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.

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).
• In the demo, technologies from the full game are drawn as locked “?” blocks. You cannot open or buy them.

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.

The tree in the demo

The demo has 51 technologies. Buying all of them costs 552 red, 254 green and 22 blue. The story path through the demo needs about 288 red and 65 green, and no blue at all (see the walkthrough for the list). 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 demo’s story needs Bronze Detail, which sits behind three Metallurgy technologies costing 45 red together: Bronze Works, Bronze Melting and the second Bronze Works.