How to Improve Corpse Quality in Graveyard Keeper

Autopsy is one of the first mechanics players will learn in Graveyard Keeper. As the new keeper of a rundown graveyard, dealing with dead bodies quickly becomes part of your daily routine, and performing autopsies is a big part of that.

Your introduction to autopsy comes from your talking skull companion (which pretty much tells you what kind of game this is). He explains the basics, but don’t be fooled. Autopsies get a lot deeper as you keep playing. If you want to manage your graveyard properly and improve body quality, you will need to understand how this system really works. Keep reading to learn more about autopsy, corpse rating, and skull values in Graveyard Keeper.

What is Autopsy in Graveyard Keeper?

An autopsy is where you inspect a corpse and remove or replace its body parts. Players will be doing this in the morgue, and the main goal is simple. Make the body as good as possible before burying it so your graveyard rating improves.

Each corpse has a mix of red and white skulls:

• Red skulls represent the bad things the person did in life, and lower the Grave's Score.
• White skulls represent the good and increase the Grave's Score.
• These skulls decide the final quality of the grave.

During an autopsy, your job is to remove parts that add red skulls and keep parts that give you white skulls. In the early game, Bishop tasks you with achieving the graveyard rating of five. So the more white skulls you stack on a body, the faster you will improve your graveyard and achieve that goal.

How to Perform an Autopsy in Graveyard Keeper

Everything begins when the donkey drops off a fresh corpse at the morgue. As soon as it arrives, the talking skull tells you to get to work. This is where you will notice a percentage above the body. That number shows how fresh the corpse is.

A body starts at 100 percent freshness, but it does not stay that way for long. Bodies decay quickly. Once it drops to 90 percent, one of the white skulls turns green. That is bad news because green skulls lower the overall quality of the corpse. This keeps happening every time the freshness drops by 10%.

The first thing you should do is move the body to the morgue as fast as possible. The less time it spends lying around, the better condition it will stay in.

Later in the game, keepers can use chemicals to remove green skulls. But early on, you will not have access to those. That means your best option is to work fast and keep the body as fresh as you can.

Once players place the body on the autopsy table, they can begin the autopsy by interacting with it. Early on, your options are very limited, and you’ll only be able to remove flesh. As you progress, this opens up quite a bit.

By unlocking Softspares and Hardspares, you can start extracting more parts like blood, fat, and skin. These upgrades are easy to get and make a big difference in how much control you have during an autopsy.

To unlock them, players will need to open the menu and go to the Technologies tab. From there, you can spend your points to gain access to more advanced procedures.

Body Parts and Their Skull Values in Graveyard Keeper

Every body part you remove during an autopsy affects the skull count in some way. Since your goal is to get as many white skulls as possible, knowing what to remove and what to leave becomes really important. Here’s the skull value of each body part in Graveyard Keeper:

Most body parts have fixed values, but the brain, heart, and intestines work differently. These three are random. When you remove them, they can give you white skulls, red skulls, or even a mix of both. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you make the body worse.

Because of that, messing with these organs early on is a gamble. Most players avoid touching them unless they really have to. Later in the game, you can unlock the Cultist perk. It allows you to see the exact skull value of each organ before removing it, so you are no longer guessing and can make much better decisions during autopsies.

While performing an autopsy, there’s always a chance your character makes a Surgeon’s Mistake. It can happen randomly when removing a body part. When it happens, you lose one white skull and gain a red skull instead, which lowers the body’s quality. Thankfully, you can reduce the chances of this happening.

Unlocking the Butcher’s perk makes mistakes less likely when working on Hardspares and Softspares like blood, skin, flesh, fat, bones, and the skull. On the other hand, the Surgeon’s perk helps when dealing with the important organs like the heart, brain, and intestines.

Lastly, you can also reinsert a body part if you’re not satisfied with the score. For that, click on the ‘plus’ icon in the autopsy menu. It will restore that part and undo its effect on the skull count.

Burying a Body in Graveyard Keeper

Once you are done with the autopsy, it’s time to deal with the body. The most common option is to bury it in your graveyard. To do that, go to the graveyard and interact with the Blueprint Desk. Place a gravesite, dig it up, and then put the body inside.

After that, use your shovel to fill the grave and cover it with dirt. That’s it, the burial is complete. Each time players bury a corpse, they will receive a Burial Certificate, which they can sell to Horadric.

If the body is in bad condition or you are not happy with its skull score, you still have other options. You can bury it anyway, but it will lower your graveyard rating. A better option is cremation. Players can burn the body at the crematorium located south of the morgue. This way, you still get useful materials like salt and ash, along with the Burial Certificate.

There’s also a third option, which is throwing the body into the river. It gets rid of the corpse instantly, but you will not receive a Burial Certificate. The first time you do this, your skull friend will spawn and call you out for it, but there are no real consequences for that.

If a low-quality corpse is already buried in your graveyard, you’re not stuck with it forever. You can still fix things by exhuming it and dealing with it properly. To do this, Graveyard Keepers will need Exhumation Permission, which can be bought from Royal Services. Once you have it, you can remove old bodies from existing graves.

After exhuming a corpse, you can perform an autopsy on it or choose to get rid of it completely. It’s not the most pleasant job, but that is part of managing a graveyard in Graveyard Keeper. If you decide to cremate the body or bury it again after improving it, you will still receive a Burial Certificate, just like with a normal corpse.