The Astrologer

The Astrologer is called Gunter, he lives in the tower at the port, and he introduces himself as the Mysterious Guntarius before admitting nobody calls him that. He sells six things, two of which you cannot buy when you meet him, and his reputation gates the only formula for Reanimation Liquid and the whole newspaper line. He is easy to treat as a curiosity and he is closer to a spine.

There are 120 points and his questline asks for 100

Twelve quests pay reputation with Gunter and every one of them pays exactly ten. That is a hundred and twenty points in the entire game, and no other source exists: no amount of trading, no gift, no repeatable errand.

His own questline asks for a hundred of them. Gluttony and Pride wants ninety and then a hundred, Destiny Polls wants forty five and then fifty, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Keyote wants twenty and then thirty, and Friendship Written in the Stars wants ten to begin with. The margin between what exists and what is demanded is twenty points, which is two quests.

He is tied with the Workshop Foreman for the largest reputation pool of any character, and both sit at a hundred and twenty. The Plague Doctor and the head of the guards pay a hundred and ten, the Nun and the tavern owner a hundred.

His shop looks identical at every tier and is not

Six things sit on his shelf and the quantities never change: five Comet’s Tail at ten coins, twenty Firefly at ten, ten Hypno-device at fifty, ten Blue Crystal at seventy five, ten Zombie goo at a hundred and fifty, and three Reanimation Liquid.

What changes is which of them he will hand over. At his first tier he refuses to sell the Hypno-device, the Reanimation Liquid and the Blue Crystal, which is three of the six and the three you came for. Upgrading his shop once releases the liquid and the crystal, and only his third tier releases the Hypno-device.

Because the stock numbers never move, nothing on screen suggests the shop improved. The first upgrade costs five hundred coins, and his purse grows alongside it: twenty coins a day at first, fifty at the second tier and a hundred at the third, which is how much he can pay you for anything you want to sell.

Two quests raise his tier on their own, so some of this arrives without money changing hands. Leaving with his zombies is one and the tower conversation about your parishioners is the other.

Two technologies sit behind twenty points

Reputation with Gunter is not only a quest currency. Two locks in the technology tree will not open until you hold twenty points with him, and what sits behind them is larger than it looks.

One leads to Writing Tools I and the Newspaper. The other leads to the Reanimation Liquid formula, which is the only way to brew your own rather than buy his three at a time.

The newspaper half matters more than it reads. The PR Machine’s top two recipes run on newspapers rather than devices, and the PR Machine is what raises your zombie limit, so Gunter gates the permanent solution to a problem he also creates.

Everything awkward in the game runs through his tower

You meet him hunting a Comet’s Tail, because summoning the fairy needs a feather from one and he is the only person selling feathers that comets do not have. He points out the obvious problem himself and sells them anyway.

He gives you your first Zombie workers, then refuses to let you walk out with them in daylight and delivers them by morning instead. The line he uses is that the last thing he needs is somebody seeing you lead zombies out of his observatory.

When your congregation starts thinning out, he is the one who explains why. His reading of it is that the guards on the wall are watching zombies do your landscaping, and that you are the preacher and the last hope of civilization and also the guy with the undead interns.

That conversation turns into the PR campaign, the printing press, the Poetry Book and the elections. It also turns into the hypno devices, which you buy from him, charge in the Abandoned Tower and bring back to him.

He is also who you ask about the Necronomicon, and he refuses until you help him first, which is his one moment of spine in the whole game. Jack’s verdict on him is that he is a good kid and a good friend and a little spineless, delivered while accepting a rock Gunter charged with luck.

The tower is where the five portal fragments are installed, so the endgame finishes in the same room where you once bought a fake comet feather. One late quest asks you to bring him a pile of Town Gratitude, which is the one moment a banked stack of it pays for itself.