Opening Walkthrough

The whole opening hangs on one man. Herbert, the Head of the Guards, means to take the town back from the zombies, and each step toward the first battle is a job he gives you. There are four of them, one after another: bring a burial certificate, raise the graveyard to quality 10, deliver 3 Faith, and get the Barracks to quality 12 with a Magic bell. The village, Jack’s boat and the church all exist, at this stage, to get those four done.

Below is the order to do things in and why. For the full rules of each system, see Graveyard, Corpses, Sermons, Technology and Energy and Insanity.

Chapters 1 to 4: the introduction

These four chapters run on rails. You escape the Inquisition’s prison, cross the deserted town, hold the town square, and fall back to an abandoned Inquisitor base that turns into your home. The Story Tree doesn’t track any of it, and you can’t miss anything.

• Tools count only on the hotbar. That is where the story looks, not in your backpack: for the pickaxe in the prison, and for the armour and sword before you can leave Jack’s workshop.
• You can’t lose the town square. Once your health runs low, damage stops landing and the retreat begins by itself.
• Sleeping at home for the first time opens the technology tree, with The Concept of Wood already paid for. From here on, that bed is where the game saves.

Chapter 5: the first burial

Your first corpse arrives at the morgue courtesy of a donkey that talks.

1. Autopsy. Bring the body in and put it on the Autopsy Table I. The Anatomy tab of the tech tree opens, with two technologies free. You can progress simply by closing the autopsy window.
2. A pocket first. Pick a pocket before closing. It never fails, pays one blue tech point, and finishes level 1 of Pickpocket. With the burial that follows, that unlocks the inspiration page and your first talent point (Talents and Inspirations explains how).
3. The grave. Take the body to the graveyard, place an Empty Grave, dig, put the body in and fill it. A chest in the graveyard holds a shovel, a hammer and 3 Wooden Signs.
4. The marker. Top the grave with a Wooden Sign. You get a Burial Certificate and the Story Tree unlocks.

Certificate, Please

Herbert waits at the Crossroads, east of your house. Certificate, Please only needs you to show him the certificate; he doesn’t keep it, so it’s still yours to sell. Finishing it sets a lot in motion:

• The village gate opens. Its guards have been sending you away until now.
• Bodies start arriving on a schedule, every other day: at 13:12 on Gluttony, Lust and Pride. There’s room in the morgue for only one at first, so bury each before the next is due.
• Town quality rises by 10, which caps happiness at 10 until the port opens and the story adds another 10.
• Grave Expectations begins.

The village quests

You’ll find the village south of the Crossroads; The Village and the Crossroads maps out who lives where.

Quest	What to do	What you get
What the Fairy?	Enter the tavern and speak to Januarius.	Trading with him. He pays 1 silver per Burial Certificate, and the first five each week also add 1 happiness each.
Supply and Demand	Meet Herm in his store.	A shop selling Wheat seed and Bronze Scrap.
Planted and Delivered	Deliver 5 Wheat to Herm.	5 village reputation.
Two Peas in a Pod	See the twins across the bridge south of the village, then Jeffry by the Hangman’s House. They want 6 Clay Plates.	A fishing rod and 5 village reputation.

The wheat needs a Garden Bed, which comes from Gardening (5 green), and you can only plant with a shovel on your hotbar. It grows slowly, so get seeds in the ground as soon as Herm has them. The plates are thrown on a Potter’s Wheel, using clay dug at Riverside, south-west of your house.

Don’t skip either one. Two later quests need village reputation 10: the twins’ share of Jack’s boat, and Januarius’s Good Fellow. The wheat and the plates give 5 each, and nothing else gets you to 10 in time.

Building the workshop

Strip away the details and nearly every quest item here is made of two things, Wooden Planks and Bronze Details. You start with none of the workbenches for them and build them all in your yard. Here is the production chain and the technology behind each link:

To make	Workbench	Technology	Made from
Board	Sawhorse	The Concept of Wood (free)	Log
Wooden Plank	Woodworking Workbench I	Woodworking I	Board
Wood wedge	Chopping Spot	Chopping	Short Log
Piece of stone	Stonemason’s Workbench	The Concept of Stone	Stone, Wood wedges
Clay Plate	Potter’s Wheel	Pottery I	Clay
Brick	Kiln	Brick Making	Clay, fuel
Bronze Nails	Wooden Anvil	Bronze Works	Bronze Scrap
Bronze Ingot	Furnace I, built with bricks	Bronze Melting	3 Bronze Scrap → 2 ingots
Bronze Detail	Wooden Anvil with a Hardening Bucket next to it	Bronze Craft	1 ingot → 6 details

Mastery gates

On top of the technology, most of these jobs have a mastery threshold, and a job below its threshold won’t start. Your mastery is the sum of every tool on the hotbar, so keep them all there.

Job	Needs	Your starting level
Boards, Wooden Planks	Building 1, 2	Building 2 (Rusty Axe + Rusty Pickaxe)
Wood wedges, Pieces of stone	Building 3	Building 2
Bronze Nails from scrap	Smithing 1	Smithing 1 (Rusty Hammer, in the graveyard chest)
Bronze Details	Smithing 2	Smithing 1
Oiled Planks	Building 4	Reached later with a bronze axe or pickaxe (2 each)
Reinforced Planks	Smithing 4	Reached later with a bronze hammer (2)

Pieces of stone go into the furnace and Bronze Details go into bronze tools, so you can’t get past the gaps with gear. Take the first node of the Building branch and the first node of the Smithing branch on the talent tree before anything else.

The Hardening Bucket

Bronze Craft unlocks the Hardening Bucket alongside Bronze Details; it costs 4 Wooden Planks and 8 Bronze Nails. It has to be placed so that it touches the Wooden Anvil. Without it attached, the anvil refuses to start Bronze Details and the bronze tools.

Don’t count on junk for Bronze Scrap; Herm sells it. The maths is kind: 3 scrap become 2 ingots, and those 2 ingots become 12 Bronze Details.

Grave Expectations

The target is graveyard quality 10. For now, no single grave can score above 3. The best you have is a Wooden Cross I worth 2 and a Wooden Fence I worth 1, both from Wooden Gravestones I; the body’s white skulls cap that score and its red skulls pull it down. Four good graves will do it, or three good graves plus an Exterior Bench I, which adds 3. Before burying anyone, remove the Fat and Blood from their pockets, as each one is a red skull.

What holds you up is the supply of corpses, one every two days at best. Have the morgue clear by each delivery, and never leave a grave half done: an open pit or unfilled grave is worth −3. When the quest is complete, Herbert gives you another 10 reputation, and you’ll need that for the barricades.

Jack in a Boat

Some night after you’ve met Herm, Jack appears at your house. Jack in a Boat has three parts: 5 Wooden Planks, then 5 Bronze Details, then persuading the twins to row, which needs village reputation 10. With all three done, ask Jack whether he’s ready; he leaves the next time you sleep.

Since the bed won’t take you at full energy, burn a little on work before each of these sleeps.

Once he’s gone, sleep one more time. On waking you’ll have the recipe for the Magic bell that Herbert wants for the battle, and the Nun will have arrived at the village tavern.

Holy Moly!

Holy Moly! introduces Agatha, the Nun, in the tavern. She unlocks the church and won’t hold a sermon until it reaches quality 10. It begins at roughly −33. To fix it:

• clear away the 13 broken pots;
• repair the 4 blockages, each for 1 Bronze Detail and 1 Board;
• place three Interior Bench I.

Go inside the church at least once before reporting back. The dialogue option telling her the church is ready doesn’t exist until you’ve been in.

When she accepts the church, the first sermon is open to you on any weekday, and it remains open until the next Wrath day is over. Every sermon after that is Wrath day only.

Your congregation is whichever is lower, happiness or church quality. The game starts you at 9 happiness and nothing uses it up before this point, so a quality-10 church draws 9 or 10 parishioners. With 8 or more, the Basic Prayer Agatha gives you always succeeds; it yields 5 Faith with 9 parishioners and 6 with 10. One sermon is enough for Herbert’s 3.

Fighting Spirit Required

Fighting Spirit Required takes 3 Faith from you; unlike the certificate, this is a real hand-in. Sermons in the church are the only source of Faith, so you can’t finish this before the church is running. The reward is access to the Barracks and 2 Town Gratitude.

The barricade chain

To upgrade the Barracks you’ll need barricades, and nothing in the opening takes more steps to make. Working backwards:

Item	Made from
Barricade	2 Reinforced Planks, 6 Bronze Nails, 2 Short Logs
Reinforced Plank	1 Oiled Plank and 2 Bronze Details, at an anvil
Oiled Plank	Melted Fat and Wooden Planks
Melted Fat	Only the Distillation Cube makes it, from the technology Alchemy, Distillation. No trader you can get to sells it.

The quantities are small. A batch of Melted Fat (1 Fat, 2 Clay Plates, fuel) gives four. One of those plus 4 Wooden Planks gives 4 Oiled Planks, which is enough Reinforced Planks for two barricades.

Getting the Distillation Cube

The cube goes in the tower laboratory, and its technology branches off one you get from Albert, the Plague Doctor. So the Barracks depends on his storyline, which you can begin the moment you have village reputation 10, long before the church is ready:

1. Good Fellow. At village reputation 10, ask Januarius to summon Jully. He sends you home to ask Larry.
2. Dungeons and… that’s it, probably. A hatch in your house opens onto the underground. Clear the blockage down there with 3 Bronze Details and 3 Wooden Planks.
3. The tower door. It opens with the Inquisitor’s medallion from the prison (you can’t lose it) and the Secret combination you pick up at the blockage. Inside, open the hatch for Albert and ask him about Dream Dust.
4. The cube. Albert hands over the alchemy technologies. Buy Alchemy, Distillation (5 red, 5 green) and build the Distillation Cube in the laboratory for 2 Wooden Planks, 2 Bronze Details and 12 Bricks.

The Study Table and Albert’s other quests are covered in The Underground and the Tower.

Swords and Bell

Swords and Bell has two parts. Do them in any order and report to Herbert in the Barracks.

Part one: Barracks quality 12. A Barricade I is worth 2. The four mercenaries are worth 8 between them, but only while they’re paid up for the coming battle (the first costs 5 silver). That works out to two barricades if you pay the mercenaries, or six if you don’t.

Barricades are unlocked by Simple Barricades. Above it on the tree is Reinforced Plank, and above that a reputation technology that requires 20 reputation with Herbert, which is exactly what Certificate, Please and Grave Expectations give you. Reputation technologies unlock automatically, but silently and only at the moment you open the tree, so open the tree once Grave Expectations is done. That reputation node is a child of Bronze Forge, which you’ll have to buy as well.

Part two: the Magic bell. Forge it at an anvil from 1 Blood and 1 Bronze Ingot. You’ll get Blood from corpses’ pockets, and the recipe itself turns up later in the story, once Jack’s boat has left.

First… Sludge?

After handing in both parts, speak to Herbert outside the Barracks. You receive the red banner and 2 Healing Potions, and the battle is available on any day.

Check your gear before that conversation. You need both armor and a sword equipped; a bow on its own doesn’t count. Without them your character just says “I must equip sword and armor” and the battle window won’t appear. Inside the window, the start button is greyed out until defence power hits 12, the same barricades-plus-paid-mercenaries figure as before. Losing costs nothing: speak to Herbert and go again, and the mercenaries remain paid.

Across the bridge

Once you’ve won, head east beyond the battlefield to the bridge that leads to the port. The demo ended here. In the full game, Jack is waiting on the other side for Docked and Found, and from there the town, its stalls and the rest of the story open up. There’s no rush to cross, so wrap up anything unfinished at home first. Carry on with Walkthrough II: From the Port to the Election.

Technology shopping list

Only the technologies the story forces on you:

Technology	For	Cost
Woodworking I	Wooden Planks	10 red
Chopping	Wood wedges for stone	8 red
The Concept of Stone	Pieces of stone	15 red
Pottery I	Clay Plates, for the twins and for Melted Fat	10 red, 5 green
Brick Making	Furnace bricks	15 red, 5 green
Gardening	Herm’s wheat	5 green
Bronze Works	Wooden Anvil, Bronze Nails	5 red
Bronze Melting	Furnace, Bronze Ingots	10 red
Bronze Craft	Bronze Details	30 red
Bronze Forge	The way to Herbert’s reputation technology	20 red
Tool Rack	The way to Oiled wood	35 red
Oiled wood	Oiled Planks	20 red, 20 green
Alchemy, Distillation	Distillation Cube, Melted Fat	5 red, 5 green
Reinforced Plank	Reinforced Planks	45 red
Simple Barricades	Barricades	60 red, 25 green
Total		288 red, 65 green

You won’t need a single blue point. Wooden Gravestones I (5 red, 2 green) isn’t required, though Grave Expectations is far easier with it. Of the 288 red, 185 go on the Barracks alone (Tool Rack, Oiled wood, Bronze Forge, Alchemy, Distillation, Reinforced Plank and Simple Barricades), so bank red points while the church is still out of reach.