Overview
An extensive guide I’ve written and tested containing lots of tips and tricks to help new players and advanced players alike. Now updated and curated, holds information relevant to the latest update. Feel free to ask in the comments if you don’t understand how something works, and I’ll try to explain when I have the time.
Tips for a fast starting early game
1.Starting a new game, dig up Gerry, and before talking to donkey and progressing further, you can actually explore the game world to get familiarized with the map layout and talk with the various npcs to get an idea of who is what and where.
+++Time will not start to progress until the bishop tells you to pick up your tools from the graveyard trunk. You can also pick up a few quests during this time frame to be completed later on and read the garden sign.
2.Take the corpse in the morgue, cut the flesh, and go in the backyard. Once there, go to the sign on the left. It’ll tell you to talk to a member of the inquisition
+++You will probably do that during the first week, but make sure you get there BEFORE the sun is past the middle of the sundial because, while time is frozen during cutscenes, npcs can still move, and the donkey spawns exactly when the sundial indicates past the sun, behind the stables the merchant sits by.
3.Bury the corpse. The bishop will tell you to fix the graveyard, but do not bother cleaning it up of bushes yet.
+++You will want to leave 2 tiles of space between most graves in tight formation, since there’s limited space to build flowerbeds (5 slots in the starting space), and those cost 2 red flowers, 1 peat and 2 stone, and provide +2 gravescore each. Getting the materials to build one and noticing where they can be built can help with this.
+++Keep the F key pressed after starting to cut/dig something, then open the menu and wait in the menu for as long as it’d regularly take to dig it, then exit menu and the next swing will finish it up, this way you can use 2 energy/dig and take less gametime ,provided you didn’t let go of the F key too early. This doesn’t work for things that don’t require tools, like berry bushes and mushrooms.
++Your tool durability will decrease based on actions performed, and not time spent on actions, thus you will neither lose nor save on durability with this trick.
4.Talk to the bishop about the certificate, after which the day timer actually starts ticking. Get your tools from the chest, gather 6 stone and go to the tavern and talk to Horadric about the garden, the contract, and the meat, and then trade him the contract.
+++With the 6 stone, you can go sell it to Cory up to the north-west, and you’ll have the money to get a teleport stone from the inkeep on the first day(use to teleport, 3min cooldown), and some peat(16 or so) from the guy out back of the ranch.
5.Go to the blacksmith, give him the letter, sharpen your sword, try to be energy efficient when dispatching the slimes, hp doesn’t matter as long as you don’t die, just line them up so you swing at both at once, and then turn the quest in.
+++Now with the sword there are 4 barrels that can be destroyed around the village, for flitch and possibly iron parts.You will have spotted them earlier when exploring the village.There’s 2 extra guaranteed in the tavern, talk to horadric to get beer, destroy those 2 barrels and look in your inventory.
++You can give the beer to Gerry the next time you get into the morgue, but try to give it to him after talking to miss charm the next day, so you get a story from it.
++The next day after, go to town and talk to the merchant, accept his deal, ask where to get seeds, then accept his loan offer. The 5 silver will help enormously with buying seeds.
++On the way back home, Gerry will tell you about your basement.
6.Go into your basement, and after the cutscene plays, get the 2 sacks of flour, and clear all the broken barrels using the inventory trick discussed earlier to save on energy. then take the recipe from the chest and use it, it will allow you to cook apples and shrooms.
++After you sleep, IGNORE what yorick tells you to do. Keep the permission, you’ll do it later.
7.Now your goal should be clearing the bushes and stones around your work area, and getting 10 sticks. Unlock building>sawing and place the sawhorse down.
+++Try to repair your tools as soon as they reach about 9% or lower durability, to save you the time and hassle of having to repair them when out gathering stuff.
++Besides cake, which is a quest reward recipe for 5 honey, one can unlock muffins which are really cheap to bake(normal dough + honey for 4) and require buying a 2 silver recipe from the inkeep’s wife.
++More advanced players will choose to go for grape pies early, since grapes can be grown without the tech by just restoring some trellises, and planting 4 grape seeds with peat.
+Pies are amazing energy sources and moneymakers, don’t be afraid to buy the 5 eggs and bucket of milk(you can use a bucket to get 5 jugs) for the pastry dough as baking and selling 6 bronze grape pies a week to horadric will more than make up for the cost, and net you decent money, as well as a great energy source.
8.Go cut the grove of trees on the way from your house to the morgue, that’s gonna be your primary source of trees. Make sure to dig up the stumps too, that will ensure the trees will regrow and provide you with enough red points to unlock “soft spares”.
+++For green points, harvest any and all mushrooms and berry bushes, and if really desperate, look for vine bushes that can be dug up for 5 green points each(they eat alot of shovel durabilty though).
+++Always try to be somewhere near home when dusk comes (red portion of sundial). If the donkey arrives with a corpse, get that corpse ASAP and put it on the autopsy table in the morgue. This will GREATLY prevent the corpse from decaying. You can then sleep if you need energy, sharpen your shovel if it’s below 8%, or operate on the corpse if you have more than half your energy bar.
+++If you’ve slept before autopsy, you can simply reload if you mess up. Before leaving the house area, make sure your shovel is above 8% durability, if not sharpen, then go to the morgue and commence autopsy.
++Removing blood and fat is a given, since they improve the corpse (-1red +1 white skull each). Blood is essential for speed potions(basically crack,once you use them once you can never go back…) so hoard it all. Fat is moderately useful for making low tier candles and oil, but it’s arguably better to just buy the oil from Dig. Just extract one fat and delete the rest:
+To delete items from corpses, and thus not risk getting surgical errors while still getting the corpse ready, simply queue the fat for removal, and then from the building table( you need to restore it first) simply double click removal on the autopsy table this will save you the time and 12 energy it’d take to remove the fat, but destroy it in the process…
++Removing bones has no effect on the corpse,unless you get surgical error, so get at most 1 for studying it after church is unlocked, for blue points, but leave them alone otherwise.
++Removing flesh, skin and skull will always have undesirable effects on a corpse, so only remove those if the corpse is to be disposed of, preferably cremated.
++Upon unlocking organs, remove and keep at most 1 of each just to scan them. (waste of space otherwise, and their alchemy components can be outsorced easily and cheaply)
++The starting corpses will be crappy 1red/2white corpses, after removing fat and blood you will get them to -1red/4white. You can’t see the negative red on the corpse, but if you extract a skull afterwards and you’ve done no surgical errors, the corpse will still be at 4 white skulls.
++If you have unlocked Important parts later on, before removing fat and blood from the corpses, you can try removing the Heart, then the Brain, then the Intestines in that order. For most corpses, only 1 organ is the correct one to remove, the others will damage the white skulls a lot. If you pick the wrong one, try the others to see which was the correct one, then restart the game, the organs will have the exact same effects for that corpse. This is however not recommended early game as the chance to “fail” at removing organs properly is really high.
Tech tree and Fast progression
9.After Sawing, keep gathering sticks, cut trees and work on making flitch from logs until you have 20 red tech points.
10.Unlock building>woodworking FIRST, before smithing>primitive forging(anvil) and place the woodworking table. Making planks rewards 2 red points/ plank at a cost of 5 energy, and it’s the fastest way to get red points early game. This is how you will make all your red points to unlock anvil and tool smithing. Don’t worry about using the planks, you will need a total of 64 planks just for the 2 confessionals and 4 benches in the church.
11.Get smithing>primitive smithing, and place down your anvil, then gather the stone required for a furnace(if you haven’t already) and place it.(Take care that in your starting space you can fit 2 furnaces. This is important, as you will want to have as many furnaces as possible built on your yard, totalling 6 after you expand)
12.Gather iron from the back of your house, there should be a total of @ 32 pieces of iron to be obtained, more or less. Then get firewood tech, make some firewood, enough for smelting 2-3 iron bars at least.
13.After you get the iron, make it into iron parts, and with 10 wood wedges, 2 planks and 4 iron parts go clear out the pathway north-west, to the quarry. This will get you access to a coal mine you will ABUSE for fuel, and also some infinite resources you’ll use later. Make sure to repair the building table there.
++The big tree on your way there and the poison gas mine will come into play a bit later, after you talk to Gunther… you’ll meet him after you unlock the dungeon, but Garry must have a conversation with you first, otherwise the cutscene won’t trigger(I’ve actually unlocked the dungeon so fast that Garry gave me the cutscene a bit later afterwards, but generally this won’t be the case)
14.Once you have about iron to spare, unlock smithing>Tools, and start working on replacing your toolset, afterwards you should sell the old rusty tools for 75 copper each at the blacksmith, no matter their condition(durability)
15.Unlock theology>simple gravestones and make wooden crosses for every body you’ve buried so far. This + repairing the right graves, removing the bushes and planting 5 flower beds, along with decent body preparation will ensure way more than 5 gravescore the first week.
++A lot of people unlock stone working early to make stone tombstones. In my opinion this is a mistake, as iron is not really super hard to get for nails, and you expend valuable tech points and yard space, not to mention wasting stone you should be gathering for more furnaces, and the energy expenditure in all roughly favors making wooden crosses.
16.By now you should’ve gotten anatomy>hard spares already, you can safely take 1 skull off of a botched corpse(preferably the one you didn’t exhume yet with the permission yorick gave you, the first ever corpse you buried is perfect for this, any corpse will do for yorick…). Skin it too, and remove the bone(and maybe the organs if you got the greens by digging the bushes in the graveyard).
17.After your graveyard is in order, and with a bit of time on your hands before church opens, unlock nature>decay and with a couple sticks, build 1-2 compost heaps on the far left(best place to put them) You will want 5 in total later. If you haven’t already, buy 8 carrot,wheat and cabbage seeds, and 4 beet seeds from the farmer south of the wheatfields. be sure to ask him about farming too, he’ll give carrot cutlets, an awesome early energy source.
++To mitigate the cost of seeds, ALWAYS fertilize with peat, and sell him 6 cabbage, carrots and beets when going to buy seeds from him.
18.From now on, you should make it a priority to make wooden crosses for each corpse.
++Fences are not really worth it until you get building>stoneworking II and theology>carved gravestones for those awesome +3 fences and by that time you’ll also start making the +3 gravestone II’s(the ones with RIP on them)
19. After unlocking the church, the donkey will give you a “present” in the form of a pile of dung with carrot seeds inside it, the next time he swings around. Plant those asap, as you will need to pay the donkey 5 carrots/ corpse delivered later, paid in batches of 10. Stepping in the dung will make the player to slide around, and is annoying.
+++ You will also need to visit Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, and buy a bottle of seed oil from him. You can also deliver 5 honey to him while you’re at it, to unlock the cake recipe.
20.At this point, if all went well, the first week should be over, and the church should be opened to you, granting you 3 faith and access to the church basement.
21. With all your body parts you got so far on you and the 3 starting faith, go to the church basement, start clearing the broken bookshelves. Hopefully you get lucky and get 1 bronze chapter, or something you can easily discompose into science. If you do, research any 3 of skin, skull, fat, blood, bone, in this order of priority to get 60 blue points. If you failed to find any chapters/pages, you could restart the day(savescumming) or you could unlock bookwriting>paper crafting and build the church workbench to make paper.
++In any case, you will want to leave your bodyparts in this chest, as you’ll use them later for alchemy, and this way you’ll also guarantee going through the church every day to check confessionals for stories and faith, before dropping off bodyparts and teleporting home to sleep/save.
++Cake or Pie buff gives +1 blue point per every researched item, but the buff itself is not really useful, given to how hard faith is to accumulate early and the other uses for it…
22.With the 60 points you just got, unlock comfort of faith,power of faith, and inborn blacksmith, and build all the church benches in the church, totaling 32 planks and 32 nails. Then build the confessionals, they cost 16 planks and 6 advanced iron parts but they’re worth it. Your final church score will be 19, 1 short of 20.
++Ideally you could buy a book from the astrologer after you hand him over the skull(+25 blues for 5 silver), or prepare to ask the bishop for the clay bowl quest AND complete it in the same day next sermon day, to get 5 blues to unlock light of faith, and with 6 iron parts build a chandelier I, getting you to 20 church score.
+You get 1 faith for every 4church score, and faith is king.
23.Go to town on sloth day(moon day). Grab the skull you probably should’ve gotten by now, go sell your certificates, and go to the lighthouse.
+++Gather apples from the 2 apple trees that can be gathered from, and then dig up the 3 stumps in the area, those will grow back as gatherable apple trees for further visits.
+++ The astrologer will give you the old key and ask you for the diary, but will not be available to trade with unless you visited miss charm and got told by the writer that the astrologer sells writing supplies.
24.The next day, do the sermon. Your total faith will be 7, and your income should be equal to your grave score x3 copper coins.
25.With this faith, you have the option of researching lots of blues, or you have EXACTLY as much as it’d take to convince snake to give you the plans(5) and research the key(2), unlocking dungeon on week 3.
26.Keep burying every corpse with 2 or less red skulls. Any botched corpse you can cremate at the cost of 8 wood billets once you unlocked the tech for it. This allows you to gain 5 ash, 1 salt, and most importantly, a burial certificate for it.
++Salt is only good for sauerkraut, and you need 1 for merchant quest.
From now on, you’re on your own, but I will leave some general tips in the next section.
More Tips
+++Priority should be given to unlocking the Circular Saw tech, as it will allow you to fully repair the shortcuts inside your basements, connecting your laboratory and mortuary.
+++Speaking of shortcuts, it is faster to get into town by going into your basement ,repairing and following the tunnel to the east, this will permanently unlock the shortcut trapdoor behind the bushes.
+++It seems that the trunk costs in various locations differ in the amount of iron parts they require. For instance, a garden trunk is 2 iron parts, a graveyard trunk is 7 parts, a basement trunk is 3 parts etc.
+++Provided you checked the sign by the church on the left in the early game, you can claim that burial site by talking to the inquisitor, accepting his friendship and giving him 20 firewood the next time you meet with him.
++This will allow the player to have a maximum graveyard capacity of 88 corpses, from an initial 42. This will allow the player to bury plenty of corpses to reach 200 gravescore, bypassing the need for embalming for the main quest.
+++Unlocking the dungeon earlier on might be a decent idea, as it costs a total of 7 faith points (persuading miss Charm is not needed). The dungeon is a good source of various materials, plenty of bats inside for making paper, and the urns drop various useful items including different quantities and qualities of seeds(delete bronze seeds though).
++ Once you get a healing potion from one of the urns, you can also repair the bridge that leads to the swamp (1 plank 4 flitch 8 nails) and go talk to Clotho. She will unlock the alchemy and embalming tech branches for free for the player, but you will be able to access her trading services only after you give her the healing potion.
++ The shortcut to clotho is quite cheap and can be made with 10 nails 3 planks and 6 flitch, but only from clotho’s side, so you gotta go through the spiral maze at least once.
+++The donkey will come 5 times a week if provided enough carrots, so it is in your best interest to keep those bodies coming and supply enough carrots for the donkey ( you’d need at least 4 crops of carrots growing to consistently feed the donkey), as this also means you will be able to get more certificates faster, and maybe cremate some corpses for ashes (you’ll need ashes for quality fertilizers).
++Build a pallet as a priority. It’s cheap, costs only 6 flitch 4 nails, and allows you to have 2 corpses out at a given time, so if you’ve not managed to bury your initial corpse before sundown, the donkey will still start delivering the 2nd one, thus not wasting the potential for another corpse.
+This also means you can autopsy and bury 2 corpses at once, by pushing one with you on the ground and carrying the other, saving time.
+++Digging sand becomes faster and easier, the more glass techs you have unlocked. At glassblower I you dig 5 sand per operation, and at glassblower II you get 10, which drops as a stack and no longer pushes you aside… stupid item colision…
++Glass awards 1 red point each, BUT making glass bottles provides blues too, so mass producing those is a neat idea for a passive point income.
++A recipe with ruined books and sand is available at the writing desk, and allows you to scavenge some paper from ruined books, with sand, giving some blue points too. Earliest you can do this is by the end of 2nd week, as only then will bishop teach you building>”The concept of dirt” for sand and clay extraction
+++You can make MORE money from mass producing and selling steel shovels to blacksmith at tier 3 per day than you could by selling crates to the merchant every week. Tool values do not decrease according to how many you sold. The only limitation becomes the amount of steel you can process and sticks(which you’ll have to cut small trees for).
+++After you get zombies unlocked, and you’re thinking about setting them up at the quarry, make sure to build at least 1 trunk there. Miners will get clogged up on coal while digging iron blocks in the mine. Preferably build the ore storages, stone storages, and 1-2 stone cutters there as well, to save space in your main yard. Have at least 1 porter zombie, so he can “load” the other zombies in from time to time,or visit the quarry yourself, cuz otherwise they stop working after a while.
+++Do not shy away from making zombies early, that’s when they’re most useful. As long as the zombie/corpse has no surgical errors, you will be able to improve the corpse later, to make the zombie better, but if you’ve got faith to spare, no sense not having it work for you.
+++Zombies can reach a max of 40% efficiency, but only when transplanted all 3white organs(which are rare btw) from other corpses. 3white organs are mostly only useful for zombies, as getting a corpse to 12 whites for burying can be done with 2x 2white and 1x1white organs and all 4 white embalms.
Tech tree choices that should be avoided or prioritized and why in the next sections
Anatomy
1.Gentle Butcher and the Surgery techs both almost fully eliminate the chance of screwing up the removal of a part, thus get Butcher as soon as you can afford it, makes life much easier. Surgery is kinda useless as by the time you can get it, you’ll have burgers to munch on, from inquisition quest line.
After unlocking alchemy( by talking to Clotho in the swamp ):
2.Do not invest into Alchemy Storage and the other techs until you’re ready to create your alchemy stations and have wooden beams and advanced glass cones accessible.
3.It is necessary to have both tier 1 and tier 2 alchemy workbenches built at the same time, as it is not possible to craft 2 reagent recipes in the tier 2 bench.
4.Getting Embalming Liquids early might seem kinda pointless (most embalming fluids require tier 2 alchemy workbench), but if the player has blue points to spare in the mid-game, unlocking Embalming and Embalming 2 allows access to Fridge Pallets, which are cheap(flitch, nails, and complex parts) to make and provide room for 2 corpses, for indefinite storage.
5.Embalming Liquids 2 and 3 should only be gotten once the player has constructed an alchemy workbench 2, and more importantly, when the player starts receiving corpses with 4 or more red skulls.
++Embalming is not necessary to beat the game, but it does help with improving your corpses enough that marble decorations become useful(those aren’t necessary to beat the game either), and can further improve your…adjutants.
Theology
1.Softness of faith should only be gotten once the player gets the merchant to provide tier 3 goods, and only if the player has unlocked Assembly Stand tech in building.
2.Smell of faith should only be unlocked once the player has alchemy table I, the hand mixer and mill built. Pheromones requires access to alcohol, smooth marble and alchemy workbench II(which takes wood jointings, requiring building>assembly stand). You CAN however use the incense II in the tier 1 censer, so you could make use of this tech partially if you don’t have marble available yet.
3.Prayer for prosperity is one of the best prayers early ingame. It has decent stats for a starting prayer, but also provides blessings of commerce. These items can be sold to merchants for 1 silver to speed up their progress to leveling up(You can get the miller and farmer to tier 3 from just selling them 1 of these). Other npcs might take a few to reach higher levels though (blacksmith barely reaches level 2 after selling him about 3 of these).
++This allows you to unlock powerful trading offers earlier, as well as decide when said merchant levels up( for instance, leveling up the blacksmith to tier 2 will allow you to sell steel and complex iron parts to him… but since right after lvl up his stock will only be 1 of each, his buy price will be WAY higher, you can prepare for this and sell a good 15 of each and make a killing, roughly 70 silver early)
4.Price of faith: mediocre tech, kind of a waste of 20 blue points early, the cardinal perk only makes it so you get 1 more copper for each gravescore point you have. Get this perk only when you can confidently make a gold star combo prayer (60 church score required for success) as that’s the best money and faith prayer ingame. Until then, the only 2 prayers you’ll want will be a prayer for prosperity and a (bronze) prayer for inspiration.
5.DO NOT GET Graveyard Enchanchement(misspelled?) and the following techs after Cremation. Cremation is a really good tech to have early, but what follows it is not really worth the blues… maybe get it late game to make your graveyard look that extra bit nicer…
6.Try to postphone unlocking Stone Gravestones early if possible, as getting it early before Stone Carving 2 gets you very little to work with(stone grave fence only).
7.Shining of faith requires access to gold and jewelery table.
8.Marble gravestones are not necessary to beat the game (get them only if going for a maxed out graveyard, with properly embalmed bodies)
9. Superpower of faith is hella expensive, but gives confessional II, which is really affordable to build, and provides 2 faith and silver-gold stories on interaction.
Writing
1.Inventing Stories, Writer’s Inspiration Playwright- Should all be obtained further on, when the player is interested in finally aquiring a gold quality prayer book.
++Writer gives a 30% bonus, Playwright gives 60% bonus, building a desk II instead of desk I gives an extra 20%, and if under the effects of prayer for imagination, you can get an extra 70%.
+This means that you will be able to turn bronze stories 70% into silver pages, and combine those into gold chapters sometimes, so try to only use bronze stories early, before you get this setup, as silver is guaranteed gold.
+When making chapters, try to mix and match silver and gold pages, to save on gold pages used.
2.Old books can be salvaged with some sand at the desk, for some early paper and blue points (after bishop teaches you how to gather sand ofc.)
3.Paper Crafting should be gotten as a priority, after being able to produce the complex iron parts necessary to build the workbench.
4.Writing supplies should be gotten once you’re able to make ink (alchemy workbench I). Before then, you can make yourself bronze quality prayers by just buying a bronze chapter from astrologer, saves you the need to buy this tech and costs roughly as much as the ink and feathers would otherwise…
5.Books tech is really only needed for prayer for imagination and the combo prayer. Until you have enough blues to unlock playwright as well, avoid getting this.
6.Get writer’s inspiration only when you have access to lenses (Assembly Stand).
7.Paper Production is a luxury tech, one can obtain bat wings easily by going at dusk( until midnight) in the swamp to the north(3 bats), or on the hill to the north-west(3 bats), and further past the blockage (4 more) daily, for plenty of paper early game.
++That being said, this tech requires at least alchemy workbench I, to make white dye for the paper.
8.Complex printing press is a scam. I’ve tested this on a brand new game started in breaking dead update, with zombies and stuff, both presses are identical, they take the same reagents to make flyers, they take the same energy, they do so at the same speed. Literally a waste of points to get this…
Farming and Nature
1.Simple and complex fertilizer techs, as well as the Gardening tech should only be gotten once the player has an alchemy worktable 2 available BECAUSE:
–the boost fertilizers only increase the speed at which crops grow, and while they can be gotten earlier with only a tier 1 alchemy worktable, they are generally useless, as time is not important when growing crops ( you plant and forget, come harvest next week or when you stumble across the grown crops)
–High quality fertilizers ONLY affect crops with quality. Growing wheat, carrots, etc. should only be done with peat as fertilizer, since the quality fertilizers require ash to make, and are only needed when trying to boost your seed’s quality and get more gold seeds.
–As with quality fertilizers, the farmer perk only affects seeds with quality to them. Carrots, wheat, and whatnot will forever give the player 4 or less seeds.
2.Master Gatherer: I’ve taken this tech early in 2 of my early game tests and figured out one thing: This perk is completely garbage. What it does is increase the amount of stuff you get from gathering flowers, berries and mushrooms by 1, and unlocks red mushrooms. This is bad early BECAUSE:
–For berries that’s a really marginal increase, and once the player has actual good food(pies, wine or honey 4 dayz) berries should only be gathered in case of missing a few green points.
–Red mushrooms are mostly useful in mass producing quality fertilizer II and are not necessary otherwise
++this tech does seem to make it possible to get double butterflies/moths from flowers, but getting those is kinda pointless, unless needing the chaos extract.
-+Double mushrooms is most of the reason why this could be good, as early game, baked mushrooms are an ok food until better stuff is unlocked, but it has such a short lasting window of usefulness that it doesn’t matter much.
Basically get this tech once you have alchemy workbench 2 accessible, and only when you need the fertilizer.
3.Grape farming: This tech allows you to build trellises for growing grapes, after you’ve completed the required inquisitor quest.
–You can grow grapes even before completing the Inquisitor’s quest for unlocking the vineyard building bench, by just restoring some of the damaged trellises. This also bypasses the need of obtaining this tech early on.
++With peat and bronze quality grape seeds (buy 4/week ) you can get an easy source of food, as they can be made into grape pies(1 siver recipe) for a better usage of pastry dough than cake.
++6 grape pies can be sold weekly for a tidy profit of 3 silver and 25ish copper at the tavern
++try to repair the shortcut behind the house to witch hill as soon as possible, as it is quite cheap.
++the follow-up tech of winemaking is god tier for food production, as there is no balancing to drinks in the game, you can guzzle alcohol without repercussions.
4.Beekeeping and Insects:
Beekeeping: This tech is misleading, as you can gather honey without this tech, just that the beeswax doesn’t have a chance of dropping until you get it.
Insects: Pretty much only required once alchemy is obtained of if the player needs to fish early game and wants a *free* fishing pole ( for 6 moths ).
4,5.Bee Domestication>Bee Friend: These techs are for those who are too hipster to grow grapes.
–Building the beehouses is a total pain as they each require 20 bees, which can be rarely obtained from beehives.
++It is most advantageous to buy up to 12 bees a week from the beekeeper in town, to kickstart the hives. He restocks wax and bees by 2 a day, unlike other vendors who only restock by 1.
++The wax and bee droprate from built hives is considerably better than trees.
++BeeFriend is basically the main reason why you’d get these techs, as it makes bees no longer damage you and almost doubles the honey you get/ gather, making honey worth eating raw, as you’ll be swimming in it.
++The 2 honey trees to the north-west + the 4 honey trees scattered in the hill on your way towards the quarry are a good source of farmable honey, especially if going to mine coal or going to the quarry.
5.Brewing: needed only once the quest for the inquisitor requires you to provide 30 beer and 15 burgers (both gold quality) for the witch burnings. This quest however is really important, but you should only get it once you have gold quality onions and hops (aka at least tier 1 quality fertilizer required).
5,5. Digestion: this tech is kinda useless, it offers 2 alternatives for obtaining alcohol in the followup tech, but it isn’t even required to get Strong Alcohol tech, one can skip it after Winemaking(which is required and really good)
6.Blending: Winemaster perk is not worth the cost(luxury perk). It just gives you higher chance to make higher quality alcohol and boosts the restoration effects of bronze and silver wines BUT:
–This can be counterproductive, as from silver grapes, instead of making silver wine(needed for quests) you might accidentally make a gold quality batch.
++Silver wines restore enough as it is, and gold wines almost fully refill your energy anyway, without this perk.
+It is advisable to simply “breed” alot of gold quality grape and hops seeds using tier 2 quality fertilizer, and then one can alternate between using silver quality fertilizer every 3-4 growth cycles and peat in between to keep the seed count stationary.
7.Zombie Gardening: Cheap tech, get it as soon as you’ve got at least quality fertilizer I craftable, and can afford to spend the faith to get some zombies working crops.
Smithing
1.Glass should be unlocked after unlocking “The concept of dirt”, by talking to the episcop the week after you unlock church. Making glass takes time and energy digging the sand, but awards an easy early game source of red points. Making bottles provides an easy but slow source of blue points.
++Sand is easy to get, so there is no excuse not making glass in one or 2 of your furnaces. Keep all but maybe 1 of your furnaces working at all times to get easy points and progress faster.
2.Imborn blacksmith: this tech is a good quality of life improvement, as it indirectly increases the longevity of your iron supply and lowers energy and time costs spent manufacturing at the anvil.
This tech is best gotten in the early game, after the first week; Otherwise if you already have ample coal supplies and made yourself an ore storage and stone cutter up the mountain rendering iron an infinite resource, it is totally possible to play the game without this tech.
++While it improves iron bar efficiency by 33% for nails and simple parts, it improves iron bar efficiency by 50% for complex parts
3. Weapons>Martial Skills: These skills should be avoided, you don’t need “good” equipment too early on, and you’ll end up unlocking Steel Weapons separately anyway.
++It is entirely possible however to not craft a single weapon though as there is a merchant that comes at night above the lumberjack in the village and sells weapons and armors. This merchant however is unlocked later on in the quest chain with miss charm’s necklace.
+The cost for a damask sword with gem(required for quest and best weapon) is 1 gold 50 silver, but the sword itself requires a steel sword, 3 gold inlays and 1 gem, the cost of all those totalling way more than 2 gold if bought separately.
++The recipe for Steel armor is really cheap, costs some sticks and complex iron parts, as oposed to iron armor which costs lots of skin.
4.Engineer: You’ll need this after you’re halfway the marble tech tree and it helps slightly when carving marble busts. Getting it early = shooting yourself in the foot with a cannon. The water pump is more of a luxury, and you’ll still need water buckets for paper glop later…
5. Rules of Burning: This tech is pretty much a luxury tech as it doubles the iron you can smelt at once, while taking slightly less time and fuel total.
–It is highly recommended to improve yard space and construct a total of at least 3 furnaces anyway(max 6), to provide a good source of points early and to get stuff done faster. This also bypasses the need of getting Advanced Smelting until later on, after you’ve unlocked Precious Metals.
6.Glassblower 2: the complex conical flasks require tier 2 furnace to craft, and are required once the player is ready to tackle alchemy. The lens requires assembly table to craft, but that doesn’t matter much because lenses are mostly used to make steel chisels for working marble busts, which means you got those techs by then anyway.
7.Iron Castings: Prioritize this tech after Circular Saw in building tab, but before Assembly table.
++Noteworthy: It is cheaper to upgrade furnaces from tier I to II rather than building them at tier II, but it’s cheaper to build furnaces at tier III directly once possible, instead of upgrading them 2 times.
-The upgrade eats a lot of energy.
Building
BUILDING:
1.Sawing and Woodworking should be the first techs you get, period. Woodworking allows you to make flitch into planks, which is the fastest, cheapest, least energy demanding, non-tool damaging, red point source available.
2.Unlock firewood tech after building your first furnace, so you can clear the blockage to the north-west that prevents you from getting to the (coal,iron,stone,marble) extraction area, and get Mining tech before going there, so you can use coal instead of firewood for fuel, because screw firewood, wedges are the reason you get this tech.
3.Woodcutter: You get this tech mostly just so you can fully clear the graveyard’s left side and your base area’s dead trees. Until you need to do that, don’t bother, waste of blue points.
++Maybe after getting zombies unlocked, and digging the 2 zombies in the rubble(yes, there should be 2, if you only dug out one, go check again) it might be worth getting this to get zombie woodcutting and build the zombie sawmill for infinite steady supply of wood.
4.Precious Metals: Get this tech before unlocking the Steel techs, as it’s impossible to make steel without making graphite first, also the chances to get precious nuggets earlier won’t hurt.
5.Circular Saw: Get this tech once you’re sick and tired of not having a shortcut to your church’s basement, basically when you start thinking about building your alchemy laboratory and spending more time there.
–Note: getting to Snake is possible earlier, as the first blockage from the basement of the house is cheaper to remove, not requiring beams, thus unlocking the shortcut to the town does not require it.
–Issue:Mortuary is poorly designed, and the tunnel to it takes alot more time than just getting to it from outside.Also repairing the hatch might cause more harm than good, as it will inevitably increase the player travel distance to retrieve the corpse.Corpses inside the mortuary will decay slightly slower than outside, but you will still want to put them on a table/pallet asap.
6.Related Ore: Bad tech atm that clutters your inventory space and is only useful in alchemy later on, or if you want to get to the miner and gems> Best Friend techs in the late late game. Limestone is white powder, mostly used for white dye, in candles and paper, and sulphur is life powder, kinda useless…
7.Stone carving 1 and 2 : I personally try to get these both at the same time, as only with stone carving 2 can you start churning out proper gravestones really efficiently. RUSH these before the steel techs, and get Stone Gravestones at the same time. This will provide lots of red points and useful grave decorations.
8.Tricks of the Trade: Albeit relatively cheap at the point of reaching this tech, it’s situational. You will want to get it mostly only after getting to the Grave Monuments tech, as it will allow you to make 2 carved stone out of 1 smooth stone, effectively making the carved stone stuff cheaper in faith. You’ll also need to have it before starting to work with marble busts.
9.Assembly Stand: This table is necessary to make steel equipment and lenses, jointings are needed for lategame stuff, etc.
+-Plank red points are lowered to 1/plank at this station, not that it matters much at this point.
10.Marble techs: Unlock them only after you are able to embalm corpses with all white skull bonus substances, as the marble stuff do NOT reward blue points on crafting and can only be studied for the blue points roughly paying back their blue point cost, while providing an overkill of grave decoration until the later stages of the game.
Cookery List and Sources
COOKERY:
The important cooking recipes are:
Simple and Tasty: You get this from your basement chest. Decent once you get firewood/coal
++You get apples every time you go to the lighthouse( there are a total of 5 gatherable trees there, but 3 start out as chopped, and you should shovel the stumps up so they regrow)
++Mushrooms are a good early source of green points, however digging green vine-bushes is more effective early on and, later on , farming will provide enough green points for all your green needs, as well as better food options.
++You can also buy apple saplings from clotho the witch starting at 3 silver each, after you provide her a health potion ( cauldron route is long and tedious, and stupid, faster to get a potion from the dungeon for her… )
+These apple trees that you grow are overpowered, as they will be harvestable for 15 apples each when ripe, definetly the best deal for your “orchard/garden”. This makes it so you can get really cheap strong alcohol by using apple ferment instead of wine.
+If you do visit Clotho, be sure to buy 6 frogs each trip, you will need 10 total for a quest for perfume later on. They’re cheap, and once you catch a frog (using a butterfly/moth as bait in village pond at low range) you’ll be able to make sliced meat out of 3 frogs.
Cake+: Obtained from Dig, the hillbilly on the road to the lighthouse, he asks for 5 honey.
Cake is always gold quality, requires pastry dough(+1 egg,1 milk /4 dough) 5 berries (cost is negligible as player will be gathering any and all berry bushes early game anyway) and 1 honey.
++The main reason why this recipe is good to get is that the buff it provides is only given by pies (early-mid game) and it allows obtaining extra blue points(+1) per each item researched, but provided you always consume cake or pie before researching, you will end up with a decent amount of blue points, especially when researching stuff for alchemy.
Good Carbs: Pasta is crap, but doesn’t require lint. Lasagna is good, but requires lint, which is a ♥♥♥♥ crop. Both these recipes are unlocked by giving an iron axe(any durability) to the woodcutter stationed north of TRES the carpenter. They give a buff that makes working with an axe or pickaxe easier.(basically only useful early, when you can’t afford to make them)
Jelly:One of the starting recipes you get as soon as you kill the slimes for the blacksmith. It is feasible to make them. 4 slimes spawn daily at dawn in the swamp behind your house, the 3 green jellies you make total 75 energy, – the honey which provides 15 raw, each slime jelly(mob drop) ends up providing roughly 8 energy surplus(-6 energy trying to kill the slime with starting sword). As long as you get the slimes lined up and hit multiple at once, it’s really good, but nothing to go out of your way for.
Vegetable Dishes: A tech you unlock after you speak with the farmer about crops, the carrot cutlet is the only good dish, and is really easy to make, provided you buy seeds regularly from him and use peat. This dish alone makes each carrot worth 24 energy, and can be used exclusively until something better like pies or wine is unlocked.(Try to buy at most 12 seeds/ week every 2 weeks)
Sweet Baking(2silver): Muffins are great. 4 dough 1 honey = 20×4 energy.
Pies(1silver): Get after you have grapes, replaces cake.
Soups: You get this by giving clotho a silver star pumpkin. Really good cheap food, they provide a bonus that gives +1 to the rate at which you regain energy in sleep, but getting a silver pumpkin early might be a reason why you end up skipping them in favor of pies/wine.
Tasty and Healthy(X): Don’t buy this, not worth it. Only reason you’d get it is for baked pumpkin, but sauerkraut does the same thing.
Fish Delicacies(X): Don’t buy this, not worth it, by the time you have the fishing rod and bait to catch good fish, you’ll have moved on from energy problems.
Beer Snacks: These recipes are unlocked for free after bringing a bronze onion and talking to the inkeeper. It has to be bronze quality. I recommend just buying one off the farmer, as it’s not worth buying the bronze seeds when silver ones are available. The onion rings are a decent value recipe by themselves, but after eating them, beer will restore 13 more energy for 2 minutes, which is ok-ish, not that you’d consume beer, since wheat is better used in making paper, and the little beer you do need (31) is for quests.
Fish Dishes: The fisherman teaches you this for free. Fish fingers required for an achievement…
Fish soup and baked fish are a pretty good food source if you like fishing…( the buffs themselves are completely trash tier as fishing is stupidly easy though)
++Fishing by the waterfall, across the river, with bait, you can catch red fillet x1 fish(bronze quality) by fishing close range, and white fillet x3 fish by fishing long range.
++Better yet, fishing above the waterfall, at the small wooden bridgeway in the forests, close range can yield bronze AND silver star red fillets, allowing an early completion of fish kebab quest.(4 silver star fillets)
Fish Kebab: You get this by delivering some silver star red fillets to the ♥♥♥♥♥ baron(lol). Don’t even bother doing the quest if you don’t intend to fish a lot. The quest is easier to complete with the tier 2 or 3 fishing rod using steel lure. The kebabs themselves are powerful potion substitutes before alchemy tier II table, and make clearing the dungeon a bit faster.
Nectar of the Gods: You get to make mead, 50 water + 3 hops + 1 honey = 10 mead, which at gold quality is a measly +3 life +20 energy(it’s worse than beer, but after you got a water pump you could do this to get even more energy than you know what to do with)
++You get this recipe after you hold your first witch burning “sale”, where you serve 10 gold quality beer and 5 gold quality burgers for 33 silver, 2 or 3 times ( i forgot). You then deliver 1 beer to the inkeeper and he’ll allow you to go take his mead recipe from the table upstairs in his room…
+-The mead isn’t affected by beer thirst buff, and there is no way to make it restore more energy. (digestion potion only works on cooked foods, not raw foods or drinks)
Noteworthy bugs/balance issues/exploits with the game
1. Dying has no consequence, and is useful for fast travelling to your house. This is unlikely to change as the game doesn’t seem to want to be punishing for those who are bad at combat, but a player can willingly let themselves die, either by eating red mushrooms when already low hp, or once the “town” is unlocked, suiciding there every time they want to get back from town.
2.Autopsy in the morgue, and this one is really important, hope they fix it: Selecting a part to autopsy, and then going to the construction menu, selecting the table for deletion and then de-selecting it will cause the said organ to be removed instantly from the inventory of the body, at no energy or chance of failure for the player. In the early game, especially before you have butcher tech, you can ensure you get a proper corpse at the cost(or benefit) of not obtaining blood and fat, with 100% chance it will not generate a “failed removal” item that lowers the corpse’s quality, and also being instant and costs no energy.
3.Entering a conversation with npcs pauses the game time, but not the game world, so if you go to the tavern at noon, and you see the donkey just spawn, and then you go talk to an npc, the time will still be noon when you leave conversation/trade with him, but the donkey will have long delivered the corpse, and it might have decayed quite a bit, your cooldowns on items and various other processes like furnaces will have progressed as well.
This can be exploited by setting your furnaces to melt ore, going to your mailbox and opening the “chat” menu, and then leaving the game for a while, and your metals will have melted at no ingame time spent, allowing you to amass resources for something you otherwise couldn’t( ex: to get enough iron smelted for making the church chandeliers in time for the next sermon)
This also works for resources replenishing (like mushrooms, berries and apples) and also farm crops, as it’s possible to have them grow by teleporting to the dead horse and talking to the inkeeper, his wife, or miss charm/vagner if present, and then going into the kitchen to eat or taking a shower irl, all your crops will have grown quite a lot and you will be able to teleport back home since your teleporter cooldown will have reset.
4.Using tools, holding F pressed after using them keeps charging an invisible progress number, and when you actually go to another resource, if the resource’s “resistance stat” is lower than the charged tool number, it’s dug instantly. This works while game is paused (looking in inventory) and makes it so you can dig most things in at least 1 energy, at most 2. Doesn’t work for harvestables (things you grab without need of pick/axe/shovel).
5. It is still possible (yes they only partially fixed the bug previously) to repair your tools by quickstacking, but only if the tools themselves can be sold to a vendor. Quickstacking 2 iron pickaxes at tier 2 Krezvold for example, with 1 pickaxe fully broken and the other one full durability, by shift-clicking the full durability pick, will repair the other pickaxe, without need of fulfilling the trade…