Burial Certificate

Burying a body hands you a certificate, and which of the three you get is decided before you pick the corpse up. The grave you put it in does not change it and neither does anything you do to the body on the way.

They are also the one thing in the game that always sells for exactly what it says on the label, and the one that quietly doubles as a source of smiles.

The corpse decides the certificate, and it caps early

Every body in the game carries a tier, and the certificate it pays is fixed to that tier. The bottom fifteen corpses pay the first certificate, the next nine pay the second, and everything above that pays the third.

Nine more bodies sit outside the ladder entirely. The named zombies and the two zombie fighters carry their own rewards, which is why a doctor pays a second certificate and a bow fighter pays a first.

A flat price, which almost nothing else in the game has

Certificates are priced at 100, 250 and 500 and they ignore the usual shop curve. Most goods are paid at three quarters of the listing and then moved again by how many the shop already holds, so what you get is rarely what the tooltip says.

A certificate is not priced that way. It is a flat rate multiplied by how many you are handing over, so five of the third tier is 2,500 and there is no haggling and no penalty for selling in bulk.

Only the Head of the Village takes them

One buyer, and he is in the Village Tavern. He will not stock certificates for sale at any of his three tiers, which is the game’s way of saying the trade only runs one direction. He tells you as much the first time you meet him.

I’ll be buying those burial certificates from you.

Januarius, Head of the Village

The same counter sells two things worth knowing about. Town Gratitude at 1,000 is the renewable tap for the town standing, and Exhumation Certificate at 550 is what you buy when a grave needs emptying rather than filling.

Five certificates are worth five smiles

This is the part that is easy to miss and worth more than the coins early on. He takes five certificates of any tier for five happiness, and the offer stands at all three of his tiers.

Five smiles is a third of an early happiness cap, and since happiness is what decides how many people attend your sermons, a graveyard that is quietly producing certificates is also producing a congregation.

Since the happiness rate is identical across the three, spend the first tier certificates on smiles and sell the third tier ones for coins. Five Certificate I bought you the same five smiles as five Certificate III and cost you 2,000 coins less to give away.

The certificate the story asks for

The first one you produce is spoken for. The intro chain has you bury a body at the graveyard and then carry the certificate to Herbert at the Crossroads, which is the quest the game names Certificate, Please.

After that the paperwork is yours. The certificate is not consumed by anything else in the game, has no recipe that wants it and no second use, so everything you produce from that point is either coins or smiles.