Moving and Demolishing Buildings

There is no move button in Graveyard Keeper 2. The build menu can place, remove and upgrade, and that is the whole list, so relocating a bench means demolishing it and building it again somewhere else.

What that costs depends entirely on what you are moving, and the spread is wider than anyone expects. Some things come back whole, some come back halved, and the siege pieces come back as nothing at all.

Remove is at the bottom of the build menu

Open the build menu in your yard and Remove sits under the list of things you can put up. Choose it and the cursor turns into a destroy tool, then click whatever you want gone.

Demolishing a finished building is not instant, and it is not automatic either. It becomes a job on the object itself, so you stand at it and hold the interact key while it works down tick by tick, exactly as though you were crafting at it.

A zombie cannot take that job off you. Starting the demolition unseats whichever worker was attached to the bench and returns it to storage, so the last thing any station does is make you do the work yourself.

Three different refunds, and nothing tells you which

Most of what you build gives everything back. Seventy three buildings refund their full cost when demolished, which covers the Woodworking Workbench I, every assembly bench, the alchemy stations and the archer towers.

Thirty one give back exactly half. Those are the early stations, and it is a painful list because it is everything you put up first: the Sawhorse, Furnace I, the Kiln, every Simple Chest, the Circular Saw, the Iron Anvil and the Steel Anvil with it.

The twelve combat pieces return nothing whatever. Every barricade and every tower is spent the moment it goes up, so placing those badly is the one mistake the game will not let you take back.

Scaffolding is free to cancel

A building you have put down but not finished is a different object from the building itself, and removing it refunds everything. Seventy seven of the seventy nine scaffolds in the game hand back the full cost.

So the moment to change your mind is before the materials go in. Put the ghost down, walk around it, look at what it blocks, and move it then rather than after a zombie has spent an afternoon building it.

Eighteen build desks, and each owns a different list

Before you can rebuild a bench you have to find the desk that offers it, and the game never tells you which one does. There are eighteen build desks in Graveyard Keeper 2 and a hundred and eighty two buildings between them, and a building almost always belongs to exactly one desk.

The Yard and the Factory are the two big ones at thirty one buildings each. New Graveyard holds twenty seven, the Church twenty one, the Garden eighteen, the Alchemy Lab sixteen, the Morgue fifteen, the Barracks twelve and the Writing Room ten. After that they get small fast: the Vineyard Basement eight, the Vineyard seven, the Quarry six, Zombie Digging and the Abandoned sawmill five each, the Zombie Mine and Home four, and Supply Storage exactly one.

Standing at the wrong desk is the usual reason a building seems not to exist. The Lifting Crane is only on the Garden desk, the Zombie Supplier Station is a Yard fixture people go looking for in the Factory, and the anvils and furnaces sit on separate tabs of the Yard menu rather than in a single list.

Five things can be built in more than one place

Almost every building has exactly one home, and the exceptions are worth knowing because they are the ones that cause arguments. Chests are the generous case: the Simple Chest, the Chest and the Large Chest each appear on fourteen of the eighteen desks, so storage goes more or less wherever you want it.

The Zombie Supplier Station appears on six, which matters more than it sounds. A stalled crafter needs a supplier in its own zone, so being able to raise one from the Yard, the Quarry, the Vineyard Basement, the Writing Room or the Alchemy Lab is what stops that fix from requiring a trip.

The Formulation Bench is the fifth and the one people cannot find. It sits on two desks, the Alchemy Lab and the Writing Room, and it costs four Wooden Plank, four Bronze Detail and one Polished Bronze at either of them.

What to get right the first time

Rotate with the key shown in the corner before you place, because rotation after the fact is a demolition like any other. The footprint is also bigger than the art, which is the usual reason a bench will not sit where it looks like it should.

Put the half refund stations where they can stay. The Sawhorse, the Furnace, the Kiln and the chests are the ones you will want to shuffle as the yard fills up, and they are precisely the ones that charge you for it.

Leave walking room between benches. Space costs nothing at the time and the crafting loop you run a hundred times is the thing that pays for it.