At the core of Graveyard Keeper is an intricate corpse economy relying on precise surgery skills and a constant flow of incoming bodies. At a certain point, you’ll need to maximize your graveyard score by making sure every cadaver that goes in the ground is in the best condition possible. One way to do this is to make sure that the body you bury hasn’t had time to decay—letting it rot or go past 90% in quality starts to whittle away at the total number of skulls the body’s score is comprised of, which diminishes its overall score building capacity.
The other way is to make sure you remove only the right body parts during the autopsy and dissection. But at the beginning of the game, this can be somewhat of a trial and error process, one that you may not have the patience for, given the travel time between the morgue and your home. Here’s what you do.
The corpse’s potential “score” is measured in skulls, both white and red. The white are positive, the red are negative. The goal is to change some of the red skulls to white skulls, or remove them altogether. When you first put a body up on the autopsy table, you should immediately remove the fat and the blood. This will automatically eliminate two red skulls, and add two white skulls, vastly improving the quality of the body.
Flesh, meanwhile, will remove a white skull, so you should avoid dissecting it from the body unless you really need it, or plan to burn the body anyway. Extracting the Skin will remove one white skull and add one red skull. Taking out the Skull will add one red skull to the body score. And the Brain, Heart, and Intestine will have a randomly selected effect, anywhere from removing three red skulls up to removing two white skulls (on those, proceed with caution, or restart your file without saving to try again). Eliminating the Bone will have no effect.
If you plan to burn the body, it doesn’t really matter what you do with the body score. However, if you want to make the most of each burial plot in the graveyard, score-wise, you’ll need to pay close attention to those white skulls to know how much each plot will potentially be worth. A plot can only have a score equal to the number of white skulls a body has, and an unadorned plot will start out with a score equal to the number of red skulls in the body. This means that you can put a +5 Stone Sculpture and +2 Stone Grave Fence on your plot all you want, but if the body only has three White Skulls, that’s all you’re getting for a plot score, and you will need to also make up the difference created by the red skulls left in the body.
Once the game really gets going and you’re doing a lot of alchemy and making potions and embalming fluids, you can alter the cadavers even further, and even reduce or halt body decay. The most valuable solution by far is the Gold Injection, which will remove two red skulls and add two white skulls when added to the corpse. Silver Injection will remove two red and add two white skulls, and Glue Injection will add one white skull.
Used with autopsies, eventually you can learn how to use a balance of embalming and dissecting to create an ideal, high-scoring corpse. Once you get the Cultist perk, you can also be able to “see” the effect that each organ has on a corpse, in order to remove them more intuitively. However, be aware that the listing on each organ will not tell you the effect of removing it from the body, but rather, the effect it is having on the body now. In other words, if the fat tissue is showing -1 Red Skull and +1 White Skull, it means that the fat is currently providing an additional skull, and removing one skull, and dissecting the fact out of the body would then return the red skull and remove the white skull, lowering the potential score of the body.
Remember that to get all the available Embalming Fluids in the chart below, you’ll need to at least reach Embalming Liquids III in the Tech Tree. Also remember to get the Surgeon perk in the Tech Tree so as to help maintain the quality of corpses during autopsies.
Here are the full details:
Autopsy
Flesh
-1 White Skull
Blood
-1 Red Skull
+1 White Skull
Fat
-1 Red Skull
+1 White Skull
Bone
No Effect
Skin
-1 White Skull
+1 Red Skull
Skull
+1 Red Skull
Brain
Max -3 Red Skull (selected randomly)
Max -2 White Skull (selected randomly)
Heart
Max -3 Red Skull (selected randomly)
Max -2 White Skull (selected randomly)
Intestine
Max -3 Red Skull (selected randomly)
Max -2 White Skull (selected randomly)
Embalming Fluids
Lye Injection
+1 Red Skull
+1 White Skull
Acid Injection
-1 Red Skull
-1 White Skull
Glue Injection
+1 White Skull
Preservative Injection
Halts body decay
Restore Injection
Reduces body decay by 50%
Dark Injection
+2 Red Skull
Silver Injection
-1 Red Skull
+1 White Skull
Gold Injection
-2 Red Skull
+2 White Skull
Holly Green is the assistant editor of Paste Games and a reporter and semiprofessional photographer. She is also the author of Fry Scores: An Unofficial Guide To Video Game Grub. You can find her work at Gamasutra, Polygon, Unwinnable, and other videogame news publications.