Graveyard Keeper 2 Beginner Guide

Quick answer: The opening is four fixed chapters (prison → empty town → town-square defence → your new base). Then: bury your first body, show Herbert the certificate, and start the quest chain that ends at the port. Buy the cheap early techs first, keep a hammer on hand for grave work, and sleep to save — it's the only save.

What you start with

Your inventory: Rusty Pickaxe, Rusty Axe, 100 copper (100 copper = 1 silver). The graveyard chest holds a Rusty Shovel, a Rusty Hammer and 3 Wooden Signs; the yard chest has 2 Boards, 1 Beer and 100 Water; the house chests hold 8 Bread and 5 Berries.

The first hour

Four fixed chapters: the Inquisition prison, the empty town, the defence of the town square, and the retreat to the abandoned Inquisitor base that becomes your home. The defence cannot be lost — at low health damage stops and the retreat starts automatically.
Hotbar checks: story hand-ins check your hotbar, not your backpack. The pickaxe must be on the hotbar in the prison; armour and a sword before leaving Jack's workshop.
First sleep: sleeping at home opens the technology tree, grants "The Concept of Wood" plus a Sawhorse for free — and saves your game.

Your first burial (the step everyone gets stuck on)

Put the body on Autopsy Table I. Pick a pocket before you close the window — it can't fail and gives a blue tech point.
Before burying, remove Fat and Blood from the body's pockets (each carries 1 red skull). Leave Flesh in (1 white skull).
Carry the body to the graveyard, place an Empty Grave, dig it, lay the body in, fill with soil, attach a Wooden Sign.
Place the tombstone with a hammer equipped (top slot of the grave menu). The full fix is on the grave marker troubleshooting page.

Watch out: setting the first body down outside the tutorial's accepted area can soft-lock the sign prompt (open bug — reload an earlier save). An open pit or unfilled grave costs 3 graveyard quality, so bury before the next donkey delivery.

Which technologies to buy first

A sensible cheap-first order: Bronze Works (5 red) → Gardening (5 green) → Chopping (8 red) → Woodworking I (10 red) → The Concept of Stone (15 red), then push toward Pottery, Brick Making and Bronze Details. Two mastery notes matter early: the first Building talent node (to craft wood wedges and pieces of stone) and the first Smithing node (Bronze Details needs Smithing 2). Spend your first Anatomy point on "Anatomy mastery +1" — organ removal is impossible at Anatomy 0. Full details on the technology page.

The five systems — all live in the full game

The opening does not tease these, it hands them to you: graveyard management, production automation, the zombie workforce (first two zombies are free via the Plague Doctor's Dream Dust chain), town rebuilding and combat. All five are officially confirmed systems, not demo-only slices.

Farming: build a Garden Bed, unlock 1 Farming mastery via Inspiration tasks, hold F to till, E to open the plot menu, pick Wheat Seeds, hold F to plant.

Tips that save hours

Sleep = save. The bed refuses sleep at full energy — spend 1 energy first. There is no manual save.
Placed objects can't be moved. Dismantling refunds about half the materials. Build the Hardening Bucket beside the anvil the first time.
Trees regrow (after you dig out stumps) but rocks and dead bushes never respawn — and nothing regrows inside build zones.
Performance: players who hit stutter in the demo cleared it at low/lowest settings; ultrawide was unsupported in the demo, and its retail status is TBD.
Dresser With Mirror (appearance) = 4 Wooden Planks, 2 Bronze Details, 2 Glass behind the "Suit Up!" tech — from a single source and still unverified post-launch.

Playing from the demo save

The demo ran about 3–4 hours (up to reaching The Town) and demo progress was officially confirmed to carry into the full game — so if you played the demo, you can continue rather than restarting.

Two demo-era walls that this guide's steps were written around: Repair the Bridge needed Polished Bronze that the demo did not contain, and the demo's scarce research budget punished unplanned studying.

TBD: whether both are now fully completable in the retail build. Neither has a post-launch source we can cite, so we are not claiming they are fixed. The walkthrough below still marks every count that came from demo data.

Next: Main story walkthrough · Energy & Tired · Fishing · Technology & early tech order

Sources: post-launch guides (Into Indie Games, tposegaming, allthings.how, bonus-action.com), demo build data (graveyardkeeper2.io), TheGamesWatch, ProdigyGamers, GamesHorizon, XboxPlay, GameRant and Steam discussion threads. Steps that still rest on demo data are labelled inline; anything unverified is marked TBD rather than filled in.