Excessive Zombies and the PR Machine

Excessive zombies is the debuff with the red thumb-down icon, and the game states what it does without saying how to end it: you have too many zombies, it is creeping people out, and your sermons are less effective. The count it measures sits in the corner of the Resurrection Lab, a skull followed by your zombies over your limit.

Most players meet it before they own too many of anything. The first one is handed to you by a quest, which is why it can appear while the readout still says five of five.

Clearing it works differently from almost every other penalty in the game, because the number of zombies you own never falls. Everything below follows from that.

Why you have it with only five zombies

Gunter‘s PR questline switches the debuff on by hand. The step called Congregation Trouble, which asks you to meet him after your next Ceremony, applies Excessive zombies the moment it starts and adds three to your zombie count in the same breath.

That is why the first one arrives with a full readout rather than an overflowing one. Two zombies came from the Plague Doctor tutorial and three from the Astrologer, five in total against a limit of five, and the quest put the penalty on top regardless.

Gunter explains the fiction of it better than any tooltip does, and he is also telling you the mechanic. The town has noticed, and the town is the thing that pays you.

People have grown a little concerned about the undead helpers working in your graveyard. The guards on the wall are literally watching zombies do your landscaping.

Gunter, in the Astrologer’s Tower

What Excessive zombies costs you

The whole penalty lands on sermons, and it lands on 32 of the 58 prayers in the game. Nothing else in your day changes: crafting, farming, combat and trade all pay exactly what they paid before.

Coins are docked by 60 percent wherever they are docked at all, and the cemetery bonus on a successful sermon loses the same proportion. Faith is hit harder and less evenly, losing between half and nine tenths of its base, and the better the prayer the more of it goes.

Two rows in that table are worth reading twice. The Prayer for Old God keeps every one of its 50 coins and loses nine tenths of its Faith, which is the only place the penalty splits like that. The Prayer for Repose flattens to 0.1 Faith at all three grades, so a debuffed third grade pays the same as a debuffed first and the work of upgrading it is wasted while the penalty is on.

Removing zombies does not lower the count

The number in front of the slash counts zombies you have raised, not zombies currently standing in the world. Nothing you do with a zombie afterwards takes any of it back.

Picking one up, storing it, carrying it around or parking it in the lab leaves the count exactly where it was. One quest in the whole game ever subtracts from it, and it is a single point in the Plague Doctor line.

Read down the second column and the shape of the system is obvious. Four things touch the count and three of them only ever push it up, while everything else in the game is aimed at the limit.

Okay… I can hide them. Put ’em underground.

That’s a good start. But it’s not enough. The people love gossip and anxiety.

The Keeper and Gunter, on burying the problem

Good fellow raises the cap by ten

Good fellow is the one permanent increase in the game. It adds 10 to your limit for as long as you hold it, taking a fresh keeper from five places to fifteen, and the in-game description never puts a number on it.

It sits on the Book writing talent track and costs three talent points rather than one. Two Book writing nodes sit in front of it at a point each, and Good fellow itself is the third.

Taking it will not clear a debuff you already have. The perk raises the ceiling and stops there, so a penalty applied before you bought it sits on your character sheet with the readout showing ten more places than it did a moment ago. The next section is why.

Two things share that name, which is worth knowing before you go looking. The quest called Good Fellow asks you to prove to the Head of the Village that you are not an egoist and needs 10 village reputation, while the perk that matters here lives in the talent tree under Book writing.

What clears it, and what does not

The debuff is re-tested at a fixed handful of moments and at no others. Loading a campaign into the PR Machine tests it, finishing that campaign tests it again, the two Gunter steps that bracket your first sermon each test it, and a God of delusions blessing running out tests it on the way out.

Raising the cap between those moments does nothing visible. That is the whole reason Good fellow looks broken: it works, and the game waits for one of those moments before it notices.

For a first debuff, the answer is to carry on with Gunter. He tells you so directly on the step where you hand over the devices.

Good! Now go ahead and hold your next ceremony. I’ll make sure the “debuff” is gone in time.

Gunter, taking delivery of the hypno devices

If the machine is already standing, the faster route is to load it. Two Charged hypno-devices start a campaign, and starting one runs the check immediately, on the same Day of Gluttony you walked up to it.

Gunter’s questline, and where the machine comes from

The chain opens once the Astrologer’s zombies have been delivered to your house. Gunter corners you in the church after a Ceremony, refuses to talk there, and sends you to his Shrine of Prediction.

At the tower he explains the panic, offers himself as your PR man, and names his price: special hypno devices, which he happens to sell. Buy one, charge it, and bring it back.

Handing them over adds 5 to your limit and re-checks the penalty, which is what makes the next sermon feel fixed. The bump is temporary and comes back off once that sermon is done, by design, because the devices were never going to work.

Gunter takes the failure well. He pivots to a newspaper, admits he has offloaded his stock of useless devices, and refuses the refund.

I’ll set up a special board for newspapers and hypno devices near my house at the port. You’ll need to leave fresh papers there every week, if you want to keep the townsfolk happy.

Gunter, after the sermon that did not work

That board is the PR Machine, and it appears at the port when the sermon step closes. The same step pays 10 Astrologer reputation and opens the Printed Poetry errand, which hands back a Town Gratitude and the PR Agreement.

Buying and charging a Hypno-device

Nothing in the game crafts a Hypno-device. There is no recipe for one at any bench, no vein that drops one and no fight that rewards one, and Gunter is the only person in the world who stocks them.

He does not put them out until his third shop tier, and that tier is not something you buy your way to. The questline promotes him the moment you reach the tower step, which is why the devices appear on his shelf exactly when he asks for them and not before.

He holds ten, and the first costs 50 coins. The price climbs as the shelf empties, so the tenth costs 158 and buying all ten in one visit comes to about 795. Take what you need and let him restock, which he does over six days from empty.

An uncharged device does nothing. Charging happens at a Formulation Bench and wants one device and one Faith at Anatomy mastery two.

One Charged hypno-device comes out, and each rank of the Alchemist perk on whoever runs the bench adds a one in two chance of a second. A zombie with two ranks charging your devices turns fifty into roughly a hundred.

Faith is the running cost of the whole system, not the coins. Gunter says the quiet part out loud when you ask him how much he needs.

Like I said… the more undead you raise, the more Faith I’ll need. And at the rate you’re going… we’ll be looking at some very big numbers.

Gunter, pricing the campaign

What the PR Machine takes at each tier

The machine accepts work on the Day of Gluttony and no other day. Walk up to it on a Day of Wrath and the Keeper just thinks about it being available tomorrow, which is the most common reason people decide the thing is broken.

Five campaigns exist and each is locked to a machine tier, so a fresh PR Machine I can only run the first. All five sit at mastery one, so your own skill never gates them.

Upgrading is a craft on the machine itself, instant, with no technology node behind it and nothing to unlock. You bring the parts to the board on a Day of Gluttony and it steps up.

A running campaign counts down at the end of each Day of Wrath, the day you hold your sermon. When the last week ticks away the machine empties itself, the limit drops back to where it was, and the check runs again, which is when a forgotten machine hands you the debuff back.

Running the machine pays for Good fellow

Every campaign that finishes pays one point of PR Manager, an inspiration on the Book writing track. It has five levels and they come at one, three, seven, fifteen and thirty finished campaigns.

Those levels are worth one Book writing talent experience each, except the fifth, which is worth two. Six points in total, and Good fellow costs three of them.

So the temporary fix funds the permanent one. Seven campaigns is three points, which is Good fellow paid for out of the machine you were running anyway, and the ten places it adds are yours whether the board is loaded or empty.

Newspapers, once the devices stop being asked for

The Printing Press sits behind the Newspaper technology, which costs 30 red, 10 green and 20 blue and is gated on the Astrologer at 20 reputation. Building it at the Writing Room desk takes three Oiled Beam, two Bronze Gear and six Iron Detail.

One batch turns a Story I and ten Clean Paper into twenty Newspapers, or thirty if the zombie working the press has Paper maker. Two upgrade recipes each take twenty of a grade plus a better Story and return twenty of the next grade up.

Five batches cover a hundred papers, which is one fourth-tier campaign and a month of headroom. A press running on its own zombie turns the zombie limit into something you set once and forget for weeks.

The Hypno Prayer switches the penalty off

One sermon removes the effect rather than working around it. A successful Hypno Prayer grants the God of delusions blessing, and the game puts it bluntly: your debuff for excessive zombies does not work anymore.

Writing one takes a Writing Desk, a Story, a Blank Hardcover Notebook and an Ink. The prayer is unlocked by Reanimation II at 100 blue, which sits behind Reanimation Liquid at 30 red, 40 green and 50 blue, and the Astrologer at 20 reputation. That parent node stays hidden until the Necronomicon questline closes, so the questline is the real gate.

Reanimation II also carries the Golden Zombie Collar, so a run already chasing zombie quality passes through the node anyway. The blessing runs on a timer and the higher grades of the prayer run it longer, which makes it cover for a stretch of overcrowding rather than end it.