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. The first Bronze collars come from the Resurrection Lab chest; after those, you make them at the Jewelry Table.
• 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.

The zombie limit

Your zombie limit is the quality of the Resurrection Lab. Nothing in that room has any quality, so the limit starts at 0. Only three things raise it:

• The PR Machine: +10, 20, 30, 50 or 80 while a run is going. When the run ends, the bonus goes away.
• The Good fellow perk: +10, for good. It is a talent on the yellow branch of the Keeper tree.
• A quest step: +5 for a short while in Gunter’s PR quests (below).

Every zombie raised at the Resurrection device adds 1 to your zombie count. The count never goes down. There is no way to get rid of a zombie, and nothing lowers the count except one story quest that takes a zombie away. While you are in the Resurrection Lab, the room’s name shows the count and the limit, for example “5/0”, but only once Gunter has first brought up your zombies (below).

Going over the limit never stops you raising more. What it costs you is the Excessive zombies debuff: most sermons bring in 0.1 to 0.9 less Faith and 3 to 36 less copper per parishioner. A few sermons are not affected, among them the Prayer for Protection, the Prayer for Imagination and the Prayer for Music.

The game only checks the limit at certain moments:

• when a PR Machine run starts or ends;
• when the God of delusions buff from the Hypno Prayer ends;
• at the two PR quest steps with the +5.

When it checks, the debuff goes on if your count is above the limit and comes off if it is not. At any other time nothing changes. Raising a zombie over the limit does not bring the debuff on, and learning Good fellow does not take it off, until the next check.

God of delusions only helps with a debuff you already have. When the buff starts, it switches off the debuff’s effect. That effect stays off even after the buff ends and the debuff icon is still showing. It only comes back if the debuff is taken off at a check and put on again at a later one. If the debuff is put on while the buff is running, it takes effect right away.

Because the limit starts at 0, any zombie at all puts you over it, unless the PR Machine is running or Good fellow’s 10 covers them all. A run always ends at the end of Wrath day, so load the machine again on the next Gluttony day to stay under the limit.

The count in the story

• Albert’s two zombies count once his zombie tutorial is over.
• Gunter’s three zombies are only counted when Congregation Trouble starts. After your next sermon he tells you that attendance has dropped because of your zombies, and from then on the Resurrection Lab shows the count. His story is only talk, though. That step adds 3 to the count, but it does not actually give you the debuff.
• Handing Gunter the charged Hypno-device (Congregation Trouble) raises the limit by 5 and checks it. After your next sermon, the 5 is taken away and the limit is checked again. By then you usually have 5 or more zombies, so this is when the debuff most likely first appears. The same sermon is when he sets up the PR Machine.
• The 8-skull zombie you give Albert in Personal Zombie Zone comes off the count. It is the only one that ever does.

Your first zombies

The Plague Doctor gives you two zombies outright. The chest in the Resurrection Lab holds three Reanimation Liquids and three Bronze Zombie Collars, which is every raising you can do until you can make more: collars come with Reanimation at the Jewelry Table, and the liquid is an alchemy formula from Reanimation Liquid, which town alchemists also sell.