Video walkthrough · captions checked · spoilers through the demo finale
Graveyard Keeper 2: the best way to start your adventure
This walkthrough is built around 16 Bit Bear's start-adventure video: get five things right early — placement, zombies, food, rating and tech order — and the demo opens up. Every claim carries its timestamp; item and tech names were cross-checked against the game's own files. Demo progress carries into the full game (0:20 in the video).
The game never says this outright: workstations and zombie supply stations cannot be relocated. You demolish the object and craft it again elsewhere, recovering part of the materials. Some objects are also locked to one rotation.
So think for ten seconds before you place anything — the closer a supply station sits to its bench, the shorter the zombie’s delivery loop (the video returns to this later).
The demo caps you at 5 zombies: 2 arrive through the story, then unlocking the morgue’s lower room and the Resurrection Table I from the tech tree lets you raise 3 more. The video is explicit that you get exactly 3 sets of reanimation supplies and cannot craft more inside the demo.
Resurrection has a calendar gate: it only works on a green day (the lightning day). Prep the body on the table, attach a collar, pour in the Reanimation Liquid, and interact — your new worker sits up.
One body, two uses: a candidate worker wants as many red skulls as possible — the red count is exactly the number of perk slots (the video shows 3 red = 3 perks). A body headed for a grave wants white skulls and every red one removed.
Watch the “+red” markers during autopsy: pulling a red-carrying organ lowers the red count. Decide the body’s purpose before you cut.
Recipes list a required tool level (boards ask for level 1). If the zombie’s matching mastery is lower, a queued order never starts. Open Inspect → Character and put the tool in its hand; the work begins once the level matches.
The video steps in the same trap for you: the woodworking icon is an axe, not the hammer it resembles — read the skill name, not the icon. Meanwhile the supply-station zombie shuttles between chests and resource piles, feeding every queued bench: two zombies run a fully automatic line.
You don’t need fancy food: buy Wheat seed from the vendor, start your first farm, and rush the mill plus the kitchenette. Bread solves energy for the whole demo (the video idles on 44 bread, topping up when passing by).
To put a zombie on cooking: drop flour and water into its supply chest and queue at the bench; it keeps producing as long as you keep the fire fed with wood. A bronze shovel gives 2 mastery — exactly enough for both the flour and the dough recipes.
The rule as demonstrated: every white skull earns one rating point, but every red skull consumes one first — clean the reds in autopsy before decorations do anything. Craft as many wreaths as your white skulls can score, and not more.
The video’s showcase graveyard sits at 24 while the demo only asks for 10 — there is no reason to bury every body or gold-plate every grave.
Bodies sort into three streams: good white skulls go to graves, good red skulls go to zombie duty, and everything in between goes into the Crematorium I — returning Ash and Salt, both crafting materials.
With that triage, every body has a home and the autopsy table stops being a dilemma: grave, job, or fire.
Cremation yields Ash and Salt
Good white → grave, good red → zombie, rest → fire
The tech-tree strategy: push quests until something craftable blocks you, then unlock the workstation that clears it. Every point lands on a roadblock instead of a shelf.
One exception: Reinforced plank and Simple barricades can wait until the very end — the demo closes with the zombie-defence mission that needs them. And the video’s reassurance stands: a wrong pick cannot brick your save.
Inspiration nodes marked with the yellow icon cost Faith. Faith has one source: the church. Slot a Prayer for Faith, gather 10 Town Gratitude thumbs-up, and preach on a red day for faith plus money in one go.
Sermons aren’t daily: green days raise zombies, red days run sermons, and missing one costs an in-game week — no penalty beyond the wait. Early on, an extra mastery point from the inspiration tree unlocks higher-level crafts sooner.
Faith comes only from sermons
10 gratitude required to preach
Red day = sermon, green day = zombies
Where this comes from
16 Bit Bear — Graveyard Keeper 2: The Best Way to Start Your Adventure!
The single source video (published 2026-09-17). Its English captions were read in full on 2026-09-20 (530 cues) and checked chapter by chapter; names were then names follow the game’s own data — Reanimation Liquid, Bronze Zombie Collar, Resurrection Table I, Crematorium I, Faith, Town Gratitude and the wheat chain all use the game's own strings.
Limits: the captions are YouTube auto-captions, so proper nouns can be mistranscribed — every name on this page was checked against the game’s strings. “Green day / red day” is the video’s own phrasing; the demo build’s in-game strings carry no day names, so the video’s wording is kept. The video covers the demo build (1.002.4); the full release (2026-09-22) may change values.