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Graveyard Keeper is a slightly amusing game that has you manage a medieval graveyard while facing ethical dilemmas and making questionable decisions. It's officially out now with Linux support.

About the game:

Graveyard Keeper is the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of all time. Build and manage your own graveyard, and expand into other ventures, while finding shortcuts to cut costs. Use all the resources you can find. After all, this is a game about the spirit of capitalism, and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business. And it’s also a love story.

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My key was only activated today (provided by the publisher before release), so I haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time with it. Even so, I want to highlight a few issues that I've encountered.

Firstly, the fancy software cursor they use is a little sluggish. You can switch to a hardware cursor (your system cursor) in the settings, but this will make it invisible until you restart the game. There's also some pretty harsh performance drops in certain areas too. Walking through the wheat fields for example on the way to the town, dropped performance hard down to 30FPS and below making it rather sluggish. Even in better areas, it still needs some improvements with a fair bit of micro-stutter.

It advertises full gamepad support, although through Steam and also trying out SC Controller, the Steam Controller wasn't picked up by the game at all. My Logitech F310 was also not picked up, so that's not great. I don't consider that a major blocker, since it plays great with a keyboard—still annoying though.

Features:

  • Face ethical dilemmas. Do you really want to spend money on that proper burger meat for the witch-burning festival, when you have so many resources lying around? 
  • Gather valuable materials and craft new items. Expand your Graveyard into a thriving business. Help yourself -- gather the valuable resources scattered across the surrounding areas, and explore what this land has to offer. 
  • Quests and corpses. These dead bodies don't need all those organs, do they? Why not grind them up and sell them to the local butcher? Or you can go on proper quests, you roleplayer.
  • Explore mysterious dungeons. No medieval game would be complete without those! Take a trip into the unknown, and find discover new alchemy ingredients -- which may or may not poison a whole bunch of nearby villagers.

What's interesting, is that it actually uses a similar system to Lazy Bear Games' last title, Punch Club, whereby doing different activities gives you coloured points towards learning different things in the skill tree.

So far, it seems quite relaxing. I've been able to do quite a lot, even in my relatively short play time. I've managed to learn a number of skills, clear out a lot of junk from around my graveyard and cut up some bodies into tasty meat. I'm currently attempting to get a fake seal of approval for my tasty human meat, to be able to sell it to a local in the nearest town.

It does seem like a fun game, certainly reminds me of Stardew Valley with a more amusing (and slightly gross) setting. So if Stardew Valley wasn't your cup for being to sweet, this just might be what you're after.

You can grab it from Humble Store and Steam. It's also on GOG, but once again GOG doesn't have the Linux build at release.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Ehvis Aug 19, 2018
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Quoting: Cyril
Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: CyrilWhat does it say when you launch it via the terminal?

Player.log gives me a backtrace ending in an unhandled NULL exception in funlockfile. Same when I run it outside of steam.

I don't know. But it seems to be an Nvidia driver issue, what's your version? Have you tried to upgrade it?
Xpander had a similar issue with Rust here.

Unfortunately, that solution didn't change anything.
silmeth Aug 19, 2018
Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: CyrilWhat does it say when you launch it via the terminal?

Player.log gives me a backtrace ending in an unhandled NULL exception in funlockfile. Same when I run it outside of steam.

Strange. I can partially reproduce the issue. I have Kubuntu 18.04, and nVidia drivers 396.51-0ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1.

It starts with no problem when I have my Steam Controller turned off and when it is set to the default configuration (which does not work, as the game does not see the controller anyway).

But iff I turn the controller on and set any community controller profile that maps it to keyboard and mouse, the game no longer starts, and in the log I too get the null pointer error:

Receiving unhandled NULL exception
#0  0x007fca503639c0 in funlockfile
#1  0x007ffe2e383bf0 in std::vector<std::vector<std::pair<int, int>, std::allocator<std::pair<int, int> > >, std::allocator<std::vector<std::pair<int, int>, std::allocator<std::pair<int, int> > > > >::~vector()
#2  0x007ffe2e383c70 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c
[… the rest of the stack]
Ehvis Aug 19, 2018
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: silmethIt starts with no problem when I have my Steam Controller turned off and when it is set to the default configuration (which does not work, as the game does not see the controller anyway).

But iff I turn the controller on and set any community controller profile that maps it to keyboard and mouse, the game no longer starts, and in the log I too get the null pointer error:

Receiving unhandled NULL exception
#0  0x007fca503639c0 in funlockfile
#1  0x007ffe2e383bf0 in std::vector<std::vector<std::pair<int, int>, std::allocator<std::pair<int, int> > >, std::allocator<std::vector<std::pair<int, int>, std::allocator<std::pair<int, int> > > > >::~vector()
#2  0x007ffe2e383c70 in oc_frag_recon_inter2_c
[… the rest of the stack]

Interesting. That part of the trace is identical to mine. Except I don't have a steam controller connected. I do have a bunch of other input devices plugged in though. Time to check something!

Edit: And indeed, unplugging all the other controllers (wheel+joystick+xbox360) fixed the problem.


Last edited by Ehvis on 19 August 2018 at 10:48 pm UTC
silmeth Aug 28, 2018
Quoting: EhvisInteresting. That part of the trace is identical to mine. Except I don't have a steam controller connected. I do have a bunch of other input devices plugged in though. Time to check something!

Edit: And indeed, unplugging all the other controllers (wheel+joystick+xbox360) fixed the problem.

You might want to try again. My Steam Controller started working after last update, so it’s possible the controller-related crashes are also fixed.

(I still haven’t really played Graveyard Keeper, because of stability issues, lack of Controller support, and 7 Billion Humans takes all my time lately… but after this fix I’ll probably try to get to it finally.)
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