System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Pauper's Pyre

Seven materials had no use anywhere in the game. This is the one place that wants all seven, every single time

A gravedigger's burning-ground standing in the graveyard region — the same region Grave Robbing takes place in. It exists to solve one very specific problem: seven early-game creature drops (Wolf Pelt, Fang, Rat Tail, Rotten Flesh, Ectoplasm, Grave Dust, and Vial of Holy Water) had no recipe, no station cost, and no bench pattern anywhere in the game that consumed them. They're deliberately not a random selection — they're exactly the leavings of the first things any new character kills, which made them the first seven stacks anybody ever accumulated and the last seven anybody ever found a use for.

Lighting it

The pyre starts as a cold, unlit heap of stones and unburnt wood. Lighting it costs 20 Stone, 8 Planks, and 6 Grave Dust — after that, interacting with it turns to fitting it out, and then to performing its rite.

Three fittings, one each

Before the rite, the pyre can be fitted with up to one of each of three upgrades, paid for once each:

The rite

Once lit, the pyre asks for one full offering of all seven leavings at once — deliberately not a menu of separate trades. A menu would just be a second merchant; a single joint demand means every one of the seven materials is wanted at the same time, which is exactly what they were missing. The base amounts needed rise slowly the more rites you've performed (every 5 rites raises most quantities by one, capped at +4), except Holy Water, which stays fixed at 1 since it's the scarcest of the seven — and every completed Lychgate lowers all seven requirements again.

Performing the rite pays coin from the parish poor-box — 200 base, +30 per Bone Cairn built, and +14 per rite already performed (capped at 20 rites, so +280 at most) — plus, once at least one Aspergillum is seated, a small bundle of Planks, Iron Bars and a Fuel Cell. Rated against what a merchant pays for the same armful of materials, the payout is comparable, not better: the pyre's real advantage is being a fixed place that always wants all seven, rather than a wandering merchant who might want two of them. There's no stat bonus, no XP, no drop-rate change, and nothing here is stronger than anything that already existed — the coin and the bundle are both hard-capped so a long-running character can't turn it into a printer.

The only reward with no ceiling

Every rite performed plants one more stone marker in a ring around the pyre, up to twelve — a purely visible record, standing in the world, of how many of the graveyard's unclaimed dead you've personally seen off. Unlike the coin and the bundle, this doesn't stop accumulating once you've hit the fitting or payout caps.

Version history

• The Pauper's Pyre added, as a direct follow-up to an earlier sweep (The Oddments Bench) that gave eight other true dead-end items a home — re-running that same sweep found it had stopped one material class short, and this pyre exists specifically to close that gap for the seven creature-leaving materials the earlier pass missed.

Trivia

• The game's own development notes are explicit that no existing line of code was changed to add this — the entire mechanic was appended as a new, self-contained block, reading only published cross-block functions rather than reaching into any other system's internals.
• None of the pyre's fittings or rites touch the Trophy Room's collection counts, the Spire of Years' relic list, or any other completion tracker in the game — by design, so that building or using the pyre can never accidentally move a denominator it was never meant to affect.
• A character saved before this system existed simply loads into a world with an unlit pyre and loses nothing — since the pyre only ever grants things that couldn't have been earned any other way, there was nothing owed to older characters retroactively.