The one rule underneath the rest
When several objectives are valid at once, take the one that unlocks something over the one that improves something. A graveyard upgrade competes with a village request; the village request may reveal a missing technology; a production problem may reveal why you need zombies. Sorting tasks into unlock versus improve, and doing unlocks first, is the habit that makes the rest of this page unnecessary.
What to do differently
Grouped by the system each one touches. Everything here traces to a developer description or to pre-release play, and the difference is marked.
Sort corpses by skull colour at the morgue
White skulls are burial quality; red skulls are workforce potential. Once resurrection exists, deciding at the plot is too late. Keep two piles — clean for the graveyard, corrupt for the zombies — and the whole dead-body pipeline becomes easier to reason about.
Build the input chain before the worker
A staffed machine with nothing to process is worse than an idle one, because you spent a corpse on it. Pre-release write-ups are blunt that resurrection materials gathered before iron processing unlock are wasted effort.
Fix Mastery with tools, not with a better corpse
When a zombie stands at a station and does nothing, the usual cause is Mastery rather than the recipe. Equipment appears to raise effective Mastery, so a tool upgrade can be the whole fix — and it is far cheaper than preparing another body.
Do not confuse transport with capability
The Supplier Station moves goods. It does not make an under-qualified zombie able to work. Treating a logistics building as a fix for a skills problem is the mistake pre-release guides flag most often.
Plan your base around Milestones
Milestones replaced teleportstones, so fast travel is now a coverage question rather than an item you buy. Place factories, storage and crafting so they sit within a short hop of a Milestone, or you will spend the mid-game walking.
Treat Town buildings as market decisions
Restored buildings create markets for your goods. Choose the next one by asking what you already have a surplus of, not by what looks nearest to finished. Without restored vendors, factory-scale output has nowhere to sell.
Raise graveyard quality by upgrading, not expanding
Weak graves and poor corpses slow the early quality target. Improving what stands beats adding another row, and it keeps your material spend pointed at the score that gates the next objective.
Read the unlock chain before gathering
Check that you can actually build the thing you are gathering for. The Tech Tree gates machines behind nodes, and several nodes behind others; a day spent harvesting for a distant machine is a day not spent opening the system that would have made it cheap.
Prepare for the town fight before it starts
The demo-observed campaign puts a squad-control battle at the Town behind a guard who wants your equipment count raised. Spiked barricades act as static anchors, and arriving at the minimum preparation level is tight rather than comfortable.
Leave the world running
The developer states that even after the story ends, The Town continues to exist and evolve on its own. That is a hint about how the systems are meant to be played: build an engine you can walk away from, rather than one that needs you standing next to it.