Autopsy Table I

An autopsy in Graveyard Keeper 2 is how you change what a corpse is worth. It produces loot along the way, but the loot is the smaller half, and the same body is worth opposite things depending on what you plan to do with it.

Every corpse carries two numbers, white skulls and red skulls, and the game is explicit that they come from its parts rather than from the body itself. Neither number is written on the body until you look, which is what makes the decision below worth making deliberately.

Human remains each have their own unique spiritual attributes. A corpse gets its red and white skulls from its body parts.

Tutorial: Skulls

Six parts, seventy one bodies

There are 71 distinct corpses, and every one is built from the same six parts: skin, bones, skull, heart, brain and guts. They also carry a pocket, which is the loot, and a burial reward, which is usually a Burial Certificate I.

The Autopsy Table I is what separates them, and the extraction recipes are the single largest group of crafts in the game at a hundred and eight. Each takes six to fourteen seconds and each one is the highest insanity rate the game has.

The durations run from six seconds for the easy parts up to fourteen for the awkward ones. Insanity is charged per tick throughout, so the long extractions cost the most on both counts.

White skulls for the graveyard, red for the zombie

The two numbers pull in opposite directions and that is the whole design. A graveyard wants white skulls, and the resurrection room wants the reverse: more red, fewer white.

For zombies, more red skulls and fewer white skulls is better.

Tutorial: Resurrection

So the question to ask before opening a body is which one it is for. A corpse that would make a respectable grave makes a poor worker, and the good worker you resurrect is a grave you never got to sell.

Grave quality rests on more than the corpse. The main lever on a graveyard’s white skulls is decoration, and a grave line that carries both a white skull and a decoration counts as one white. Lines carrying a red skull never count at all, which is the part that quietly caps a graveyard built on bad bodies.

Changing a corpse with organ improvers

A body can be improved after you open it. Organ Improvers are alchemy formulas, one white and one red, and they upgrade a single part at the Formulation Bench into its tier three version.

There is a red improver and a white one, and each is applied to a specific part: skin, bones, skull, heart, brain or guts. Feed a part and an improver in, get a better part out, and put it back.

The collar sets the ceiling. The game refuses an operation with a plain message, that you cannot exceed the collar’s skull limit, so upgrading parts past what your collar supports has no effect at all.

Burning instead of burying

A body you do not want as a grave or a zombie is still worth something. The Crematorium I turns it into five Ash and a Salt, rising to seven at the second tier.

Ash is what Ink is made of, and Ink is what the whole writing economy runs on, so cremation is the route that turns bodies into technology points rather than into graveyard rating. One Ash, one Water and one Melted Fat make four Ink at a Writing Desk.

How to decide

Read the skulls before you dig. A white heavy corpse goes in the ground with a decorated grave, a red heavy one goes to the resurrection room, and anything middling is worth more as Ash than as a mediocre example of either.

Improvers are what rescue the middling ones, and they are worth saving for the bodies you care about rather than spending on the first corpse that turns up. The formula is repeatable; the good corpses are not.