Fortified cemetery edge from the official Steam stills.
You still manage your own medieval graveyard. Steam's about text opens the sequel on burying, harvesting, and expanding that cemetery for profit. The land gives flora and fauna; the dead give remains; both feed the machinery that later pages treat as zombie labour. Quality is the public language for whether the place looks like a business rather than a pit. Two Steam achievements print the only Steam numbers: True Graveyard Keeper at 50 burials, Home Sweet Tomb at cemetery quality 200.
Bury, harvest, expand
The original loop is intact: bodies arrive, you process them, and the cemetery grows. Steam tells you to harvest flora, fauna, and human remains so production has input. That sentence is why the graveyard page and the automation page share a hinge without sharing a screenshot. Remains are not flavour text; they are the feedstock that working zombies will spend once machinery exists.
Expanding the graveyard is the profit language in the store blurb. There is no official tile-by-tile map in Steam text, so Steam does not list plot sizes or decoration prices. What you can plan around is sequence: make the yard function, then decorate and bury until the public quality and burial marks move. The 14 September demo already included graveyard-digging and decorating in official news copy, so the first session is not a locked tutorial island.
Sermons, concerts, and elections happen elsewhere. The cemetery is the soil layer: graves, harvest nodes, and the path that Steam stills show as benches, trees, and a work yard. If a decoration does not change quality, it is still allowed. Steam never said every object is a quality node, but a decoration alone will not move Home Sweet Tomb.
The two public quality marks
True Graveyard Keeper awards when you have buried 50 corpses. Home Sweet Tomb awards when cemetery quality reaches 200. Steam prints those descriptions on the community achievements page with unique icons. They are not a hidden formula and they are not a complete quality table. Everything between a first burial and those two marks is player-facing work the stores do not quantify.
Treat 50 burials as a volume check and 200 quality as a presentation check. You can fail one while chasing the other if you bury without decorating, or decorate without processing the dead. The achievement register lists both under the graveyard category so you can filter them without opening a dead-end entity page. This guide only needs the numbers and the fact that Steam has not published a quality equation.
Keep the two marks in mind when you decide whether to spend a night decorating or processing a new cart of bodies. The register lists both rows under the graveyard filter, with unlock percents that sat well under one percent in the 24 September 2026 Steam snapshot. Those percents will move; the 50 and 200 thresholds will not.
A first-session cemetery checklist
If you carried a demo save, land in 1.0 before tearing the yard apart. Official demo news said the save carries over; the launch-day hotfix restored missing pre-order sauna and inquisitor outfit content in some existing saves, which matters if you pre-ordered and then opened the demo. Check those bonuses on the demo page before you assume a decoration is missing because of cemetery quality.
Then run the three boxes below. They are the only session steps on the checklist: bury, harvest, and push quality. Sermons sit on the faith achievements (Words of Faith, Shepherd of Souls, Stroke of Genius) and belong to the inquisitor's congregation more than to soil. Cooking, farming, trees, and fish have their own production marks on the achievement register. Use this checklist as a cemetery start, not as a 100 percent plan.
Skip any checklist item that your demo save already finished. The boxes are stored in this browser so you can tick them across visits without making a Steam overlay note. They are not achievements and they do not unlock anything; they exist so the first hour has a cemetery sequence instead of a blank yard.
When the yard feeds the rest of the map
Cemetery output is how zombie-based automation gets a workforce. Working zombies are the labour side of the undead split; biting zombies are the combat side. You do not need a published recipe table to see the hinge: remains and harvests go into machinery, machinery scales the graveyard, and the scaled graveyard funds The Town.
The Town restoration loop still wants a functioning cemetery. Town orders and merchant stalls are a different page because Steam wrote them as a street, not as extra graves. Keep this route for soil, burials, and quality. When you are ready to spend that output, open automation, then Restore The Town, then the undead army if biting zombies hold a district.
Words of Faith is the first sermon, not a burial. Leave it on the inquisitor page. First Blood is the first battle, not a shovel swing. Leave it on the army page. The cemetery only owes the rest of the atlas input and a yard that looks like someone works there.
What the stores do not quantify
Steam does not publish grave sizes, decoration catalogs, or a quality curve. Lazy Bear Games has not posted a cemetery spreadsheet either. The honest page is therefore short on numbers and long on sequence. You bury, you harvest, you expand, you watch two public marks. Everything else is in-game observation you should verify in your own 1.0 save rather than copy from a file-dump wiki.
That limit is why this route stays a system hub instead of an item dump. There are no official portraits of individual graves. The exclusive still on this page is the cemetery-edge screenshot Steam shipped, not a per-plot icon. If later patches print a quality formula, this guide should gain a table; until then Steam never printed one.
If you need a number that Steam did not print, do not scrape a unofficial dump into this guide. Observed station counts belong in a notebook, not in a sentence that sounds official. This atlas would rather leave a gap than ship a fake quality table.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an official grave-quality formula?
Steam does not publish a quality equation. The only Steam numbers are the 50-burial True Graveyard Keeper mark and the quality-200 Home Sweet Tomb mark on the Steam achievements roster. Plan around those two public marks when you decorate Decorate toward 200 if burials are already done.
Does the demo include cemetery work?
Official demo news lists graveyard-digging and decorating among the 3-4 hour trial tasks, and it says the demo save carries into 1.0. Start there if you want the yard already in motion when the full game opens on 22 September.
