Who knows why it works this way, it just does (could be magic). When you start playing Graveyard Keeper, the only station you have to work on incoming corpses is the Preparation Place (Autopsy Table) in the Morgue. Gerry walks you through it to an extent, but there’s a lot more to it than that chatty skull and the tutorial window tell you.
Each body part you remove from a corpse affects its quality, which then affects the Decor of the grave they are placed in. You can change the quality of a corpse during the autopsy, but those quality changes won’t necessarily be positive.
For each part you remove, there is an effect. That effect may be positive or it may be negative – sometimes you’ll know and sometimes you won’t. It depends on the part itself.
Once you’ve progressed enough, you will be able to add a functional new workstation to your morgue: the Embalming Table.
Unlike the Autopsy Table, which you use to remove things from the corpse, you use the Embalming Table to inject chemicals into it to affect its quality, decay rate, and decay level.
The table below covers body parts you can remove, as well as the embalming fluids you can inject into a corpse, along with their effects. Underneath, we’ll talk about how to use this information.
Red Skulls: necessary inconvenience
You’re trying to get rid of the things, why would you want to add them to your corpses?
The effects of removing a body only apply if you fulfill both requirements – in order to get that +1 White Skull from removing Blood from the corpse, you have to be able to give up that -1 Red Skull.
Each player has their own corpse processing method. Early in the game, before you get the Embalming Table or bother with important parts like the Brain, Heart, or Intestines, your process is going to be simple:
Remove Blood Remove Fat
As you progress, the things you’re going to have to remove will get more complicated. Corpses start coming in with some real hefty Red Skull stacks, which require you to either attempt to nullify them by removing the Heart, Brain, and/or Intestines or move onto getting the Embalming Table researched and constructed.
As you get further, the two-step process above can get a little more complicated. What happens if a corpse is out of Red Skulls? Well, you should add one Red so you can remove it and add a White.
Here’s a simple example of adding a Red Skull to create a new White:
Remove Blood (-1 Red +1 White) Remove Skull (+1 Red) Remove Fat (-1 Red +1 White)
This becomes more complex once you have to deal with corpses with three or more Red Skulls, but you should have enough experience by the time you get to embalming to deal with these without too much difficulty.
The maximum effective White Skulls is 12 – you can go up to 13, but there is no point. You can only get a single grave up to 12 Decor.
What happens if things go wrong?
Yeah, it happens. I hate when autopsies go wrong.
I suggest trying to extract a corpse’s Brain, Heart, or Intestines if you feel overwhelmed by a corpse’s Red Skulls. Heck, extract all three if you want. If the results aren’t desirable, just save scum (load the save) back to the start of the day and try it all differently. An individual corpse’s values are invariable and won’t be more in your favor after a reload.
Once you are able to reliably produce Gold Injections, which requires you to be deep in the tech tree and getting gold, this all becomes much easier. Even before that point, the embalming fluids you are able to produce and use do help considerably.
If you had to bury a sub-par corpse early on in the game or are simply not happy with how one is affecting your Graveyard Decor, you can pay for Exhumation Permission using the Royal Services box outside the entrance to the church. It’s good to know for when you’re getting serious about making money from sermons.
This wraps up our tips on dealing with the many corpses you’re going to get hands-on with in Graveyard Keeper. The better your graveyard looks, the more money you’ll get from parishioners to your church. The sooner you get to refining your corpse processing, the sooner you’ll be rolling in money from the townsfolk.
