Corpses & Organs

A corpse comes with six organs (skin, bones, skull, heart, brain, guts), between one and four pocket items, and a Burial Certificate. Organs and pocket items each have red skulls and white skulls, and a corpse’s skulls are just those added together. The autopsy table lets you remove or insert parts to adjust the skulls before you bury the body, and any organ removed cleanly is yours.

Graves reward low red and high white. Zombies want the reverse.

Deliveries

Once Certificate, Please is done, the donkey brings bodies at 13:12 on Gluttony, Lust and Pride (see Time and the Week). With the morgue door still broken, every body is left outside at the Corpse Dumping Point; see The Morgue.

A scheduled visit doesn’t always produce a body. Two things decide it:

1. Morgue space. Capacity for bodies you haven’t dealt with equals morgue quality. The Autopsy Table I, each Corpse Pallet I and a Crematorium I are worth 1 apiece. You start with only the autopsy table, so there’s room for one. A full morgue means no visit.
2. The delivery chance. It begins at 100%. A delivery drops it by 15 points, a miss adds 50, and a visit cancelled by a full morgue adds 5.

Burying, burning or dumping a body in the river frees its space. Removing organs doesn’t.

All corpses start at the bottom tier, which means Burial Certificate I every time. Later quests and a sermon buff lift the tier, and the certificate grade goes up accordingly.

During the donkey’s strike, Agatha delivers instead, leaving bodies at her house at the Crossroads on the usual schedule. After deliveries are restored you can tell her how many corpses you’d like. Choosing “Lots of corpses” lets the donkey bring as many as two per visit and keeps the chance up.

At the autopsy table

Bring a corpse to the Autopsy Table I, interact once to put it down and again to open it. You’ll see the organs, the pockets and the skulls on each part, and you can:

• take an organ out;
• put an organ in from your backpack, into an empty slot;
• pick the pockets, which can’t fail, needs no mastery and gives 1 blue tech point each time.

Unknown organs

Organs you don’t yet have the technology for show as unknown. You can’t operate on them or see their skulls.

Technology	Organs it reveals
Skin and Bones	Skin, bones
Skull and Teeth	Skull
Autopsy, Advanced	Heart, guts
Autopsy, Master	Brain

Outcomes

Organ removal and insertion are graded the way a starred dish is, and only a perfect result gives you what you wanted:

Grade	Taking an organ out	Putting one in
Perfect	It’s yours	It goes in
Fair	It’s destroyed	Nothing goes in and the organ is gone
Bad	A Surgeon’s Error takes its place	A Surgeon’s Error goes in instead

A Surgeon’s Error is worth −1 red and −1 white skull, permanently blocks that slot, and stops the body from ever being raised as a zombie.

Anatomy requirements

Your Anatomy mastery (Mastery) decides the outcome. Meet the organ’s requirement and every swing lands, so the result is always perfect. Fall short and each swing becomes a gamble, while perfection demands that all but one swing land; the odds collapse quickly.

Organ	Anatomy needed at quality 1 / 2 / 3
Skin	1 / 3 / 6
Bones	2 / 4 / 7
Skull	3 / 5 / 8

First-tier corpses carry quality 1 organs almost without exception, so the practical targets are Anatomy 1 for skin, 2 for bones, 3 for skulls. Higher-tier corpses have higher-quality organs with steeper requirements.

Odds when you're under the requirement

Worked out from the game files, without perks:

Operation	Anatomy	Perfect	Destroyed	Surgeon’s Error
Remove quality 1 bones (need 2)	1	4%	61%	35%
Remove quality 1 skull (need 3)	1	0%	21%	79%
Remove quality 1 skull (need 3)	2	10%	82%	8%