Graveyard Keeper: How to Build Crates and Sell Them at the Trade Office

Crates are the closest thing Graveyard Keeper has to passive income. Each one is a packed box of vegetables or manufactured goods that the merchant buys automatically, and once the whole chain is running, zombies can handle almost every part of it while you do something else.

Quick answer: Finish the trade license quest with Gunter, build the Crate factory in the workyard, pack a crate from 2× Nails, 4× Flitch and one bulk item, then place it on a pallet in the Trade Office.

Unlock requirement: Trade license and the Trade Office

Crate recipes do not appear in any menu until you have solved the trade license quest. That means talking with Gunter and unlocking the Trade Office in the village. Until both are done, the Crate factory blueprint stays unavailable and the packing table has nothing to pack.

Once the license is settled, the factory blueprint shows up in the workyard build menu. It has a single legal placement, on the strip of ground between the workyard and the kitchen garden, which is deliberate. Sitting there, it draws materials from the storage of both areas.

Property	Value
Build materials	12× Flitch, 4× Simple iron parts, 12× A piece of stone
Energy cost	25 to dig, 20 to construct
Footprint	7×4, not rotatable
Built from	Workyard workbench

The factory arrives with its own elevator, pallets and porter station in the cellar already attached, so you do not need to build that infrastructure separately.

Crate recipes and material costs

Every crate shares the same shell, 2× Nails and 4× Flitch, and then takes a bulk filler that decides which crate you get and what it sells for. Each pack costs 10 energy. Silver and gold crates can be made at either the packing table or the Crate factory, while the goods crate is exclusive to the factory.

Silver crate

Silver crates sell for 10 silver and 75 copper. On top of the nails and flitch, pick one filler: 44× two-star Onion, 40× two-star Lentils, or 32× two-star Pumpkin. Pumpkins are the cheapest option by unit count, which matters a lot when a zombie farm is doing the harvesting.

Gold crate

Gold crates are the same shape with three-star produce and sell for 16 silver and 50 copper. The filler is 44× Onion, 44× Lentils, or 32× Pumpkin, all at three-star quality. Pumpkin again needs the fewest units for the best price, so a pumpkin-focused garden is the efficient route.

Goods crate

Goods crates sell for a flat 15 silver and use manufactured items instead of crops. The filler options are 62× Nails (on top of the two for the box), 14× Complex iron parts, 10× A carved piece of stone, 10× A polished brick of marble, 200× Ceramic bowls, 100× Ceramic jug, or 16× Porcelain pitcher.

Crate Factory Menu — The Crate factory recipe list, showing the vegetable and goods boxes alongside their Nails and Flitch requirements. Shown at 00:17 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

Nails are the bottleneck for goods crates. Craft them in batches at the Anvil II, where one iron ingot yields six nails, before you start a packing run.

Crafting Materials & Crates — Batching nails at the Anvil II, then packing a box of goods at the factory. Shown at 00:52 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

Feeding the factory with a zombie farm

Vegetable crates eat produce in quantities that are painful to harvest by hand. A zombie farm solves this by pulling crops such as silver-quality pumpkins on its own and dropping them into storage the factory can reach. Because the Crate factory touches both the workyard and kitchen garden storage, harvested vegetables are already where the recipe needs them.

Zombie Farm Demonstration — A zombie farm harvesting silver-quality pumpkins, the cheapest filler by unit count. Shown at 00:36 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

The factory itself supports two zombie workers. One stands at the outdoor station and packs crates for you, and the second works the porter station down in the cellar. Assigning both means you never touch a crate manually.

Moving finished crates to the Trade Office

A crate is worth nothing sitting in the workyard. Selling happens only at the Trade Office in the village, and only when the crate is sitting on a pallet there. The merchant then buys everything on the pallets automatically every Gluttony.

Pack a crate at the factory. As soon as it finishes, it goes onto the built-in elevator and drops to the cellar, where it moves from the output chute straight onto a crate pallet.

Assign a zombie to the porter station in the barn cellar. That worker carries crates down the tunnel to the Trade Office for you. Without one, you have to haul each crate to the village on foot.

Cellar Logistics & Zombie Porter — Crates arriving in the cellar and a zombie porter hauling one toward the village. Shown at 01:11 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

Open the Storage menu at the desk in the barn cellar and build pallets. Twelve pallet slots are available in total, and each one is a place a finished crate can wait to be sold. The same menu shows your current Fame and the Marketing campaign option.

Trade Room Storage Menu — The barn cellar Storage menu, with pallet requirements, the Marketing campaign entry, and Fame levels. Shown at 01:28 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

For more Fame, produce Flyers by combining Clean paper and Pen and ink at Desk II, which is underground beside the Church workbench.

Crafting Flyers at Desk II — Desk II, where Flyers are made from Pen and ink and Clean paper. Shown at 02:00 in JA Guides Gaming’s video. Image: Lazy Bear Games

Return to the storage desk in the barn cellar and spend 10 Flyers on a Marketing campaign. Each campaign grants +1 Fame, after which you can enter build mode and put down another pallet.

How to confirm the crate pipeline is working

There are three visible checkpoints, and each one tells you a different part of the chain is live.

A zombie is animating at the outdoor packing station, which means crates are being produced without you.
Finished crates appear on the crate pallet in the cellar instead of staying at the factory.
The zombie porter stocks the pallets at the Trade Office, and your Fame count in the Storage menu rises by one after each Marketing campaign.

Once crates are sitting on Trade Office pallets, payment arrives on its own at the next Gluttony. The practical build order is simple enough to repeat every cycle. Keep nails and flitch stocked, let the zombie farm handle pumpkins, and add pallets as Fame allows so more crates can be waiting when the merchant comes around.