Advanced tips and frequently asked questions

A number of useful tips and tricks to progress through the mid and late game smoothly.

Content

This game is a bit lengthy and a lot of the information out there is rather outdated, so I figured I'd give you some tips to get by and have a better experience with Graveyard Keeper. This isn't a detailed walkthrough or guide of the game, just a list of things I wished I knew before grinding away my hours.

The guide is mostly spoiler-free.

1) Inventory dyslexia
A lot of the game suffers from inventory dyslexia. Keep your stuff organised. You will want about 2 chests in each area, 4 in your yard (after you expand it). Keep stuff organised early and it won’t be an issue.

2) Alchemy
Alchemy right now is a "look it up on the wiki" part of the game - https://graveyardkeeper.gamepedia.com/Alchemy . Use these recipes, don't bother experimenting.

Build yourself a bench just for the elements, and another one for other reagents (gold / silver dust, water, oil, blood, etc.). Grind up a full stack of elements at a time and don’t worry about things for a long time afterwards.

Yes, Tanning Agent requires Death Solution, but you can get it from the Dungeon.

3) Farming & alcohol
Early on, farm a good deal of carrots for the donkey. Later on you will be only farming grapes and more carrots. Until the devs make fertilising less annoying, Peat is only worth it if you’re strapped for cash or have expensive seeds (like grapes).

Most of the time, you will be getting 3 seeds for every 4 you plant, you will have to replenish those. However, if you use Quality Fertilizer 1 or 2, you will get more than 4 seeds, AND they will be of better quality. Definitely go for Quality Fertilizer 2 as soon as you can to get a lot of gold-star grapes!

Turn those grapes into wine. This is your healing and energy potion for the rest of the game (sells decent too!). Don’t bother with the rest until you need them for quests.

4) Dungeon
Get into the dungeon early. Remember to break jars! You will get a lot of random seeds out of it, and often find veins of silver, gold and diamonds!

Monster bits from the dungeon can be ground up for useful ingredients! Look out for grey goo especially – that can give you Death Solution AFAIR.

5) Resource grind
Sand will always be a grind. Sand makes glass, which make bottles. You will need a good deal of them for embalming. So grind grind grind that sand.

You can get a bit of iron from the swamp, some rocks from all over the place, and there is some marble at the Witches Hill, but don’t bother. Eventually, you will want to get all of your iron, rocks, marble and coal from north of the swamp. There is a whole camp there where you can sleep and build. Set up a few chests and two furnaces there as well to smelt everything on the spot! Definitely bring a lot of coal back with you for your home needs – firewood is a chore to grind.

For wood – gather it from around your house or directly below the vertical road next to your house.

6) Church
Ignore candles and incense – they are too much of a grind. Do install candelabras and such though – they still give points. Silk you have to get from the merchant.

Combo prayer is your bread and butter for the majority of the game. Get it to gold and have the church to support it and you’re mostly set. Use Prayer for Imagination when you want to write a lot of stories, chapters and books.

Don’t upgrade your church to the next level before you’re a Rightful Citizen – you won’t be able to use it!

7) Quests
Do try to do the quests early. A few of them unlock a few important aspects of the game. A few tips to keep in mind:
- Collect skulls and blood so you can build a shrine for Snake
- When the Merchant will want you to package boxes for them, you do that in your garden. You will need a good amount of silver and gold quality crops to finish that quest.
- Prepare gold-quality beer and hamburgers for Inquisitor (so have some spare meat around and look for gold-quality hops and onions!)
- Ms. Charm will want a gold-quality story (not a note or a chapter, a story!)
- Episcop will want you to be a Rightful Citizen after you upgrade the church. Later he’ll want gold-quality marble statues (you use silver-quality for graves and bronze-quality for inside of the church, so nothing is wasted if you get a worse quality)
- Progressing with the Inquisitor will unlock Dark Brain, Heart and Intestine.
- Save one Dark Heart for Snake
- Late-game, have a spare silver and gold quality book for Astrologer

8) Embalming
Don’t bother with this until late-game. Then you will want to be using – Golden Injection, Silver Injection, Glue Injection and eventually, Lye Injection if you can eliminate that extra red skull.

Gold is especially rare in the game, so make sure you have enough gold dust for your Golden Injections before smelting the rest.

9) Other things
Fishing is pretty pointless – buy the fish bits you need from the Lighthouse and don’t bother.

Bring parts to build a bridge when you go to the middle of the swamp – it’s a long walk and you don’t want to do it 3 times for no reason.

Silver is very easy to come by, gold is very rare. Make sure you have enough golden dust for alchemy before smelting gold. You will find a lot of diamonds in the dungeon.

Eating cake will make you research extra bits at the research table. Researching grave markers and fences gives you a lot of blue bits.

Eventually, you will have to grind to become an aristocrat. It’s a chore. Sell gold-star wine to the merchant, sell jewellery to Ms. Charm, sell some gold-star books to the Astronomer, ship crates of gold-star produce in crates for the Merchant. Gold-quality Combo Prayer or Prayer for Donations will also be useful if you have a high-quality church and graveyard.

If one NPC isn’t giving you any more quests, you probably need to advance a different NPC’s story to proceed.

The map you see is it. You won’t go to the Town or the Fort.

[Trashb0at]

Actually, fishing could get you a good bit of money, selling Gold/Silver Sturgeon and Carp for 1-3 Silver or Crucian to the fisherman for about 9 silver a piece, time stops for as long as your hook is cast. You can catch 10+ fish easily while you wait for crops to grow.

[Ricatdo Milos]

I feel like this guide is severaly outdated now that it has more DLC added

[BlueFénix]

The grinding of the mid-late game was eliminated by the tavern, save a bit of money from your witch burning to build the tavern and then you will be rolling in money... provided you have automated the gold star wine production

[Nasabot]

This should not be a guide, but a negative review about the game!

[Zeng Xiao]

alternative title: everything wrong with graveyard keeper

[Woof]

Was looking for people's opinion on Alchemy. Seems like it really is as well-implemented as I feared it was.

[Boonsly]

Some good tips, thanks for sharing!

[GlassDeviant]

*shakes head*

[InertFurry]

The problem with selling anything to merchants is that their prices drop to this ridiculously low floor of like 20% of thier original price because they're overstocked. They move stock at like 5 units a friggin week.

[Aristos]

i realy made a lot of gold in early game fast (1-2coins in an hour or so?) by selling gold fish. its only a good choice when buffed for a higher catch chance