How to Unlock Zombies in Graveyard Keeper?

Zombies in Graveyard Keeper are not your typical undead enemies roaming around for horror vibes. Instead of being threats, they flip the usual zombie game trope and are actually helpful workers you create and control to automate your daily tasks.

But before we delve into how to unlock zombies and how to make more of them, you need to know one important detail: you can only get zombies if you have the Breaking Dead expansion. If you have the DLC, it’s time to make some zombies.

How Zombies Become Available in Graveyard Keeper

Zombies become available fairly early in Graveyard Keeper, approximately after 19.5 in-game days. Unlocking them starts with a short questline involving a mysterious character named Gunter.

Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide for the questline:

1. Help Snake unlock the basement gate in your house
2. Enter the basement and find Gunter
3. Follow his questline to unlock zombie technology
4. Receive your first free zombie and the zombie juice recipe

Once this is completed, you gain access to the ability to create more zombies. These additional zombies are crafted later using alchemy, specifically through zombie juice. However, in the early game, you are limited because zombie juice is difficult to produce. As it requires 1 Blood and 1 health powder.

This means when you get access to zombies, you will be utilizing the three free zombies given by Gunter. However, once you have the resources, you can create them by yourself on the resurrection table with these ingredients:

• 1× Zombie Juice
• 10× Faith
• A corpse

After creation, zombies can be assigned to different workstations.

What Zombies Do and How They Work

Why work harder when your workforce is already dead? | Credits: Lazy Bear Games

Once unlocked, zombies become one of the most powerful automation tools in Graveyard Keeper. Instead of manually gathering resources or crafting items, you can assign zombies to handle repetitive work for you.

Here are all the tasks they can be assigned to do:

• Cutting and gathering wood
• Mining ore and stone
• Running farms and vineyards
• Crafting items like books, pottery, and jewelry
• Operating production stations and transport systems

However, zombies come with a major limitation: they do not generate technology points, meaning you still need to progress research manually through books, exploration, or crafting.

Additionally, their effectiveness depends heavily on the quality of the corpse used: better skull ratings mean better performance. More white skulls on the zombie = faster and better workers. Red skulls, on the other hand, do not affect zombie performance.

Because zombie juice is hard to craft early on, your first few zombies are extremely valuable. That’s why it’s important to assign them carefully to high-impact tasks like resource production or transport.

Do you own the Breaking Dead DLC, and which tasks were your first few zombies assigned to? Comment below to let us know.