First hours, in order
Each step exists because it unlocks the next one. If you are unsure what to do, take the step that opens a system rather than the one that improves something already working.
Leave the ruined district
The opening area is full of mushrooms, breakable objects and blocked paths that look worth clearing. Take what is directly on your path and keep moving. The destination that matters is the surviving group at the town defences.
Take the free sword and armour
The survivors hand over usable combat gear before the first serious fight. Take it and do not detour looking for an early upgrade — the opening has already given you the equipment that fight expects.
Stay near the guards, then go west
The next fight exists to carry you back toward the gate; straying after zombies is how people lose that sequence. Once the group is safe, the guard points you to an abandoned Inquisitor base to the west and asks you to bury the fallen on that side.
Claim the base, but do not renovate it
The property becomes your home, morg, graveyard and first production area. Clear only enough room to move, sleep and process a corpse. Rebuilding the whole site before your first burial is the classic opening detour.
Autopsy the first corpse
Put the body on the autopsy table before carrying it to the graveyard, because the first autopsy teaches the rule the rest of the game runs on: white skulls help a burial, red skulls work against it. Keep it simple — advanced extraction is tied to later progression.
Finish the grave, including the sign
Carry the body out, use the Blueprint Desk to place the grave, then follow the fixed order: dig the plot, place the corpse, fill the grave, add the basic sign. The burial is not complete until the sign is up, and completion is what produces your Burial Certificate.
Hand in the Burial Certificate
Take it back to the guard contact rather than staying to decorate the cemetery. The hand-in is what turns burial from a tutorial step into part of the economy.
Push Graveyard Quality to 10
Ten Graveyard Quality is the first concrete target, and it is a better guide for spending than making every plot look finished. Improve graves that already exist as better options appear instead of expanding across the whole yard at once.
Switch to the village’s food and firewood problem
Once the story asks how you can help the settlement, the answer is specific: the village is short on food and firewood. That gives the land around the base a second purpose, and makes farming and wood production part of the village route rather than a private chore.
Buy seeds only when planting is the blocker
The merchant ties into seeds, trading and later food progression. Establish one working crop cycle rather than spending everything on seed variety at once.
Where the opening leads
The developer’s own framing of the game is four overlapping stages: graveyard, then automation, then Town, then army. Each produces the input the next consumes, and a stall in a later stage is usually an upstream shortage. The opening route above finishes stage one; the zombie workforce and The Town are what come next.