Technology

The tech tree is where you unlock new workbenches, buildings and recipes. It is a page of your character window with six tabs: Building, Metallurgy, Farming, Theology, Anatomy and Cooking. Technologies are paid for with tech points in three colours, the small coloured orbs that burst out of the things you chop, build, craft and study.

The game’s tutorial describes the colours like this: red is your skill with your hands and materials, green your knowledge of nature, and blue your spiritual knowledge.

Opening the tree

The tree opens the first time you wake up at home, together with the Building, Metallurgy and Farming tabs, and you get The Concept of Wood for free. The Anatomy tab opens when you first lay a body on the autopsy table. The Cooking tab is always open, but its technologies are hidden and are given to you by events rather than bought.

The Theology tab opens when you meet the Nun.

Buying a technology

• A technology can be bought once all the technologies it hangs from are bought.
• Its price is shown on the node; click it to see what it unlocks and press Unlock.
• Nodes with a character’s portrait are reputation technologies. They are free and unlock by themselves when your reputation is high enough, but only when you open the tree (see Reputation).
• A “?” block is a technology that has not shown itself yet. 37 of them start hidden, each with its own condition: a quest, a recipe you finish, or a place you reach.

Where tech points come from

Source	Colours	Notes
Chopping, mining, clearing junk, harvesting	Mostly green in the wild, red for stone and junk	Trees and bushes give 1 or 2; crops 2 to 12
Finishing a workbench you are building	Red, some blue	1 to 10
Crafting	Depends on the bench	Usually 1 to 3 per item. The crafting window does not show it
Autopsy	Red and blue	Removing an organ gives 1 red and 1 to 3 blue; picking a pocket 1 blue
Studying an item	Any	10 to 150 at once, but each item only once (see the Study Table)
Techbooks, which are items	One colour	25 or 50 when used

A workbench that runs on its own keeps the tech points it earns until you collect what it made. At a bench worked by a zombie, the tech points go to the zombie, not to you.

Tech points on the ground never disappear, and when you go to sleep, every tech point left lying anywhere in the world is collected for you. You can hold at most 999 of each colour; any more are lost.

What the tree costs

The tree holds 236 technologies: 226 you buy and 10 free reputation nodes. Buying every one costs 11,157 red, 5,129 green and 4,132 blue, and 124 of them want blue at all. The story path through the first fifteen chapters is a small corner of that, about 288 red and 65 green with no blue (see the walkthrough for the list); early blue is only spent on the autopsy technologies, the first church furniture and resurrection.

Early on, the cheapest useful technologies are Bronze Works (5 red), Gardening (5 green), Chopping (8 red), Woodworking I (10 red) and The Concept of Stone (15 red). Almost every step of the opening needs Bronze Detail, which sits behind three Metallurgy technologies costing 45 red together: Bronze Works, Bronze Melting and Bronze Craft.