flowers, berries and mushrooms by 1, and unlocks red mushrooms. This is bad early BECAUSE:
--For berries that's a really marginal increase, and once the player has actual good food(pies, wine or honey 4 dayz) berries should only be gathered in case of missing a few green points.
--Red mushrooms are mostly useful in mass producing quality fertilizer II (and for a quest) and until then are not necessary
++this tech does seem to make it possible to get double butterflies/moths from flowers, but getting those is kinda pointless, unless needing the chaos extract.
-+Double mushrooms is most of the reason why this could be good, as early game, baked mushrooms are an ok food until better stuff is unlocked, but it has such a short lasting window of usefulness that it doesn't matter much.

Basically get this tech once you have alchemy workbench 2 accessible, and only when you need the fertilizer.

3.Grape farming: This tech allows you to build trellises for growing grapes, after you've completed the required inquisitor quest.
--You can grow grapes even before completing the Inquisitor's quest for unlocking the vineyard building bench, by just restoring some of the damaged trellises. This also bypasses the need of obtaining this tech early on.
++With peat and bronze quality grape seeds (buy 4/week ) you can get an easy source of food, as they can be made into grape pies(1 siver recipe) for a better usage of pastry dough than cake.
++6 grape pies can be sold weekly for a tidy profit of 3 silver and 25ish copper at the tavern
++try to repair the shortcut behind the house to witch hill as soon as possible, as it is quite cheap.
++the follow-up tech of winemaking is god tier for food production, as there is no balancing to drinks in the game, you can guzzle alcohol without repercussions.
++With the tavern DLC, you can sell large quantities of high quality wine daily at your tavern, possibly earning you more than 2 silver per bottle sold. Gold quality wine is the best alcohol to sell passively at your tavern.
-Building the tavern requires a large upfront investment though, of nearly 1 gold coin and a lot of building materials, provided the main quest is followed.
+If Game of Crone dlc is also owned, obtaining this amount of money fast is made a lot easier, as one can sell the jewelry gained from the donkey/refugee camp quests to the moneylender, or hell, even borrowing the 1 gold from him.

4.Beekeeping and Insects:
Beekeeping: This tech is misleading, as you can gather honey without this tech, just that the beeswax doesn't have a chance of dropping until you get it.
Insects: Pretty much only required once alchemy is obtained of if the player needs to fish early game and wants a *free* fishing pole ( for 6 moths ).

4,5.Bee Domestication>Bee Friend: These techs are for those who are too hipster to grow grapes.
--Building the beehouses is a total pain as they each require 10 bees, which can be rarely obtained from beehives.
++It is most advantageous to buy up to 12 bees a week from the beekeeper in town, to kickstart the hives. He restocks wax and bees by at least 2 a day, unlike other vendors who only restock by 1.
++The wax and bee droprate from built hives is considerably better than trees, so once you've built some beehouses, forget about gathering from trees altogether.
++BeeFriend is basically the main reason why you'd get these techs, as it makes bees no longer damage you and almost doubles the honey you get/ gather, making honey worth eating raw, as you'll be swimming in it.
++The 2 honey trees to the north-west + the 4 honey trees scattered in the hill on your way towards the quarry are a good source of farmable honey early game, especially if going to mine coal or going to the quarry.

5.Brewing: needed only once the quest for the inquisitor requires you to provide 30 beer and 15 burgers (both gold quality) for the witch burnings. This quest however is really important, but you should only get it once you have gold quality onions and hops (aka at least silver quality fertilizer required).

5,5. Digestion: this tech is kinda useless, it offers 2 alternatives for obtaining alcohol in the followup tech, but it isn't even required to get Strong Alcohol tech, one can skip it after Winemaking(which is required and really good). It can be useful however if the player builds an apple orchard and intends to make large batches of booze through apple ferment.

6.Blending: Winemaster perk is not worth the cost(luxury perk). It just gives you higher chance to make higher quality alcohol and boosts the restoration effects of bronze and silver wines BUT:
--This can be counterproductive, as from silver grapes, instead of making silver wine(needed for quests) you might accidentally make a gold quality batch.
++Silver wines restore enough as it is, and gold wines almost fully refill your energy anyway, without this perk.
+It is advisable to simply "breed" a lot of gold quality grape and hops seeds using gold quality fertilizer, and then grow most of them with peat, while using some gold quality fertilizer to keep the seed count constant.

7.Zombie Gardening: Cheap tech, get it as soon as you've got at least quality fertilizer I craftable, and can afford to spend the faith to get some zombies working crops.

8.Zombie Winery: Having a zombie turn grapes directly into wine is great for automation, you no longer need to squeeze grapes or fiddle with barrels.

9 Zombie Brewery: Borderline useless. Making beer in bulk isn't useful past the inquisitor quests, beer doesn't sell for much, even at the tavern.

Smithing

1.Glass should be unlocked after unlocking "The concept of dirt", by talking to the episcop the week after you unlock church. Making glass takes time and energy digging the sand, but awards an easy early game source of red points. Making bottles provides an easy but slow source of blue points.
++Sand is easy to get, so there is no excuse not making glass in one or 2 of your furnaces. Keep all but maybe 1 of your furnaces working at all times to get easy points and progress faster.

2.Imborn blacksmith: this tech is a good quality of life improvement, as it indirectly increases the longevity of your iron supply and lowers energy and time costs spent manufacturing at the anvil.
This tech is best gotten in the early game, after the first week; Otherwise if you already have ample coal supplies and made yourself an ore storage and stone cutter up the mountain rendering iron an infinite resource, it is totally possible to play the game without this tech.
++While it improves iron bar efficiency by 33% for nails and simple parts, it improves iron bar efficiency by 50% for complex parts

3. Weapons>Martial Skills: These skills should be avoided, you don't need "good" equipment too early on, and you'll end up unlocking Steel Weapons separately anyway.
++It is entirely possible however to not craft a single weapon though as there is a merchant that comes at night above the lumberjack in the village and sells weapons and armors. This merchant however is unlocked later on in the quest chain with miss charm's necklace.
+The cost for a damask sword with gem(required for quest and best weapon) is 1 gold 50 silver, but the sword itself requires a steel sword, 3 gold inlays and 1 gem, the cost of all those totalling way more than 2 gold if bought separately.
++The recipe for Steel armor is really cheap, costs some sticks and complex iron parts, as oposed to iron armor which costs lots of skin.

4.Engineer: You'll need this after you're halfway the marble tech tree and it helps slightly when carving marble busts. Getting it early = shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon. The water pump is more of a luxury, providing a passively increasing supply of water in the yard, and you'll still need water buckets for paper glop later anyway so it won't help with that...
--With GOC, the refugee camp well, once built, is an infinitely better source of water droplets than this tech will ever hope to provide.

5. Rules of Burning: This tech is pretty much a luxury tech as it doubles the iron you can smelt at once, while taking slightly less time and fuel total.
--It is highly recommended to improve yard space and construct a total of at least 3 furnaces anyway(max 6), to provide a good source of points early and to get stuff done faster. This also bypasses the need of getting Advanced Smelting until later on, after you've unlocked Precious Metals.
++You can build nice looking decorative lamp posts at designated spots over the road from the quarry to your home.

6.Glassblower 2: the complex conical flasks require tier 2 furnace to craft, and are required once the player is ready to tackle alchemy. The lens requires assembly table to craft, but that doesn't matter much because lenses are mostly used to make steel chisels for working marble busts, which means you got those techs by then anyway.

7.Iron Castings: Prioritize this tech after Circular Saw in building tab, but before Assembly table.
++Noteworthy: It is cheaper to upgrade furnaces from tier I to II rather than building them at tier II, but it's cheaper to build furnaces at tier III directly once possible, instead of upgrading them 2 times.
-The upgrade process eats a lot of energy.

Building

1.Sawing and Woodworking should be the first techs you get, period. Woodworking allows you to make flitch into planks, which is the fastest, cheapest, least energy demanding, non-tool damaging, red point source available.

2.Unlock firewood tech after building your first furnace, so you can clear the blockage to the north-west that prevents you from getting to the (coal,iron,stone,marble) extraction area, and get Mining tech before going there, so you can use coal instead of firewood for fuel, wedges are the main reason you get this tech.
++You will still need firewood for the professional oven in your tavern, as that one won't accept coal

3.Woodcutter: You get this tech mostly just so you can fully clear the graveyard's left side and your base area's dead trees. Until you need to do that, don't bother, waste of blue points.
++Maybe after getting zombies unlocked, and digging the 1-2 zombies in the rubble(yes, sometimes the game glitches and you can dig 2 instead of just 1) it might be worth getting this to get zombie woodcutting and build the zombie sawmill for infinite steady supply of wood.

4.Precious Metals: Get this tech before unlocking the Steel techs, as it's impossible to make steel without making graphite first, also the chances to get precious nuggets earlier won't hurt.

5.Circular Saw: Get this tech once you're sick and tired of not having a shortcut to your church's basement, basically when you start thinking about building your alchemy laboratory and spending more time there.
--Note: getting to Snake is possible earlier, as the first blockage from the basement of the house is cheaper to remove, not requiring beams, thus unlocking the shortcut to the town does not require it.
--Issue:Mortuary is poorly designed, and the tunnel to it takes a lot more time than just getting to it from outside.Also repairing the hatch might cause more harm than good, as it will inevitably increase the player travel distance to retrieve the corpse.Corpses inside the mortuary will decay slightly slower than outside, but you will still want to put them on a table/pallet asap.

6.Related Ore: Bad tech choice early that clutters your inventory space and is only useful in alchemy later on, or if you want to get to the miner and gems> Best Friend techs in the late late game. Limestone is white powder, mostly used for white dye, in candles and paper, and sulfur is life powder, kinda useless...

7.Stone carving 1 and 2 : I personally try to get these both at the same time, as only with stone carving 2 can you start churning out proper gravestones really efficiently. RUSH these before the steel techs, and get Stone Gravestones at the same time. This will provide a good grindable source of red and blue points by repeatedly making and then destroying the stone fence II's, at a cost of 1 stone and energy per set of operations.

8.Tricks of the Trade: Albeit relatively cheap at the point of reaching this tech, it's situational. You will want to get it mostly only after getting to the Grave Monuments tech, as it will allow you to make 2 carved stone out of 1 smooth stone, effectively making the carved stone stuff cheaper in faith. You'll also need to have it before starting to work with marble busts.
++You can repair your almost broken gold star steel chisel by "upgrading" it with a lens when it's at 1/10 durability. This will save you lenses, and thus faith, trying to get new gold star chisels.

9.Assembly Stand: This table is necessary to make steel equipment and lenses, jointings are needed for lategame stuff, etc.
+-Plank red points are lowered to 1/plank at this station, not that it matters much at this point. If you still need a large amount of planks, consider crafting them before upgrading the bench.

10.Marble techs: Unlock them only after you are able to embalm corpses with all white skull bonus substances, as the marble stuff do NOT reward blue points on crafting and can only be studied for the blue points roughly paying back their blue point cost, while providing an overkill of grave decoration until the later stages of the game.

Cookery List and Sources

The important cooking recipes are:

Simple and Tasty: You get this from your basement chest. Decent once you get firewood/coal
++You get apples every time you go to the lighthouse( there are a total of 5 gatherable trees there, but 3 start out as chopped, and you should shovel the stumps up so they regrow)
++Mushrooms are a good early source of green points, however digging green vine-bushes is more effective early on and, later on , farming will provide enough green points for all your green needs, as well as better food options.
++You can also buy apple saplings from clotho the witch starting at 3 silver each, after you provide her a health potion ( cauldron route is long and tedious, and stupid, faster to get a potion from the dungeon for her... )
+These apple trees that you grow are overpowered, as they will be harvestable for 15 apples each when ripe, definetly the best deal for your "orchard/garden". This makes it so you can get really cheap strong alcohol by using apple ferment instead of wine.
+If you do visit Clotho, be sure to buy 6 frogs each trip, you will need 10 total for a quest for perfume later on. They're cheap, and once you catch a frog (using a butterfly/moth as bait in village pond at low range) you'll be able to make sliced meat out of 3 frogs.

Cake+: Obtained from Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, he asks for 5 honey.
Cake is always gold quality, requires pastry dough(+1 egg,1 milk /4 dough) 5 berries (cost is negligible as player will be gathering any and all berry bushes early game anyway) and 1 honey.
++The main reason why this recipe is good to get is that the buff it provides is only given by pies (early-mid game) and it allows obtaining extra blue points(+1) per each item researched, but provided you always consume cake or pie before researching, you will end up with a decent amount of blue points, especially when researching stuff for alchemy.

Good Carbs: Pasta is crap, but doesn't require lint. Lasagna is good, but requires lint, which is a ♥♥♥♥ crop. Both these recipes are unlocked by giving an iron axe(any durability) to the woodcutter stationed north of TRES the carpenter. They give a buff that makes working with an axe or pickaxe easier.(basically only useful early, when you can't afford to make them)

Jelly:One of the starting recipes you get as soon as you kill the slimes for the blacksmith. It is feasible to make them. 4 slimes spawn daily at dawn in the swamp behind your house, the 3 green jellies you make total 75 energy, - the honey which provides 15 raw, each slime jelly(mob drop) ends up providing roughly 8 energy surplus(-6 energy trying to kill the slime with starting sword). As long as you get the slimes lined up and hit multiple at once, it's really good, but nothing to go out of your way for.

Vegetable Dishes: A tech you unlock after you speak with the farmer about crops, the carrot cutlet is the only good dish, and is really easy to make, provided you buy seeds regularly from him and use peat. This dish alone makes each carrot worth 24 energy, and can be used exclusively until something better like pies or wine is unlocked.(Try to buy at most 12 seeds/ week every 2 weeks)

Sweet Baking(2silver): Muffins are great. 4 dough 1 honey = 20x4 energy.

Pies(1silver): Get after you have grapes, replaces cake.

Soups: You get this by giving clotho a silver star pumpkin. Really good cheap food, they provide a bonus that gives +1 to the rate at which you regain energy in sleep, but getting a silver pumpkin early might be a reason why you end up skipping them in favor of pies/wine.

Tasty and Healthy(X): Don't buy this, not worth it. Only reason you'd get it is for baked pumpkin, but sauerkraut does the same thing.

Fish Delicacies(X): Don't buy this, not worth it, by the time you have the fishing rod and bait to catch good fish, you'll have moved on from energy problems.

Beer Snacks: These recipes are unlocked for free after bringing a bronze onion and talking to the inkeeper. It has to be bronze quality. I recommend just buying one off the farmer, as it's not worth buying the bronze seeds when silver ones are available. The onion rings are a decent value recipe by themselves, but after eating them, beer will restore 13 more energy for 2 minutes, which is ok-ish, not that you'd consume beer, since wheat is better used in making paper, and the little beer you do need (31) is for quests.

Fish Dishes: The fisherman teaches you this for free. Fish fingers required for an achievement...
Fish soup and baked fish are a pretty good food source if you like fishing...( the buffs themselves are completely trash tier as fishing is stupidly easy though)
++Fishing by the waterfall, across the river, with bait, you can catch red fillet x1 fish(bronze quality) by fishing close range, and white fillet x3 fish by fishing long range.
++Better yet, fishing above the waterfall, at the small wooden bridgeway in the forests, close range can yield bronze AND silver star red fillets, allowing an early completion of fish kebab quest.(4 silver star fillets)

Fish Kebab: You get this by delivering some silver star red fillets to the ♥♥♥♥♥ baron(lol). Don't even bother doing the quest if you don't intend to fish a lot. The quest is easier to complete with the tier 2 or 3 fishing rod using steel lure. The kebabs themselves are powerful potion substitutes before alchemy tier II table, and make clearing the dungeon a bit faster.

Nectar of the Gods: You get to make mead, 50 water + 3 hops + 1 honey = 10 mead, which at gold quality is a measly +3 life +20 energy(it's worse than beer, but after you got a water pump you could do this to get even more energy than you know what to do with)
++You get this recipe after you hold your first witch burning "sale", where you serve 10 gold quality beer and 5 gold quality burgers for 33 silver, 2 or 3 times ( i forgot). You then deliver 1 beer to the inkeeper and he'll allow you to go take his mead recipe from the table upstairs in his room...
+-The mead isn't affected by beer thirst buff, and there is no way to make it restore more energy. (digestion potion only works on cooked foods, not raw foods or drinks)

There's a bunch of other foodstuffs added in the GOC dlc, unlocked by helping the camp's chef, but they cannot be made in bulk in the tavern, and are somewhat underwhelming. Some of them have buffs that are downright broken and apply an effect that does nothing.

The Tavern

Provided the player has "Stranger Sins" dlc, they will be able to complete a series of quests that enable them to build and own a tavern.

The tavern can then be upgraded at certain points in the questline, increasing the "tavernscore". Higher tavernscore means more drinks are consumed daily at the tavern, increasing reputation and making money faster. It also makes it so the max amount of sales that can occur during festivals is higher.

To oversimplify things, the best thing to stock in your cellar is gold quality wine, as it provides the fastest money gain. Having a constant supply of wine sold at the tavern with 40+ quality will easily earn the player more than enough money to not know what to do with.

The various events the player will have to host require different foods/drinks for max satisfaction, and getting the related achievements for "best event x" require a certain tavernscore too. The maximum amount of food/drink sold by Yorick is your tavernscore x 2, so at max 81 tavernscore, you could sell a maximum of 162 items.

For grave festival and standup comedy, the best item to give Yorick to sell is booze. Setup a large apple orchard and mass produce booze, and you'll have no issue here.

For miss charm's concert, gold quality wine is the best.

For the rat races, you'll want gold quality grape pies. You can bake those in bulk using the professional oven. I recommend setting a batch for baking every time you visit the tavern/Gerry to do quests.

The dlc offers plenty of insight on how the various village npcs ended up living the way they are. Most of the quest items obtained will also be able to be put on display in the tavern for a boost in score, after the player is done with them.

The dlc also offers yet another alternative method to gaining a golden apple, by helping the woodcutter after a certain point at the end of the questline. You'll find the woodcutter in the tavern, and approaching him will trigger the quest, he'll ask you to craft some quest items, roof tiles at a furnace(clay bowls required) and curtains at the church workbench(I think, they also cost silk to make)

The Refugee Camp

Provided the player has acquired the Game of Crone DLC, upon repairing the graveyard and opening the church, and then going to sleep, the player will get a cutscene that will unlock the camp.

To keep things simple, at least make sure that there's plenty of water(droplets) in the stockpile. You want to make the camp grow, as it's both required for the quest, and lucrative for the player. Keeping at least water stocked will ensure the camp will still slowly grow, even without food.

You will want to prioritize building a well as soon as possible, as that will give the camp access to a self-accumulating water storage, similar to a water pump a player could build back at home, and also enable the player to draw lots of water insanely fast at the cost of energy.

Apart from that, always make sure the camp has the max amount of tents and refugees, as it will make the refugee progress much faster.

For early game food, cooking tons of carrot cutlets is advised, making sure not to deprive the donkey of carrots for corpse deliveries though. The camp refugees will also slowly fill the storage with mushrooms and berries, and won't eat them unless there's no other alternatives left.

After getting a certain amount of refugees, or building certain improvements, special npcs will show up.

+The first is the cook, who will give the player access to various cooking recipes (not that important)

+The second one is the moneylender. This guy is important but looks generic, memorize how he looks, you'll spend a great deal of time looking for him in the camp. While he doesn't give you any quests, he can offer to lend you 1 gold coin, possibly useful for opening a tavern with stranger sins, but MOST importantly, he buys and sells valuables.
He's your go-to if you get your hands on jewelry(and you will, you'll get at least 2 very early on from this DLC) enabling you to earn quick money, he serves as another source of gold fittings apart from the merchant, and he sells gold and silver ore. He also buys silver and gold powder, along with silver bars, 1 of each can be sold to him daily for a steady profit.

+Undertaker is the 3rd. She's only really useful if the player intends to get the best graveyard decorations unlocked.

+The tanner is last. The tanner, after completing her questline, gives access to all the bag recipes, which act as an inventory extension and are thus very useful.

One of the most important features of the camp is unlocked when building the "Fence supplies for garden", which can be done really early on. After building it, a maximum of 4 garden beds can be built inside, which are for all intents and purposes equivalent to zombie farms that you can unlock even before zombies. They work in the same way, they take a bulk of 24 seeds and can be set to loop-grow crops. They require 12 fertilizer to permanently upgrade their tier, increasing their crop yield. Of course, probably the best crop to automate here is carrots, as they can act as a food source for the refugees as well. They are fully automated, being "manned" by the various camp residents, but only visually, as they keep producing 24/7.
-They output a random seed count varying from 21-27 seeds, regardless of bed quality, so it is advisable to leave plenty of excess seeds in the stockpile so they don't become idle.

Upon building a "kitchen", the camp's cook will randomly create various dishes with the items in stock inside the camp storage, utilizing their water from the well and the various farm produce to create better food for the camp residents.
Building the kitchen however should be postponed if the player wishes to farm large quantities of wheat (for beer and paper) at their farms, because otherwise the cook will start converting it all into flour, then dough.

At the end of the questline, there's 3 possible rewards in the form of various perks, depending on the player's choices, so it's recommended to backup the savegame and try achieving all 3 endings.

Apart from the camp's questline, the donkey also offers an interesting set of chores to do, with various rewards strewn across, culminating in the obtaining of an umbreakable -1 energy/use "ice pick" which functions like a better steel pickaxe that doesn't need repairing.

Noteworthy bugs/balance issues/exploits with the game

1. Dying has no consequence, and is useful for fast travelling to your house. This is unlikely to change as the game doesn't seem to want to be punishing for those who are bad at combat, but a player can willingly let themselves die, either by eating red mushrooms when already low hp, or once the "town" is unlocked, suiciding there every time they want to get back from town.

2.Autopsy in the morgue, and this one is really important, hope they fix it: Selecting a part to autopsy, and then going to the construction menu, selecting the table for deletion and then de-selecting it will cause the said organ to be removed instantly from the inventory of the body, at no energy or chance of failure for the player. In the early game, especially before you have butcher tech, you can ensure you get a proper corpse at the cost(or benefit) of not obtaining blood and fat, with 100% chance it will not generate a "failed removal" item that lowers the corpse's quality, and also being instant and costs no energy. All it requires is repairing the morgue workbench with 2 parts and 2 flitch.

3.Entering a conversation with npcs pauses the game time, but not the game world, so if you go to the tavern at noon, and you see the donkey just spawned, and then you go talk to an npc, the time will still be noon when you leave conversation/trade with him, but the donkey will have long delivered the corpse, and it might have decayed quite a bit, your cooldowns on items and various other processes like furnaces will have progressed as well.
This can be exploited by setting your furnaces to melt ore, opening your teleport stone's "chat" interface, and then leaving the game for a while, and your metals will have melted at no ingame time spent, allowing you to amass resources for something you otherwise couldn't( ex: to get enough iron smelted for making the church chandeliers in time for the next sermon). Afterwards, if you chose to teleport, the stone's cooldown will also have been reset, so it will be possible to tp again.This also works for resources replenishing (like mushrooms, berries and apples) and also farm crops, as it's possible to have them grow by teleporting to the dead horse and talking to the inkeeper, his wife, or miss charm/vagner if present, and then going into the kitchen to eat or taking a shower irl, all your crops will have grown quite a lot.Having zombies working on something or even refugee camp farms with crops queued will also work.

4.Using tools, holding F pressed after using them keeps charging an invisible progress number, and when you actually go to another resource, if the resource's "resistance stat" is lower than the charged tool number, it's dug instantly.
-This used to work while the game was paused (looking in inventory) and made it so you could dig most things in at least 1 energy, at most 2. They recently "hotfixed" it by making it so that if you pause the game while mining/cutting, you'll cancel your animation.
+It's still possible to do it as long as you pause the game while you're on route to the next resource while holding F.
-Doesn't work for harvestables (things you grab without need of pick/axe/shovel).

5. It is still possible (yes they only partially fixed the bug previously) to repair your tools by quickstacking, but only if the tools themselves can be sold to a vendor. Quickstacking 2 iron pickaxes at tier 2 Krezvold for example, with 1 pickaxe fully broken and the other one full durability, by shift-clicking the full durability pick, will repair the other pickaxe, without need of fulfilling the trade...

6. It is possible to bypass a large chunk of the early gameplay grind/loop by filling your graveyard to the brim with lawns, thus getting a high enough church score to complete the game, all the while earning you very good money early game, and enabling you to forget about body decay and surgery mistake perks ( you just build lots of pallets to enable corpses to pile on in the morgue, and then scrap them all for parts and burn them all in bulk once a week.
--This costs lots of peat and stone(200+) and requires a few tech, including the woodcutter tech for clearing the left side of the graveyard.
++This means no fiddling with grave decorations and enables the player to use that time more productively, like farming, stocking their tavern, managing their camp, questing, etc.
++This ensures the absolute maximum output of meat, blood, skins, skulls and ashes, as most bodies will be harvested and cremated, apart from maybe a select few bodies in good condition reserved for zombie making.
++After completing most of the important questlines, the player can then chose to gradually remove the lawns and start embalming and burying maxed out corpses directly, to reach max graveyard score with much less hassle than otherwise exhuming and burning all the buried corpses. (if the player is actually interested in achieving max graveyard score, as it's not necessary and there's no achievement for it anyway)

[Lurker]

Thanks! I really appreciate your quick and helpful response!

[Skrymaster]

@Lurker
Yep, zombie unlocks happen after a cutscene in the Morgue where Gerry asks you if you're alright, and that you look tired (happens relatively early, after a couple weeks in game).

The actual place you need to go is to the left of the dungeon area, and to reach that place you will need to hand Snake the key to get past the gate in the basement.

Snake usually comes during day of envy (green) but might sometimes come during other days at night, and sits in front of the locked gate, otherwise if gate is unlocked, he goes further inside.

Be very mindful, not sure if it's relevant for you, but if using a 3rd party software to speed up/slow the game down, like cheat engine's speed hack function, if your game speed hits x0 NPCs will freeze in place and can potentially mess up your savegame...

[Lurker]

I can' t find out how to unlock zombies. According to Gerry there should be one in the church cellar, and I expectred more info after giving him wine, but nothing. Snake doesn't show up either so I cant hand him the key :(

[Lurker]

@Skrymaster thanks! I guess I'll hope for grapes to finish growing soon...

[Skrymaster]

@Lurker
Game should save automatically any time you either sleep in a bed somewhere or mediate in the garden (once you built it)

I'm not sure about berry pies, but I know that Horadric (inkeep) should buy grape pies from you for decent money... unless they changed something, but hopefully not.

[Lurker]

Who can I sell pie to? tavern doesn't give me the option when trading with the bartender or his wife

[Lurker]

I just realized there's no way to save games (no save button in menu or anything), what do I do?

[Micho]

DEEPLY THANKFUL :) <3

[Skrymaster]

And to clarify:
The numbering of most steps in the guide are in the order I personally played them out in my games to fit said actions within a very tight time-frame, with "++" additions where I had extra information on the topic that I wanted to expand on.

If you're a new player to the game, it's best to just play the game with no consideration for time at all, and just skim through the guide tips and draw whatever wisdom or information you deem useful, or refer to the guide when you're curious about a certain topic.

[Skrymaster]

@JoJo
This is one of the first guides I've written on steam, and although I do admit that the formatting and layout of the information is not good (was even worse when I created it initially), the information inside is thoroughly tested and relevant.

The guide was never meant to be followed like a recipe, since the game is sandbox-y in nature, with no real time crunch and multiple valid "paths" to achieve your goals. More detailed step-by-step instructions would result in this guide turning into a "meta build order", like RTS genre games have, and I didn't intend for that.

While I do admit that the start of the guide is quite linear, similar to a build order, later on I just explain the good tech to get, the bad ones to avoid early, what can make you money faster, etc. without forcing the player's hands into one particular playstyle. Ideally, by the end one should experience most of what the game has to offer anyway.