Graveyard Keeper 2 Beginner's Guide — Your First Week as a Keeper

Graveyard Keeper 2 hands you a graveyard, a house full of broken furniture, and a to-do list that all points at once. This guide walks your first in-game week in the order the game actually demands: quests first, energy management always, and a graveyard that scores positive instead of embarrassing you on inspection day.

Follow the quest chain, not your curiosity

The opening quests are the game's tutorial, and they chain into each other. Talk to the merchants in the village to start the line that eventually hands you the church: Jack needs ship materials (5 planks + 5 bronze fittings), the twins south of the bridge want 5 clay plates, and a letter that arrives days later sends you to the tavern to meet the nun. That chain unlocks sermons — your only source of faith, which gates research and story progress. Don't wander; push it.

A second chain matters just as much: the quest entries around the fairy and the dust in your kitchen lead to the Plague Doctor in your own basement — the gatekeeper of the entire anatomy-and-alchemy tech tree, Dreamdust, and your first zombie workers. Our Plague Doctor guide covers the checklist; the step players miss most is raising Bali's tavern-introduced friendship to 10 before the basement dialogue will trigger.

Learn the three bars before anything else

Three meters rule your day, and two of them are frequently confused:

• Blue energy bar (top-left): every action drains it; food and sleep refill it. At zero, you stop working.
• Purple segment on that bar: accumulated fatigue and sanity that caps your maximum energy. Food can't fill past it — only repeated sleep shrinks it.
• Blue Zz bubble (top center): sleep deprivation, appearing after roughly two in-game days without sleep. While it shows, every task costs extra energy and pushes sanity up faster.

The habit that prevents 90% of early pain: when the Zz bubble appears, sleep. That night. Food manages today's energy; sleep resets tomorrow's ceiling. Berry pie (−3 sanity, +30 energy each) is the workhorse snack once the kitchen runs.

Repair the kitchen in week one

Inside your house, the left wall holds a broken oven and a broken kitchen table. Repair them early — 2 stone blocks and 6 planks respectively — and build the firewood shed (blueprint left of your bed: 10 twigs + 2 bronze nails) so the oven has fuel. Cooked meals let you work the whole map without sprinting home to bed, and bulk baking feeds the Master Chef achievement along the way. Full steps in the cooking guide.

Farm barrels before you farm trees

Bronze nails gate most early construction. The cheapest source isn't crafting — it's the junk around you: chop broken barrels with an axe and tidy junk piles by hand for nails, scrap and planks. When local barrels run dry, unlock Bronze Working and forge at the wooden anvil (1 bronze scrap → 6 nails). Details in the bronze nails guide.

Bury corpses like an accountant

Every grave scores min(decoration, white skulls) − red skulls. Two consequences shape everything:

1. Never bury a corpse straight from delivery. Stop at the autopsy table and extract only the red-skull parts first — hovering each part tells you which. Stop cutting when red hits zero.
2. Match decoration to the ceiling. A wooden cross (+2) and wooden fence (+1) is wasted on anything below 3 white skulls, and marble fences can't lift a grave above its corpse's ceiling no matter what they cost.

Also: corpses below 90% freshness tank their burial score permanently, so process deliveries the day they arrive. And clear weeds, stumps and broken markers — the bishop's weekly review subtracts 2 rating per piece of junk. The full formula, expansions and the standalone buildings that carry you to graveyard level 10 are in the rating guide.

Tech tree priorities

The tree is wide; the early choke points are narrow. Unlock in this order and the rest opens naturally:

• Woodworking I / Chopping — planks and logs, the backbone of every build.
• The Concept of Stone + stone polishing path — stone blocks for the oven and graveyard expansions.
• Pottery I + the pottery wheel — clay plates for the twins' quest (2 clay → 3 plates).
• Bronze Working — the wooden anvil, bronze fittings for Jack, and a stable nail supply.
• Later: the anatomy & alchemy branch (via the Plague Doctor) for Dreamdust, resurrection and your zombie workforce.

Research any recipe before you craft it — the study step is cheap and the tech points aren't.

The first-week loop, compressed

1. Push quest chains (church + Plague Doctor) every day.
2. Chop barrels, tidy junk, keep a plank and nail reserve.
3. Repair oven + kitchen table; bake pies; carry them everywhere.
4. Autopsy every corpse; bury only red-skull-free bodies; decorate to the ceiling.
5. Sleep the moment the Zz bubble shows — never push through it.

From there the game opens up: sermons fund the church, zombies automate the yard, and the graveyard rating climbs toward the milestones (+30 consecration, +100 cathedral, +200 noble citizen papers) that define the midgame.