Tavern Guide - Graveyard Keeper

With the addition of the Stranger Sins DLC, you get to own a tavern and operate it with your favorite ghost Yorick, who takes the role of the bartender. Booze, beer, and wine will flow. Profit will be made!

The tavern is quite cool and I see it as a new main income source. The other two are the church sermons and selling crates to the merchant.

I would rank them in the following order…

• Tavern (#1)
• Merchant crates (#2)
• Church sermons (#3)

In this game guide, I'll explain how the tavern works and the different ways it can make you profit. A short section will also cover the upgrades and the special events that you can organize in it.

How the tavern works

There are a few quests to complete before unlocking the tavern (check the Stranger Sins walkthrough if needed).

Once that's done, operating the tavern is pretty simple.

Alcohol that you want to sell automatically to customers over time is placed on the tavern's basement crates. The greater the tavern's reputation (upgrades), the more alcohol sells over time. You don't need to do anything else. You can build additional crates if needed to place more bottles.

Next, alcohol and food that you want to sell during events are placed in the bartender's inventory. He won't sell those to normal customers over time.

That's pretty much it.

Another thing that is good to know is that a zombie porter can haul alcohol from the house's basement where it is produced to the tavern's crates.

Booze

Booze sells for 1.5 silver coins.

It's not the most profitable thing in the world but any money is good money in the early game. And hey, it could be worse.

You could be selling stamped meat to Horadric!

Making booze requires either apple or berries fruit ferment. In the orchard near your house, you can plant 12 apple trees that each produce 15 apples every few days. This will net you 18 booze bottles, or 27 silver coins in total.

That's pretty decent!

Red wine

Gold quality red wine sells for 2.5 silver coins.

I believe selling red wine is the most profitable thing you can do in the game. The price is high and you can produce a ton of it, very easily.

What I like the most about producing red wine is its simplicity. It only requires grapes and unlike beer, it can be completely automated.

The little zombie fella in the picture above works on the winery and makes 40 red wine bottles at once.

He's not fast (takes him about a week), but the 40 bottles sell for 1.2 gold pieces with the tavern bonus. That, in and by itself, is almost the same as the 1.5 gold pieces weekly income from the merchant crates.

Here's the thing though. You can make a lot more.

If you get a few zombies working in the vineyards to bring you grapes, your trunks will get full of them. They bring way, way more grapes than what the zombie can process at the winery.

So if you're willing to do manual work, create a vine press and many wine barrels. I'm pretty sure it's possible to make 10 gold per week exclusively from selling red wine.

It's just amazing.

Beer

Gold quality beer sells for 0.5 silver coins.

It's a bit of an odd one. The income per unit is much lower than red wine, AND it is more complicated to make (water and wheat are required), AND fewer bottles are produced at a time.

The redeeming quality is that it requires very few hops. Only 3 hops to make 10 bottles. Whereas red wine requires 30 grapes for 20 bottles.

Since it requires so few hops, my recommendation for your zombie slaves working the vineyards would be 7 grapes and 1 hop. The single hops vineyard is more than enough to supply an automated zombie brewery. You will actually have quite a lot of leftover hops.

The other vineyards focus on grapes to make you rich with red wine.

Upgrading the tavern

Upgrading the tavern is similar to upgrading the church. The upgrades require resources and they increase the quality of the tavern, which increases the income you make from it.

Unlocking the upgrades is linked to the Stranger Sins DLC story quests. I explain the quests in detail in the walkthrough but without spoiling things too much here, I would say…

Keep doing Stranger Sins quests until you meet Adam (first tavern upgrade) and Koukol (second tavern upgrade)!

Tavern events

In your tavern, you will notice a star meter on the right side of the counter. When the reputation stars are unlocked, they can be combined with faith and flyers to start events.

Events are simply a cutscene, after which a screen appears to inform you on the food and drinks that were sold. The events themselves add 10 silver coins per required reputation star.

I would say they aren't really worth the trouble for the silver coins. But if you cook a lot, the events might be worth it as a way to sell a ton of food to the customers. I'm not quite sure.

One thing I would add is…

Many achievements are related to throwing “excellent events”. I tried to isolate what exactly makes an excellent event and my feeling, in the end, was that it's related to the number of items sold with a small customer smile:

That example above with 80 items sold worked as an excellent event.

Just before it, I had a try with 60 items (same thing without the toasts I believe) and it didn't work. Maybe the sweet spot is 75 or 80 items sold.