The Donkey drops off a steady supply of bodies at your morgue, but not every corpse belongs in the ground. Some arrive covered in red skulls, and burying one of those drags down your graveyard quality instead of raising it. Knowing what to do with these bad bodies keeps your cemetery clean and still earns you the reward you came for.
Quick answer: Cremating a spoiled corpse protects the graveyard and still awards a Burial Certificate. Before unlocking the Crematorium, take the body to the river and dispose of it there.
Why red skulls make a corpse bad
Every corpse carries a mix of white and red skulls. White skulls raise a grave’s quality once the body is buried and decorated. Red skulls do the opposite. Each red skull has to be covered by a decoration point before any white skulls start counting, so a body loaded with red skulls contributes little or nothing to your graveyard rating.
The rule for burial is simple. A body is only worth putting in the ground when it has more white skulls than red. If the balance tips the other way, you are better off cleaning it up, cremating it, or getting rid of it entirely.
Fix a bad corpse at the autopsy table
Once you unlock Autopsy, the first thing to try on any body is removing red skulls at the Autopsy Table. If you can pull the balance in favor of white skulls, the corpse becomes safe to bury and you keep the full reward.
Every action on the Autopsy Table drains Sanity, so do not grind away at a body that is beyond saving. If a corpse cannot be brought back into the white, dispose of it another way.
Cremate a bad corpse for the Burial Certificate
Cremation is the cleanest way to remove a bad body from the equation. Burning it keeps your graveyard untouched, and you still receive a Burial Certificate as if you had buried it properly. You need the Crematorium built inside the Morgue to do this.
- Unlock the Body Places I technology to get the Crematorium recipe.
- Construct Crematorium I inside the Morgue using 6 Bricks and 6 Bronze Details.
- Burn the bad corpse to receive a Burial Certificate.
Take any certificates you collect to Januarius at the village tavern. He trades them for Silver Coin and a bit of Town Gratitude, so cremation still pays even though nothing goes in the ground.
Throw a bad corpse in the river
The river serves as a fallback until you unlock the Crematorium. Use your hands to take the corpse from the graveyard area to the nearby river, then choose the option for throwing it in. The body vanishes, leaving the cemetery safe.
The trade-off is that you forfeit every reward. There is no Burial Certificate and no other payout, so treat the river as a way to clear out bodies you simply do not want rather than a source of income.
Turn bad corpses into zombies later
Much later in the game, after meeting the Plague Doctor, you unlock the ability to raise corpses as zombies. This flips the usual logic on its head. Red skulls, the very thing that ruins a burial, are exactly what makes a strong zombie, since each red skull opens up a perk slot for your undead worker.
Hold on to your worst corpses for this route only once you reach the late game. Until then, cremation and the river remain the practical ways to keep bad bodies out of your graveyard.
You will know you handled a corpse correctly when your graveyard rating holds steady instead of dropping, and, for cremation, when a fresh Burial Certificate lands in the Morgue ready to sell.
