KeeperRL – Necromancer Keeper Guide

How to Play as Necromancer Keeper

Zombies are your general use workers, digging, hauling, construction…

The crafting unit is the “Zombie Artisan”, try raising one of these to make your clubs.

Some extra info might prove helpful for readers, including the OP:

• In order to be able to raise the artisan, or anything else for that matter, you need to build the ‘crafting’ table that allows your Necromancer Keeper to raise minions.
• Your zombies will build that for you, provided you’ve had them collect wood.
• Then click on the table and the list of minions you can potentially raise will be displayed, limited according to their cost (in corpses) AND having a high enough Necromancy skill.
• Note that bit about the costs being in ‘corpses’. They are a resource that is shown on the bottom of the screen along with the other ones such as wood, stone etc.
• You start with 20.
• That means your Keeper can raise up to 20 corpses worth of minions, assuming you don’t hit your population cap.

• As a resource, and such a crucial one, obviously you’ll want to collect more of them.
• In order to do that, you need a grave.
• That appears in the ‘stores’ menu (I believe). You need stone to build it.

In my very limited experience, I’ve found it useful to think about the following:

1. Your zombies can’t be outside when daylight comes (see point 6). Therefore..
2. start your lair with a small entry chamber into which you put ‘resource’ storage space, then
3. get your zombies collecting wood ASAP, but ALSO
4. build the mortuary table (whatever it’s called) so your Keeper can raise things.
5. I immediately raised another zombie as there’s plenty for them to do and they’re not the fastest.
6. Any undead with the ‘vulnerable to sunlight’ trait will immediately cease to exist if they go outside during the ‘day’. The exception is if there’s a Vampire Lord (I think) who has a trait that surrounds them with darkness, shielding any units from sunlight, but we can’t raise them until increasing the Necro skill.

This means, as I said in point 1, if you want to gather wood from above ground (which is the most common of course) you MUST have your zombies do so at night.

I had them gather a whole load of wood on the grounds they could expand the base during the day, but I DID have them build a training room so the skeletons my Keeper raised could train. Note skeletons are NOT affected by sunlight, but I locked everyone inside during the first day period anyway.

7. Granite -> stone -> grave

I recommend you want a grave BEFORE you go off to have your first battle with anything local, else you end up wasting the opportunity to increase your corpse resource.

Therefore get a zombie digging towards the nearest deposit. Note you CAN find stone outside on the surface, too, so if you do, that’s a real bonus.

8. Once you wipe out the locals AND have built a grave, corpses will appear as loot items on the ‘pillage’ menu provided they died within the recognised area (can be a little hit and miss).

Thus the ‘loot all’ (or similar command) will automatically add all the corpses to your resource stock without you needing to to anything manually.

That is arguably the most important thing a Necromancer Keeper needs to know.

Without a grave you won’t resupply the corpse resource which means you won’t be able to raise new minions after using the 20 corpses with which you start the game.