Your First Week

This page covers the stretch from your first burial through Herbert’s first quest to the village opening up, which is the first part of the walkthrough. A game week has six days and lasts 45 real minutes. Rather than repeat the story steps, it focuses on the routines worth setting up straight away: earning tech points, spending them, meeting the body deliveries, and keeping energy and insanity under control.

Starting kit

Where	What
On you, from the introduction	Rusty Pickaxe, Rusty Axe, 100 copper
Chest in the graveyard	Rusty Shovel, Rusty Hammer, 3 Wooden Signs
Chest in the yard	2 Boards, 1 Beer, 100 Water
Chests in the house	8 Bread, 5 Berries

Your mastery is added up from every tool sitting on the hotbar, so where you keep the tools matters. The axe and pickaxe should live there, because a gravestone can only go on a grave with Building mastery 1. Add the shovel as well. Besides digging graves, it supplies the green mastery that a garden bed asks for before you can plant in it.

Tech points and what to buy

Break a tree, bush, stone or pile of junk and coloured orbs fly out; finishing a workbench does the same. These are tech points. Red and green turn up quickly. Blue is scarce at first, and the reliable early source is the autopsy table: every pocket you pick yields one blue point. Orbs on the ground stay there forever, and they are all swept up for you when you go to sleep.

The Concept of Wood and the Sawhorse that comes with it are free after your first sleep at home. With your first points, these are good buys, cheapest first:

Technology	Cost	What you get
Bronze Works	5 red	The Wooden Anvil, plus Bronze Nails made from Bronze Scrap
Gardening	5 green	Garden Beds, needed for Herm’s wheat
Chopping	8 red	Wood wedges
Woodworking I	10 red	Wooden Planks, an ingredient in about half of the early recipes
The Concept of Stone	15 red	Pieces of stone

Two early talent points

Wood wedges and Pieces of stone both ask for Building mastery 3. The rusty axe and pickaxe only get you to 2, so you need the root node of the Building branch on the talent tree, Building mastery +1. The point for it is easy: level 1 of Lumberjack (fell 5 trees) and level 1 of Rock Breaker (smash 3 rocks) cost nothing, and having both gives you the talent point.

The same trick applies to Smithing. The longer goal is Bronze Details, reached through Pottery, Brick Making and the Bronze technologies, and making them takes Smithing mastery 2. The Rusty Hammer only counts for 1, so you also want the first Smithing node. Its point comes from the free first levels of Junk Fighter (smash 5 barrels or trash piles) and Bronze Crafter (craft Bronze Nails 3 times). The full chain is laid out in a table in the walkthrough.

Your first body

Before the first burial, pick at least one pocket on the autopsy table. Level 1 of Pickpocket and level 1 of Last Respects (bury one body) are both free. Completing the two unlocks the inspiration page and earns your first Anatomy talent point.

Put that point into Anatomy mastery +1, the root of the Anatomy branch; with Anatomy at 0 no organ can be removed. Next, Skin and Bones costs 5 green and 2 blue (pickpocketing covers the blue) and lets you take skin out cleanly. For clean results every time, bones need Anatomy 2, and skulls need Anatomy 3 plus Skull and Teeth. Try them earlier and most attempts fail. Corpses has the details.

The donkey’s timetable

Once Certificate, Please is done, the donkey turns up at 13:12 on Gluttony, Lust and Pride. It drops the body outside the morgue, but only if there is space inside, and at first the morgue has space for just one body you haven’t dealt with.

In practice, get the previous body buried, burned or disposed of before 13:12 on those three days. A Corpse Pallet I raises the room by one each; it costs 4 Boards and 4 Bronze Nails, and your first autopsy already gave you the technology. Pallets won’t make the donkey bring two bodies at once, since it only ever carries one. What they do is stop a delivery being skipped when you are away.

Each body, in order:

1. Pockets and organs. Pick the pockets, remove the Fat and Blood (one red skull each) and leave the Flesh, which is a white skull. Hold on to what you take out: Fat is later melted down into Melted Fat, and Blood is needed for the Magic bell.
2. Burial. Dig and fill the grave on the same day. Until it is finished, an open pit or unfilled grave takes 3 off graveyard quality.
3. Decoration. Give the grave your best gravestone and fence. Grave Expectations asks for graveyard quality 10, and before stone decorations are available no grave can be worth more than 3, so none can be skimped.

Money and happiness

The game starts you on 100 copper, the same as 1 silver. Your first regular earnings come once the village opens, from Januarius at the tavern. Each Burial Certificate sells to him for 1 silver, and the first five you sell in a week add 1 happiness apiece. That weekly count resets on Pride day.

Early on, the happiness is of little use. You begin at 9, the cap is 10 once the village is open, and the only thing that spends it is a sermon, at one point per parishioner. For the first week, treat the certificates as a silver income and nothing more.

The first coins are best spent in Herm’s store. Buy Wheat seed, which his own quest needs, and Bronze Scrap: three scrap melt into two bronze ingots, and a single scrap makes six bronze nails.

Energy and insanity habits

• Don’t go to bed on a full bar. The bed won’t accept you. You get up the moment energy is full rather than at dawn, and sleeping at home is what saves your game.
• Sleep at least every two days. 15 real minutes without sleep brings on Lack of sleep, and while it lasts every point of energy you use raises insanity.
• Grim work adds up. Each swing costs 0.3 insanity at the autopsy table and 0.2 when digging or filling a grave. Your energy cap shrinks by one for every point of insanity, and at 80 grim work is blocked entirely.
• Drink, don’t just sleep. A normal night leaves insanity untouched, but a Beer takes off 12. There is one in the yard chest and Januarius sells more.

Every other way to raise or lower them is in Energy, Sleep and Insanity.

The week day by day

Day	In your first week
Gluttony	Donkey delivery at 13:12
Sloth	No fixed events
Lust	Donkey delivery at 13:12
Envy	Thunderstorm all day, of no use to you yet
Pride	Donkey delivery at 13:12; at 00:14 the traders’ weekly happiness limits reset
Wrath	Sermons, once the church is up

Days roll over at midnight, not when you get out of bed. Sleep makes the world run 50 times faster, but none of the events above are skipped. More in Time and the Week.