Zombies

Zombies are corpses you’ve brought back as workers. You carry one overhead just like a corpse, set it down at a workbench or other work spot, and it keeps working with no energy and no breaks. The drawback is speed: a zombie swings once every 10 seconds.

Raising one

What you need

Requirement	Details
Resurrection Table I	Unlocked by Reanimation.
A complete corpse	All six organs present. A missing organ or a Surgeon’s Error rules it out.
A collar, in your backpack	Its range must cover the corpse’s red skulls: Bronze up to 5, Golden up to 10, Steel up to 99. Your first Bronze collars are in the Resurrection Lab chest; later ones are made at the Jewelry Table.
Reanimation Liquid, in the room’s storage	Open storage in the same room as the table.

The procedure

1. Put the corpse on the table, open it, and select a collar.
2. Hit Prepare. Collar and liquid are consumed immediately, and the table is locked until the raising happens.
3. On Envy day, activate the Resurrection device. All prepared tables wake at once.
4. Collect your zombie from the table.

The device holds a single charge per week. It refills at the close of Lust day and empties when you use it. If you want several zombies in one week, build several tables and prepare every one before Envy (Time and the Week).

Skulls, collars and talents

• Each red skull is a talent slot. A zombie can learn as many talent upgrades as it has red skulls.
• White skulls are irrelevant. The tutorial implies fewer is better, but the game never reads them for zombies.
• The collar sets a ceiling that the zombie’s red skulls must stay under. A collar can only be replaced by one with a higher ceiling.

Fresh zombies know no talents. Upgrades are paid from the zombie’s own tech points, earned through its work; while it runs a bench, you receive none of them. Should you later remove organs and lower its red skulls, the newest upgrades switch off and the spent tech points aren’t returned.

Zombie mastery follows the same rules as yours, with the tool in its hand and its armour standing in for a toolbar (Mastery). Use the second interaction key on a zombie to change them.

Zombie workers

Bring a zombie to a workbench and pick Put Zombie. It works down the bench’s queue, which you fill in the normal way.

• No fetching. It uses only what’s already inside the bench. Missing materials become a request, fulfilled from the area’s storage by a zombie at a Zombie Supplier Station in the same area, or by you.
• Output stays in the bench until collected, and the zombie won’t start the next item until it is.
• Zero failures. Every swing succeeds, so star crafts such as dishes always get three stars.
• No energy, no tool wear.
• Silent stops. If its mastery is under a recipe’s requirement or it lacks the right tool, it just stops, with no message.

Zombie Assistant is the technology behind the supplier station.

The zombie limit

The limit equals the Resurrection Lab’s quality. Nothing in that room carries any quality, so it begins at 0, and just three things push it up:

Source	Bonus	Lasts
PR Machine run	+10, 20, 30, 50 or 80	Only while the run is going
Good fellow perk, a yellow-branch talent on the Keeper tree	+10	Permanently
A step in Gunter’s PR quests (below)	+5	Briefly

The count

Each zombie the Resurrection device raises adds 1 to your count, and the count only ever goes up. You can’t dispose of a zombie, and apart from one story quest that takes a zombie off your hands, nothing reduces it. Inside the Resurrection Lab the room name displays count and limit, “5/0” for example, though only after Gunter has first raised the subject of your zombies (below).

The penalty

Exceeding the limit never blocks a raising. The price is the Excessive zombies debuff, which trims most sermons by 0.1 to 0.9 Faith and 3 to 36 copper per parishioner. A handful are immune, including the Prayer for Protection, the Prayer for Imagination and the Prayer for Music.

When the game checks

The limit is only compared at specific moments:

• a PR Machine run starting or ending;
• the God of delusions buff from the Hypno Prayer expiring;
• the two PR quest steps that apply the +5.

At a check, the debuff is applied if the count exceeds the limit and removed if it doesn’t. Between checks nothing moves, so raising past the limit doesn’t trigger the debuff and learning Good fellow doesn’t clear it until the next check comes round.

God of delusions only neutralises a debuff you’ve already got. Starting the buff turns the debuff’s effect off, and it stays off after the buff ends even though the icon remains. It returns only if a later check removes the debuff and a check after that reapplies it. A debuff applied while the buff is active works immediately.

With a starting limit of 0, a single zombie already puts you over, unless a PR Machine run is active or Good fellow’s 10 is enough for all of them. Runs always finish at the end of Wrath day, so reload the machine every Gluttony day to keep under the limit.

How the story moves the count

• Albert’s pair join the count once his zombie tutorial finishes.
• Gunter’s three aren’t counted until Congregation Trouble begins. After your next sermon he tells you attendance fell because of your zombies, and the Resurrection Lab starts displaying the count. It’s all talk, though: that step adds 3 to the count without really applying the debuff.
• The charged Hypno-device you give Gunter (Congregation Trouble) lifts the limit by 5 and runs a check. After the following sermon the 5 is removed and another check runs. You’ll typically have 5 or more zombies by then, so this is the most likely moment the debuff first lands. That same sermon is when Gunter installs the PR Machine.
• The 8-skull zombie handed to Albert in Personal Zombie Zone is subtracted from the count, the only zombie that ever is.

Starting zombies

The Plague Doctor simply gives you two zombies. In the Resurrection Lab chest are three Reanimation Liquids and three Bronze Zombie Collars, enough for every raising until you can produce more. Collars come with Reanimation, crafted at the Jewelry Table; the liquid is an alchemy formula from Reanimation Liquid, and town alchemists sell it too.