Corpses and Organs, Part by Part

Corpses in Graveyard Keeper 2 don’t have a quality score of their own. Their red and white skulls are the total of the six organs plus whatever sits in their pockets, and every change on the autopsy or embalming table shifts that total. This guide takes a body apart piece by piece: where the skulls are in each tier, how operations resolve, what extracted organs are useful for, and how to assemble the best grave or zombie you can. Everything is drawn from the game’s code and data tables. Anything that follows from the code without having been tested in play is marked Unconfirmed.

The basics of where bodies come from and how the autopsy table works are on Corpses; graves and decorations are on Graveyard. Here the focus is how the parts interact.

Skulls are a sum

Each organ and each pocket item has a set number of red and white skulls. A corpse’s skulls are nothing more than those totals, and neither can drop under 0. The grave formula is:

Grave quality = gravestone + fence − red skulls, capped at the number of white skulls.

Bury the body shown above beneath a Wooden Cross I (2) and Wooden Fence I (1) and you get 3 − 4 = −1. Remove its two Blood and two Fat first, leaving 0 red and 4 white, and the very same grave is worth 3.

Three rules fall out of this:

• Removing a part removes its skulls, whether they help or hurt. Pull out an organ with white skulls and the grave’s cap drops.
• Adding a part adds its skulls, whether it’s putting an organ into an empty slot, or embalming a pocket with a mixture.
• Graves and zombies pull in opposite directions. Graves need white skulls and zero red; zombies get a talent slot for every red skull.

Skulls by body tier

Every body belongs to a tier. You begin on the first, and quests later push it as high as the fourth. Each tier picks at random from its own fixed set of bodies:

Tier	Pockets emptied of Fat and Blood	Straight from the donkey
1st (15 bodies)	0–1 2–5	0–4 2–5
2nd (9)	1–5 3–5	3–5 3–5
3rd (9)	2–6 4–6	4–6 4–6
4th (9)	3–7 4–7	5–8 4–7

First-tier bodies keep their red skulls in the pockets. Their organs mostly carry nothing or one white skull, and once the Fat and Blood are gone, any red skull still there belongs to a single organ. Early on, then, picking pockets does nearly all the work, and pickpocketing can’t fail and has no mastery requirement. Leave the Flesh where it is, since it’s worth a white skull.

From tier two upward the red skulls live in the organs, so the only way to improve a grave is to remove or cancel those organs. Higher tiers bring more white skulls but also more red, which means an unprocessed high-tier body won’t make a better grave by itself.

Surgery

Until you learn an organ’s technology, its slot is shown as unknown; you can’t operate on it or even see its skulls.

Organ	Anatomy needed, grade 1 / 2 / 3	Unlocked by	Removal pays
Skin	1 / 3 / 6	Skin and Bones	1 + 1 / 2 / 3
Bones	2 / 4 / 7	Skin and Bones	ditto
Skull	3 / 5 / 8	Skull and Teeth	ditto
Heart	5 / 9 / 13	Autopsy, Advanced	ditto
Guts	9 / 11 / 13	Autopsy, Advanced	ditto
Brain	8 / 10 / 13	Autopsy, Master	ditto

The brain comes last: Autopsy, Master is locked behind Embalming I. The Autopsy Table II offers identical operations at identical requirements to the first one.

How an operation resolves

Result	Removing an organ	Inserting an organ
Perfect	The organ is yours	The organ goes in
Fair	The organ is destroyed	The organ is lost (it left your backpack when you started)
Bad	A Surgeon’s Error fills the slot (−1 red, −1 white) and can never be taken out	The organ is lost

Meet the requirement and every operation is perfect. Fall short and each swing merely has a chance of landing, while a perfect result tolerates only one miss. Even a single point below usually means losing the organ, so treat the number as a hard limit.

Raising Anatomy

Anatomy mastery stacks from several sources:

Bonus	Where it comes from
up to +5	Talent tree, Anatomy branch
+1 / +2 / +4	Surgeon’s kit in the hotbar: Butcher’s Kit, Surgeon’s Kit, Master Surgeon’s Kit
+4	Expert anatomist perk (autopsy table only)
+2	Third Eye Salt, lasts 7½ minutes
+1 to +3	Vegetable salad, lasts a day

Maxing the talent branch, carrying the best kit and taking Expert anatomist comes to precisely 13, the figure top-grade hearts, guts and brains demand. Surgeon, the perk beside Expert anatomist in the tree, begins each operation with 2 cells already filled, which helps you land a perfect result when you’re under the requirement. The kits are crafted at the Jeweler’s Table using one or more Leather Scroll, itself made from skin, and each kit is unlocked by one of the autopsy technologies in the table above.

Uses for organs

Selling isn’t one of them. All organs have a base price of 0, and traders never pay above base price, so they fetch nothing. Flesh, at 35, is the only part of a corpse with any price.

Study them. Your first study of each kind at the Study Table pays a big one-off batch of tech points. You keep the item; only the science and faith are spent.

Study	Reward (first time only)	Cost
Skin	10 10	5 science
Bones, Skull	10 10 apiece	5 science apiece
Heart	10 20	3 science, 3 faith
Guts	10 20	3 science, 3 faith
Brain	30	3 science, 3 faith
Fat	10	5 science
Blood	5 10	1 science
Flesh	10	1 science, 1 faith

Craft with them. Some parts are ingredients elsewhere:

Part	Goes into	Output	Made at
Skin	Clean Paper, notebooks and every surgeon’s kit	4 Leather Scroll	Writing Desk
Skull	Alchemy (1 1)	1 Tooth	Formulation Bench
Fat	Paint, Lacquer, ink, incense, polished stone, oiled planks and beams, plus both corpse mixtures (Solution and Injection)	4 Melted Fat	Distillation Cube
Flesh	Cooking (and Flesh itself becomes baked meat in the oven)	2 Minced Meat	Millstone
Blood	Alchemy (1)	Used as is	Laboratory

Brew with them. Top-grade hearts, brains and guts have runes, and once you’ve studied that organ they’re accepted by the laboratory: a heart counts as 1 2, a brain 3, guts 1 2. Organs below top grade carry no runes. More in How Alchemy Actually Works.

Transplant them. Any organ you removed with a perfect result can be placed into an empty slot in another corpse or a zombie. That’s how you build a body to specification.

Organ Improvers

Practical Potions (100 100, following Alchemy, Advanced) reveals two alchemy products plus twelve Formulation Bench recipes. Every recipe combines an organ of any grade with an Organ Improver and returns the top-grade form of that organ:

Organ	Mastery	With Organ Improver (white skull)	With Organ Improver (red skull)
Skin	5	1 3	3 0
Bones	5	1 3	3 1
Skull	5	0 3	3 2
Heart	7	0 3	3 1
Brain	7	0 3	3 1
Guts	7	1 3	3 0
All six		3 18	18 5

Both improvers are two-ingredient brews that any laboratory can make. The white one is 4, i.e. two Flour; the red one is 4 1, i.e. a Stone plus a Copper Nugget. Since the grade of the input organ is irrelevant, any first-grade organ from a first-tier corpse will do as a donor, and costs the least.

The catch is getting the result into a body. Top-grade organs have the steepest insert requirements: skin needs 6, bones 7, the skull 8, and the heart, guts and brain 13 each.

The perfect grave

Marble Cross II plus Marble Fence II, the top decorations, total 14. To actually score 14 the body must have zero red skulls and 14 or more white. You can get there two ways.

Route 1: embalming

An Embalming Table I places a mixture into an empty pocket slot; a body can hold up to six pocket items.

Mixture	Effect per star grade (1 / 2 / 3)	How to get it
Solution for Corpses	+1 / +2 / +3 white	Embalming I; Formulation Bench, from Melted Fat and Preservative
Injection for Corpses	−1 / −2 / −3 red and +1 / +2 / +3 white	Embalming III, far down the resurrection branch; the same plus a Comet’s Tail

Both are star crafts, so the grade you get depends on how the mix goes (Stars explains). The recipe: start with a first-tier body, remove Fat and Blood (leaving 0–1 red, 2–5 white), then add three or four top-grade Solutions. That’s 14 white without a single operation (Unconfirmed in play). If one red skull remains, add an Injection as well.

Route 2: organs

Fit all six white-improved organs and you have 3 red and 18 white. One top-grade Injection for Corpses cancels those 3 red, leaving 0 red and 21 white, comfortably enough for 14. It’s a lot more effort than embalming and three of the inserts need Anatomy 13, so it’s mainly worth it if you want the organs for their own sake.

For cheaper decorations the targets shrink accordingly. Wooden Cross II with Wooden Fence II is worth 5, so it wants 0 red and 5 white, and some first-tier bodies already qualify after the Fat and Blood come out.

The strong zombie

Zombies want the opposite. Each red skull is a talent slot, and according to the game’s code white skulls have no effect on a zombie, despite what the tutorial implies (Unconfirmed in play). The collar limits how many red skulls you can have: up to 5 on a Bronze Zombie Collar, 10 on a Golden one and 99 on a Steel one. Any later organ change has to stay within the collar’s limits.

• Raising requires all six organs and no Surgeon’s Error. A single botched operation makes a body useless as a zombie.
• All six red-improved organs make 18 red skulls, which only fits a Steel collar. First-tier bodies arrive with 0 to 4 red and fit a Bronze collar; if you plan to raise one, leave its pockets alone, because Fat and Blood are red skulls.
• Zombie organs are swapped, not removed. A swap only works on a perfect result; anything less changes nothing and costs you the new organ.
• Taking red skulls away switches off the zombie’s newest talents. The tech points you spent aren’t returned, but the talents reactivate if the red skulls come back.
• Solution for Zombies puts 1 to 3 red skulls into a pocket slot, no surgery needed.