Body Parts

Every corpse arrives with six organs (skin, bones, skull, heart, brain and guts), one to four items in its pockets, and a Burial Certificate. Each organ and pocket item carries red skulls and white skulls, and the corpse’s skulls are simply their total. On the autopsy table you can take things out or put them in to change those skulls before you bury the body. Organs you remove cleanly are yours to keep.

For a grave you want few red skulls and many white ones. For a zombie it is the other way round.

Where corpses come from

After Certificate, Please the donkey starts delivering bodies at 13:12 on Gluttony, Lust and Pride days (see Time and the Week). Until the morgue door is repaired, it leaves them outside at the Corpse Dumping Point. In the demo the door cannot be repaired, so this is where every body arrives; see The Morgue.

Whether the donkey actually brings one depends on two things:

• Room in the morgue. The morgue holds as many unhandled bodies as its quality: the Autopsy Table I counts 1, each Corpse Pallet I 1 and a Crematorium I 1. At the start only the autopsy table is there, so the morgue holds one body. When it is full, the donkey does not come.
• A delivery chance. It starts at 100%. Every delivery lowers it by 15 points, every miss raises it by 50, and every visit skipped because the morgue was full raises it by 5.

A body stops counting toward the limit once you bury it, burn it or throw it in the river. Taking organs out does not free the space.

In the demo every corpse is of the lowest tier, so its certificate is always a Burial Certificate I.

The autopsy table

Carry a corpse to the Autopsy Table I and interact to lay it down, then interact again to open it. The window shows the organs, the pockets and each part’s skulls. You can:

• Remove an organ.
• Put an organ in an empty slot, from your backpack.
• Pick the pockets. This always works, needs no mastery and gives 1 blue tech point each time.

An organ slot shows as unknown until you learn the technology for that organ. You cannot touch an unknown organ or see its skulls.

Organ	Technology
Skin, bones	Skin and Bones
Skull	Skull and Teeth
Heart, brain, guts	None in the demo

How an operation turns out

Removing and inserting organs are graded, like a dish with stars. Only a perfect result does what you wanted:

Result	Removing an organ	Putting an organ in
Perfect	You get the organ	The organ goes in
Fair	The organ is destroyed	Nothing goes in; the organ is lost
Bad	The organ is replaced by a Surgeon’s Error	A Surgeon’s Error goes in instead

A Surgeon’s Error counts as −1 red and −1 white skull, and that slot can never be used again. A body with one cannot be raised as a zombie.

The result depends on your Anatomy mastery (see Mastery). At or above the organ’s requirement every swing succeeds and the result is always perfect. Below it, each swing only has a chance to succeed, and a perfect result needs all but one swing to succeed, so it becomes unlikely very quickly.

Organ	Requirement (quality 1 / 2 / 3)
Skin	1 / 3 / 6
Bones	2 / 4 / 7
Skull	3 / 5 / 8

Almost every organ in a demo corpse is of quality 1, so you need Anatomy 1 for skin, 2 for bones and 3 for skulls.

Chance of a perfect removal below the requirement

Calculated from the game files, with no perks:

Removing	Anatomy	Perfect	Destroyed	Surgeon’s Error
Bones, quality 1 (needs 2)	1	4%	61%	35%
Skull, quality 1 (needs 3)	1	0%	21%	79%
Skull, quality 1 (needs 3)	2	10%	82%	8%