Zombies

A zombie is a corpse you have brought back to work for you. You carry it over your head like a corpse and put it down at a workbench or another work spot, and it works there without energy or rest. Zombies are slow, though: one swing every 10 seconds.

Raising a zombie

You need:

• A Resurrection Table I, from the technology Reanimation.
• A corpse with all six organs. A corpse with a missing organ or a Surgeon’s Error cannot be raised.
• A zombie collar in your backpack whose range covers the corpse’s red skulls: Bronze up to 5, Golden up to 10, Steel up to 99. In the demo there are only a few Bronze collars: no collar can be made or bought there.
• A Reanimation Liquid in open storage in the same room.

Then:

1. Lay the corpse on the table, open it and choose a collar.
2. Press Prepare. The collar and the liquid are used up now, and the table stays locked until the zombie is raised.
3. On Envy day, use the Resurrection device. Every prepared table comes to life at the same time.
4. Pick the zombie up from the table.

The device only has power once a week: it recharges at the end of Lust day and using it drains it. To raise several zombies in one week, build several tables and prepare them all before Envy day (see Time and the Week).

Skulls, collars and talents

• Red skulls are talent slots. A zombie can learn one talent upgrade for each red skull it has.
• White skulls do nothing for a zombie. The tutorial says fewer white skulls is better, but nothing in the game reads them.
• The collar is a limit: a zombie’s red skulls must stay within its collar’s range. You can only swap a collar for one with a higher limit.

A new zombie starts with no talents. Its upgrades are bought with the zombie’s own tech points, which it earns from the work it does; while a zombie works a bench, those tech points never reach you. If you later take organs out and its red skulls drop, its most recent upgrades switch off, and you do not get the tech points back.

A zombie’s mastery works like yours, except that its “toolbar” is the tool in its hand and its armour (see Mastery). Open a zombie with the second interaction key to change these.

Zombies at a workbench

Carry a zombie to a workbench and choose Put Zombie. It works through the bench’s queue, which you set up as usual.

• It does not fetch materials. It only uses what is already in the bench. For anything missing it posts a request, which a zombie at a Zombie Supplier Station in the same area fulfils from the area’s storage. You can also hand things over yourself.
• What it makes waits in the bench until someone collects it, and it does not start the next item until then.
• It never fails. Every swing counts as a success, so dishes and other star crafts always come out with three stars.
• It uses no energy, and its tools never wear out.
• If its mastery is below a recipe’s requirement, or it lacks the right tool, it stops without any message.

The supplier station comes from the technology Zombie Assistant.