Technology
New workbenches, buildings and recipes come from the tech tree, a page in the character window split into six tabs: Building, Metallurgy, Farming, Theology, Anatomy and Cooking. You pay with tech points, little coloured orbs in three colours that pop out of whatever you chop, build, craft or study.
In the tutorial’s words, red stands for skill with your hands and with materials, green for knowledge of nature, and blue for spiritual knowledge.
When each tab opens
| Tab | Opens |
|---|---|
| Building, Metallurgy, Farming | The first time you wake up at home, along with the tree itself; The Concept of Wood comes free |
| Anatomy | The first time you put a body on the autopsy table |
| Cooking | Always open, but its technologies are hidden and granted by events, not purchased |
Theology unlocks once you meet the Nun.
Unlocking technologies
- Prerequisites: you need every technology a node hangs from before you can buy it.
- Buying: the cost is printed on the node. Click it to see what it gives, then press Unlock.
- Portrait nodes are reputation technologies. They cost nothing and unlock automatically once your reputation is high enough, but only at the moment you open the tree (Reputation has more).
- “?” blocks are technologies not yet revealed. 37 begin hidden, each with a condition of its own: a quest, a finished recipe or a place you visit.
Earning tech points
| Activity | Colour | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Chopping, mining, clearing junk, harvesting | Green mostly, from nature; red from stone and junk | 1 or 2 per tree or bush; 2 to 12 per crop |
| Completing a workbench under construction | Red, sometimes blue | 1 to 10 |
| Crafting | Varies by bench | Typically 1 to 3 per item, not shown in the crafting window |
| Autopsy | Red and blue | 1 red plus 1 to 3 blue per organ removed; 1 blue per pocket picked |
| Studying an item | Any | 10 to 150 in one go, once per item (see the Study Table) |
| Using a Techbooks item | Single colour | 25 or 50 |
Self-running workbenches hold on to their tech points until you collect the output. When a zombie runs a bench, the zombie gets the tech points instead of you.
Orbs lying on the ground stay put forever, and going to sleep sweeps up every one of them, wherever it is in the world. Each colour is capped at 999; anything beyond that is wasted.
Total cost
There are 236 technologies in the tree, 226 for sale and 10 free reputation nodes. The full tree comes to 11,157 red, 5,129 green and 4,132 blue, and 124 technologies have some blue in their price. The main story up to chapter fifteen needs only a sliver of that, roughly 288 red and 65 green, no blue (the walkthrough lists them). Early on, blue goes only on the autopsy technologies, the first church furniture and resurrection.
Cheap early picks
| Technology | Cost |
|---|---|
| Bronze Works | 5 red |
| Gardening | 5 green |
| Chopping | 8 red |
| Woodworking I | 10 red |
| The Concept of Stone | 15 red |
Most of the opening depends on Bronze Detail, which is three Metallurgy technologies deep: Bronze Works, Bronze Melting and Bronze Craft, 45 red altogether.
Notes
- Nodes don’t show everything they unlock. Chopping also teaches a firewood recipe, Bronze Melting bronze nails, Simple Barricades three battle barricades, and Skin and Bones and Skull and Teeth the organs in their names.
- Don’t mix up Bronze Works and Bronze Craft. Bronze Works (5 red) is the Metallurgy root and gives the anvil. Bronze Craft (30 red) follows Bronze Melting and gives the Bronze Detail.
- Failed dishes still pay tech points, because the reward is given before the failure check.
- Some technologies are gifts for doing things. Eating raw flesh, harvesting a new crop, fixing the kitchen table or baking your first pie each grants a Cooking technology on the spot, with a message. 37 nodes in the tree come to you like this instead of through purchase.
- The tutorial has the Study Table in the wrong place. It says your first blue tech point comes from the Study Table in the church basement; the table is actually in the tower laboratory.