Zombie

A zombie is what a corpse becomes on the resurrection table, and the game then puts it to work in one of two careers that share almost nothing. One stands at a station and gathers wood, ore, clay, sand, stone or marble while you are on the other side of the map. The other takes armor and a pike and holds a line during a siege.

Both are paid for in spheres rather than coins, and both come out of the same room on the same day of the week. The corpse you use decides how far either can go, because the organs inside it set the number of talents the zombie is allowed to hold for the rest of the game.

This page covers raising one, what the collar is for, the six gathering jobs and what unlocks each, the zombie talent tree and its price, and what a fighting zombie needs before it will turn up. the zombie limit and why a worker stops have their own pages.

Raising one, and the day of Envy

The Resurrection Lab sits under the Morgue behind an old door, which takes one Bronze Detail and one Melted Fat to get open. Inside, the thing you build is Resurrection Table I, from the Morgue build desk, for two Oiled Planks, four Polished Stone and three Glass. Putting it up needs Building mastery two and pays ten blue spheres.

The room is not something you can use whenever you like. It is powered on one day of the week, and the game marks that day with an icon rather than a name.

Here you can resurrect zombies every [Envy]. Prepare everything in advance.

During [Envy] the room is powered. Use the Resurrection Device to bring zombies back to life.

Tutorial: Resurrection

That day is Envy, fourth of the six. The blessing of the God of storms is the one thing that lifts the weekly clock, so until you have it, anything the ceremony needs has to be in hand before Envy arrives.

Lay the corpse on the table, pick a collar, and press prepare. The Reanimation Liquid and the collar are both taken at that moment, and the body stands up as a zombie when Envy comes round. Every table you have prepared fires in the same ceremony.

The liquid is the part to start early, and it is mixed rather than cooked: two red, one green and four blue runes at the Laboratory I, from any of the hundreds of ingredient combinations that hit those runes. Organs are in more than half of them, so the Autopsy Table I feeds the bottle that raises the next corpse. The formula is not on the tree to be bought, though: the node is hidden until you finish the Necronomicon questline with Gunter, and only then does it cost 30 red, 40 green and 50 blue.

Now I can create new zombies. Great power and great responsibility.

Journal, on closing the Necronomicon quest

Alcohol is in a fair few of those combinations and is the one ingredient you can buy rather than cut out of a body, four to a craft at the Distillation Cube if you put wine in. Ignore any recipe pairing it with a Catalyst: no Catalyst exists anywhere in the game, so that route cannot be run.

Red skulls are the zombie’s perk slots

A corpse is six organs: bones, a brain, a heart, guts, skin and a skull. All six have to be in the body and none of them can be a botched extraction, or the table refuses the job outright.

This body is missing vital organs. You can’t make zombies without them.

Resurrection table

Each organ carries a number of red skulls and a number of white ones, and the corpse counts as the sum of everything still inside it. Red skulls are the number of talents the finished zombie may hold at once, which makes them the single most important thing about a corpse you intend to raise. White skulls do nothing to a zombie at all, and only cost you on a burial, which is why the graveyard and the workforce pull against each other.

Three red is the ceiling on every one of the six, so eighteen is the most a corpse can carry from its own parts. What differs is the white that rides along with it.

Guts and skin reach three red clean, which makes them the two to hold out for. A skull at three red brings two white with it, and a heart never comes without at least one, so those two are where a body meant for the graveyard and a body meant for the yard part company.

Embalming moves the number after the fact. Solution for Zombies adds one, two or three red at its three grades, and Injection for Zombies adds the same red while taking that many white away, which is the one thing that improves a corpse for both jobs at once.

Raising the count on a zombie you already have

This is the question the Plague Doctor’s project forces, because he asks for a zombie with eight red skulls and most bodies do not arrive anywhere near it. The collar is not the answer: fitting a better one raises the ceiling and adds nothing, so a zombie on six stays on six.

Organs are the answer, and they can be changed on a zombie that is already walking around. Pull a weak organ, put a better one in from another corpse, and the count moves with it, up to whatever the fitted collar accepts.

There is a real risk in it, which is the extraction rather than the transplant. Pulling an organ is a graded job rolled against your Anatomy mastery, and a failed one comes out as a surgeon’s mistake worth minus one red and minus one white. A body holding one of those cannot be raised at all until it is replaced, so do this with mastery behind you and a spare corpse in reserve.

The collar is a gate, not a cap

There are three: the Bronze Zombie Collar from a Bronze Ingot, the Golden Zombie Collar from a Golden ingot and the Steel Zombie Collar from a Steel Ingot. Each states a number of red skulls it will accept, which reads like a ceiling on how good the zombie can get.

It works in the other direction. A corpse carrying more red skulls than the collar accepts cannot be raised with it at all, and the game names the collar rather than the technology you are missing.

This Zombie Collar isn’t good enough for this corpse. You need a higher-quality collar.

Resurrection table

So the good corpse and the good collar have to arrive together. A body worth six red skulls is unraisable until Reanimation II is bought for a hundred blue, and the game says only that the collar is not good enough rather than naming the technology. Anything over ten waits on Reanimation III at three hundred blue.

All three collars want a Blue Crystal, which is what caps the size of a workforce. corpses arrive from the Crossroads by the cartload and Blue Crystals do not.

That pricing runs the opposite way to everything else in his shop, and it catches people out. Collars, along with every tool, weapon, fish and bag, cost base price multiplied by the stock on the shelf, so they are at their most expensive when he is fully stocked and cheapest on the last one. A Bronze Zombie Collar is 100 coins when he has one and 500 when he has five.

Six jobs, eight seconds each

A worker zombie is placed at a station and left there. Six stations turn raw material out on a fixed eight second cycle, and the cycle runs whether you are in the zone or not.

The Lumberjack stand is the one to build first, because two Sticks a cycle is the only recipe in the game that makes them and the Log beside them pays for the stand. The Zombie Miner runs on Iron Ore and Coal, the clay stand and the sand stand turn out Clay and Sand for the whole building economy, and the stone scaffolding and marble scaffolding cover Stone and Marble.

Pair any of them with a Timber stockpile or a supplier and the line runs unattended. The two quarry scaffolds are the cheapest of the six to put up, at two Pieces of stone and four Wooden Planks, and the two stands in the yard want Iron Nails where the miner and the lumberjack want Brick.

The mastery column is the thing worth understanding, because it is not a gate. A zombie with no talents and no tool is lifted to whatever the job asks before its swing is worked out, so a zombie raised this morning can be put on the marble scaffolding this afternoon and will never fail a craft. Mastery above the job’s requirement buys speed and nothing else, and it stops paying at three times the number in that column.

That has a consequence worth acting on. Because a zombie cannot fail, it produces the top grade on every craft that has grades, including ones you cannot reliably hit by hand. The trade is throughput, since its toolbelt holds two tools where yours stacks more.

Tools are worth reading carefully rather than upgrading by habit. A pickaxe is worth one, two, four or six mastery from Rusty up to Steel, and the cap is three times whatever the job asks. Mining, wood, clay and sand all ask for one, so three is the ceiling: a Bronze pickaxe leaves a zombie one short and an Iron one is already past it, which makes a Steel pickaxe on those four jobs worth nothing at all.

The two quarry jobs are where the good tool goes. The stone scaffolding asks for two and caps at six, which a Steel tool hits exactly, and the marble scaffolding asks for four and caps at twelve, which nothing reaches on its own.

Zombies cost nothing to run. They spend no energy and no sanity, nothing they carry wears out, and they ask for no food or sleep.

What they do need is somebody to clear up after them. A worker at a bench stops dead after one craft until its output is hauled away, which is the most common reason a station goes quiet. Zombie suppliers do that job, and the full list of reasons is on why a worker stops.

A Zombie Supplier Station costs four Wooden Planks and four Bronze Nails and arrives with Zombie Assistant, at 35 red and 5 green, which is the cheapest zombie technology in the game. The garden has its own version: a Gardener Stand for four Wooden Planks, two Bronze Detail and six Bronze Nails, behind Zombie Gardening at 60 green and 20 blue.

Its own talent tree, paid for out of its own pocket

The perk screen holds two trees on the same grid. Yours has 95 nodes bought with talent points; the zombie side has 85 and is bought with spheres, and not spheres you are holding.

A zombie collects the technology points for everything it crafts and spends them on itself. Nothing moves them back to you and no other zombie can spend them, so your own sphere income falls as you staff more benches and each worker funds its own training.

Every track is the same seven step ladder to nine mastery, at three different prices. Building, Smithing and Farming charge 1,650 for it, while Book writing and Anatomy charge 1,175 in a mix of red and blue. A writing or alchemy zombie is the cheapest one in the game to take to the top of its track, at about a quarter of what a farmer costs.

Finishing all 85 comes to 12,050 red, 4,650 green and 1,910 blue. The whole technology tree, the one you buy for yourself, is 11,157, so a fully trained workforce is the larger project of the two.

Squads want armor and a pike, or they stay home

Fighting zombies are a separate system with their own building. You bring zombies to the Barracks and put them in a squad slot, and the slots are opened by talking to Battle Ram rather than by building anything.

Zombies only fight if equipped with armor and a pike or bow.

Tutorial: Zombie Squads

Read that as the hard requirement it is. A zombie missing either the weapon or the body armor is not weak in the fight, it never arrives: no message, no gap in the line, the slot shows five and three walk out. It is the commonest reason a siege feels harder than the numbers suggested.

Armor is worth more than it looks, because damage in this game is the raw number minus your armor value, floored at nothing. A wild zombie hits for four, so armor at the fourth grade takes the whole swing to zero. No enemy in the game wears any armor at all, so your side of that arithmetic always lands in full.

An allied zombie fights on 100 health, or 150 with Undead Resilience at 400 red on the Smithing track. None of them can be lost permanently: the fighters sent into a siege are copies, the originals stay docked at the base, and smashed barricades come back to the build inventory.

Zombie goo and Zombie Power are not Zombie Juice

Graveyard Keeper 1 had Zombie Juice and people still search for it. This game does not have it, and the two zombie resources it does have are not that in a new wrapper. Zombie Power is made at the Bioreactor from five Wheat and feeds the conveyor side of the factory, appliance crates and engineering mechanisms among them.

Zombie goo comes out of fighting, which is why it looks like it has no source until you win something. Nothing crafts it, Gunter stocks it at every tier of his shop, and it turns up in 257 of the valid alchemy mixes, feeding Reanimation Liquid, Berserker Potion III and Third Eye Salt among others. The Study Table takes one as well, paying 20 blue for two Faith and three Science.