How to make zombies in Graveyard Keeper 2

Your next steps

1. 01

   Finish Sweet Dreams first. The Plague Doctor hands over two free zombies, and the lab chest holds three Reanimation Liquids and three Bronze Zombie Collars.

2. 02

   Research Reanimation in the Anatomy tree and build a Resurrection Table: 2 Oiled Planks, 4 Glass and 4 Polished Stone.

3. 03

   Pick a body that still has skin, bones, skull, heart, brain and guts, with no Surgeon’s Error anywhere.

4. 04

   Count its red skulls and carry a collar that covers them: Bronze up to 5, Golden up to 10, Steel up to 99.

5. 05

   Put the Reanimation Liquid in a chest or shelf inside the resurrection room, then press Prepare on the table.

6. 06

   Wait for Envy. Use the resurrection device once and every prepared table in the lab raises its body together.

Before you build anything: the free zombies

You do not have to raise your first workers yourself. The Sweet Dreams quest ends with the Plague Doctor, Albert, giving you two zombies once you bring him Dream Dust. Later, Gunter the Astrologer adds three more during Friendship Written in the Stars. Those five bodies cover most early jobs, so there is no rush to cut open your best corpse on day three.

Check the chest in the Resurrection Lab as soon as you can get in. It starts with three Reanimation Liquids and three Bronze Zombie Collars, which is enough for three raisings before you need to buy or brew anything. People miss this chest all the time and then spend a week hunting for liquid they already own.

Field note: Gunter’s three zombies count toward your zombie limit straight away. If a sermon payout suddenly drops after his quest, that is why.

What the Resurrection Table checks

The table runs four checks, and it will not let you press Prepare until every one passes. Most failed attempts come down to the second one: a body that looks fine but has lost an organ to a bad autopsy.

A Surgeon’s Error is the one mistake you cannot undo. It takes up an organ slot, costs a red and a white skull, and marks the body as unraisable for good. If you are learning autopsies with low Anatomy, practise on bodies headed for the river, not on your future workforce.

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Choose the right collar

Red skulls are bad news for a grave and good news for a zombie. Each red skull becomes one talent slot, so a body with five red skulls can eventually learn more upgrades than one with two. White skulls do nothing for a worker at all.

The collar sets the ceiling. A Bronze collar covers up to 5 red skulls, Golden up to 10 and Steel up to 99. If the body has 7 red skulls and you only carry Bronze, the table refuses. The Jeweler in town sells Bronze collars at tier I, Golden at tier II and Steel at tier III.

For first-tier bodies, which usually sit between 0 and 4 red skulls, Bronze is all you need. Leave the pockets alone if you want to keep every red skull: Fat and Blood in the pockets carry red skulls, and emptying them lowers the count. That is great for a grave and slightly worse for a zombie.

Prepare, then wait for Envy

Pressing Prepare is the step where the game takes your materials. The collar and the liquid are used up right away, and the body stays on the table looking exactly as dead as before. That catches a lot of players. Nothing is broken; the second half happens on a different day.

The resurrection device holds one charge per week. It refills at 23:45 on Lust and can only be used on Envy, which also brings an all-day thunderstorm. When you use it, every prepared table in the lab raises its body at the same moment. So the efficient routine is to prepare several tables during Gluttony, Sloth and Lust, then raise them all in one go.

Miss Envy and you wait a full week. The one shortcut is the God of the storms sermon buff, which lets the device work on any day while it lasts.

Field note: Bodies arrive on Gluttony, Lust and Pride. A Pride body can be autopsied and prepared before the following Envy, so it never needs to sit in the morgue for long.

The zombie limit and what it costs you

Your zombie limit equals the Resurrection Lab’s quality. Going over it never blocks a resurrection, and the count only goes up: every zombie raised adds one, and only a single story quest ever removes one. What you get instead is the Excessive zombies debuff on sermons, which trims 0.1 to 0.9 Faith and 3 to 36 copper per parishioner depending on the prayer.

Three prayers ignore the debuff: Prayer for Protection, Prayer for Imagination and Prayer for Music. Everything else gets the cut. You can raise the limit permanently with the Good fellow perk (+10), temporarily with Gunter’s PR quests (+5), or for the length of a run with the PR Machine (+10 up to +80). The PR Machine only accepts loading on Gluttony.

• Improve lab quality before a big batch of raisings.
• If you are over the limit anyway, preach one of the three immune prayers that week.
• Load the PR Machine on Gluttony so the bonus is running by Wrath.

After it wakes up

A new zombie knows no talents and has an empty equipment slot. Press F to inspect it, give it the right tool for its job, and carry it to the station. An axe covers woodcutting and carpentry, a pickaxe covers mining and stonework, a hammer covers metalwork and a shovel covers the garden. Zombies earn their own technology points through work, and you spend those in their personal talent tree, not yours.

If your new worker stands still at its bench, it is almost always a tool or supply problem rather than a bad body. The zombies-not-working guide walks through those checks in order.

Common questions