In Graveyard Keeper, you are an unlucky victim of a hit-and-run transported to a new world, given the tasks of embalming, burying, and cremating corpses brought to you by a talking donkey. Throughout it all, you must run a church, complete quests, and barge through a dungeon in an attempt to actually make a profit from your grim deeds.
Due to the nature of your work, the limbs and organs of the recently deceased are naught but a resource to be used for your benefit, having many applications throughout your tenure; body parts are the key to keeping your Graveyard running.
9 Improving Graveyard Rating
Every body that you try to put into a grave has a rating tied to it based on the parts it's made of, changing the overall rating of your graveyard once laid to rest. But you don't have to accept each body and its flaws: you can perform surgery to place positive body parts into corpses you plan to bury.
This is extremely important because your overall Graveyard Rating affects the income you receive from your sermons. If you plan on getting any sort of cash during your reign over the graveyard, improving your corpses should be a frequent endeavor.
8 Building Zombies
Corpses don't just have to lay dead – instead, you can use the dark arts to raise them and take a bit of the workload off of you. The efficiency of a zombie worker is tied directly to the number of positive body part stats they bear, meaning that if you have good enough limbs to spare, you can have your graveyard working overtime.
What's even better is that negative body parts have no effect on the value of your zombies, giving bad parts inherent value as fodder when trying to get a workforce in the early game.
7 Upgrading Zombies
If you're unhappy with the working speed of the zombies you've built, you don't need to toss them into the river quite yet– if you've found newer, shinier body parts, you can apply them to your most loyal undead workers to boost their speed.
This also means that if you need a particular job done quickly, you can pull the best parts out of all your zombies and apply them to the one doing that work temporarily. Being able to upgrade individual workers like this ensures you'll have an easy time managing things as you need more jobs done.
6 Reducing Waste From A Bad Corpse
It's inevitable that you're going to find a downright terrible corpse over the course of your adventure, which is particularly unfortunate when you don't have any good parts in reserve to at least improve it for grave sites. In these situations, you're going to have to either toss it or burn it – so, why not tack on a few more bad parts to reduce waste?
If you end up choosing to throw a corpse into the river, you don't get any value at all, so you can at least put parts with negative traits on it to save storage space for parts that'll actually bring value to your zombies and corpses.
5 Completing Quests
Many body parts will end up being required for completing certain quests over the course of the game, especially in the case of the Inquisitor. Once you become good friends with him, you'll be required to get him a Dark Brain, Dark Heart, and Dark Intestines to progress.
In another case, Blood is a necessary component of completing the Vampire questline. You'll never know which quests might ask you for specific organs and limbs, so it's worth keeping a decent amount on hand to get the wonderful rewards when such quests come up.
4 Researching For Techpoints
Though you can only do it once per body part, you can take limbs and organs to the Study Table in order to get a bounty of techpoints. Given how important techpoints are when it comes to progressing through the game's tech trees, being able to get some free points just by throwing in a few cheap body parts great.
Though you might think this would be all done after the first corpse you open up, certain organs like the Dark Brain, Heart, and Intestines actually come later and can provide some blue techpoints deeper into the game.
3 Crafting
There's a myriad of items that you absolutely need throughout your time maintaining your graveyard, and many of them require body parts as a crucial ingredient when crafted. One of the most useful craftable items is candles, which are made primarily out of collected fat.
Not every body part is useful in crafting, so you should double-check if a part is worth keeping before you decide to chuck it out with a dud corpse. Quality also has no effect on crafting, so negative parts like blood and fat might serve better as a product than in a body.
2 Alchemizing
Alchemy is an important process for producing fertilizer, injections, and potions, all of which improve your general quality of life when trying to perform tasks day-to-day. Being a darker art, some of the primary ingredients used in alchemy are body parts.
If you want to make any injections for your corpses (which you do if you want a high-quality graveyard), you have no choice but to spend body parts. Life Extract is one of the most important components for corpse-improving injections and is made from human hearts.
1 Cooking
It's a bit nasty, but one of the best ways to get meat in the game is by extracting and then preparing flesh from corpses. Since Burgers are one of the easiest ways to get the Steady Hand buff when trying to reduce the frequency of error during surgery, getting meat is critical to improving your overall efficiency.
Even beyond Burgers, Packages of Meat can be sold for a fantastic profit in the early game, giving you the means to make money beyond your sermon income.