v0.2.0

0.2.0 | 29 August 2026

Walk there yourself, one direction at a time. Auto-walk (Ctrl+Home) does the walking for you,
which is not what everyone wants — several players would rather move themselves and only be told
where to go. Until now the only thing on offer for that was the compass beacon, which points
straight at the target in a dead line: through fences, through the church wall, through the
graveyard hedge. It was never a route. Ctrl+B now gives you the route, spoken one step at a
time, and your legs stay yours.

How it works

Pick something the way you always do — Page up / Page down through a category — and press
Ctrl+B. The mod asks the game for the same obstacle-aware route the auto-walker drives, reduces
it to the corners worth mentioning, and talks you along it:

Guiding to the sawmill, 12 meters. Walk 8 meters east, then north.

Hold the one key it names. When you reach the end of that stretch it gives you the next one — "Now
5 meters north" — and when you arrive it says so and turns you to face the thing, so plain E
interacts without any fiddling to line yourself up.

Then it is quiet. While you are on course it says nothing at all, and it only speaks up when
something has changed: you have drifted off the line, something is in the way, or you are there.

• Every step is one direction, so it is one key held down. North, south, east or west, never
  "north-east". Partly because one instruction should be one key, and partly because this game moves
  you up and down at four fifths of the speed it moves you left and right — so a diagonal is not a
  straight line and any diagonal instruction would drift by design. A slanting stretch of route
  becomes a staircase of short cardinal steps instead.

• Distances are in metres, and the next turn comes with the step. "Walk 12 meters east, then
  north" — so when the east stretch runs out you already know which key comes next instead of
  standing still waiting to be told.

• A step is only ever offered along ground you can actually walk. Each one is checked twice:
  against the game's navigation data, and against the same collision the game uses to stop your
  body. "Walk 12 meters north" never means "walk into the fence".

• When something is in the way, it names it and takes you round. "Fence blocks the way. Walk 6
  meters south, then east." The name is the thing your character actually collided with — the fence,
  the barrel, the gravestone — or "something solid" when it is part of a building rather than an
  object of its own. It works out how far round you really have to go, so a barrel costs you a metre
  and a fence costs you the length of the fence.

• It corrects you rather than repeating itself. Drift off the line and it tells you how to get
  back onto it — "Off course. Walk 3 meters east" — not the same instruction again. Speech takes
  time and you are still holding the last key while you listen, so nothing is judged off course
  until the instruction has had time to land.

• Ctrl+B never moves you. It is a toggle for the directions and nothing else. Only Ctrl+Home,
  the key that means "walk me there", may take over your legs.

• It stays on until you switch it off. It is a mode, not a one-shot. Arriving leaves it on,
  ready for the next thing, and so do cutscenes, teleports and anything else that interrupts. You
  can switch it on before choosing anything — it says "Guidance on" and waits.

• The directions follow whatever you select. With it on, paging to another object re-aims the
  guidance: "Now guiding to the gravestone. Walk 6 meters north." Browsing for somewhere to go no
  longer means pressing Ctrl+B again for every candidate. It waits until you stop paging before
  switching, so stepping through a long list does not set off a burst of talking.

• Home repeats the step you are on, with how far is left and where you are heading.

• Indoors, it takes you to the door first. Choosing something outside while you are standing in
  your house gets you out of the house rather than a bearing through the wall.

• If it truly cannot see a way, it says so honestly and keeps the target. You get the direction
  and the distance, and it quietly tries again as soon as you have walked a few metres — often that
  is all it takes. It will not repeat itself at you while you move.

• Escape stops the directions, though only once nothing else is moving you, so Escape still
  stops an auto-walk first.

• Auto-walk falls back to directions instead of the beacon. When the auto-walker gets boxed in
  by geometry it cannot drive through, it now hands you turn-by-turn directions along the route it
  did find. The old compass bearing is kept for the one case that has no route at all.

Getting it right

This was built and rebuilt across twenty rounds of play-testing, and it is worth saying what those
rounds were spent on, because they are the difference between a feature that works and one that
technically functions. Directions that are wrong occasionally are worse than none: you cannot see
what the mod got wrong, so every wrong instruction costs you a walk into a fence and your confidence
in the next one.

Most of that time went on three things. Believing the route — the mod now follows the path the
game's own pathfinder returns instead of scoring compass directions for itself, so anywhere auto-walk
can walk you, this can talk you. Believing the collision — every step is measured against the
thing that actually stops your body, because the navigation maps do not know a wooden fence is there.
And "that way is blocked" is now said only when something really is there and
you were really walking into it, so pausing to think, or listening to an instruction before setting
off, is no longer mistaken for being stuck against a wall.

A finished craft says where the result went

The line that speaks when a craft finishes told you the result was lying on the ground beside you.
That is true of a workbench you worked yourself and wrong nearly everywhere else — and it was said
even when you had long since walked away.

• It only speaks while you are still at the station. A station with a zombie docked in it keeps
  working after you leave, and a station that unloads behind you looks exactly like one that has
  just finished, so completion lines were arriving from the other side of the map. If you are more
  than a few metres away when the craft ends, nothing is said at all.

• Each kind of station now says where its output really goes. Work a station yourself and the
  result drops at your feet, as before. A station run by a docked zombie, or run remotely on
  gratitude points, files it into the linked storage. The tavern kitchen and oven hand it to the
  barman, and the refugee camp's kitchen, hive and well hand it to the camp's own store. And the
  crates you build at the elevator for the merchant are not on the ground anywhere — they go down
  the shaft: "Box of vegetables crafted, sent down the elevator to the cellar".

• Where the game hands the result to a script, the mod stops guessing. Embalming, the rat cell
  and the skull and soul crafts now finish with a bare "… crafted" and no claim about where the
  thing is, because the game decides that somewhere the mod cannot follow.

GOG: your own screen reader, at last

The GOG version of Graveyard Keeper is a 32-bit program, and Prism — the library the mod speaks
through — has never been built for 32-bit Windows. So GOG players have been getting the Windows
SAPI voice: everything was spoken, but in a voice that was not theirs, at a speed that was not
theirs, and never on a braille display.

The GOG download now bundles Tolk instead, a second speech library that does have a 32-bit
build, and it drives NVDA, JAWS and ZoomText directly, braille included. Nothing
to install and nothing to choose: the mod looks at which version of the game it is running inside
and loads the one library that fits it. On Steam that is Prism, exactly as before, and the two are
never both awake — so there is no chance of the mod talking to your screen reader twice.

If no screen reader is running, GOG still falls back to the SAPI voice, the same as everywhere else.

• The GOG download is now half the size. Each bundle carries only the speech library its own
  version of the game can load — Tolk for GOG, Prism for everyone else — instead of both. That
  takes the GOG download from 2.6 MB down to 1.3 MB. The ModOnly download still contains both,
  because it does not know which store your game came from.

The keys are where you can find them

The keyboard reference, the install instructions, the changelog and the licence used to ship only
inside BepInEx\plugins\GraveyardKeeperAccessibility\ — four folders down, behind a name there is
no reason to open. In practice that meant the list of keys was effectively missing.

All four now sit in the root of every download, in the folder you extract into, named
Accessibility-Mod-README.md, Accessibility-Mod-KEYBINDINGS.md, Accessibility-Mod-CHANGELOG.md
and Accessibility-Mod-LICENSE.txt. The prefix keeps them together in a folder listing and tells
them apart from BepInEx's own changelog and licence files, which land in the same place. The copies
beside the mod stay where they are, so a Vortex install still has them.

Also in this release

A handful of words were still coming out in English, or not coming out at all, in the German game.

• The grave window says fence and cross in your language. The two decoration rows were labelled
  from hardcoded English, so a German player heard "No cross" and "No fence" in the middle of a
  German sentence; they now read "Kein Kreuz" and "Kein Zaun". The repair entries behind them follow
  the game's own wording ("Grabstein reparieren") instead of a fixed "Repair cross".

• A grave's decay is spoken as a percentage, with a translated name. It used to come out as a
  bare count of the untranslated word "decay"; it is now "Verfall 47 Prozent" / "decay 47 percent".

• The icon-only counters are read out. Quite a lot of the game's text is written around a little
  picture — "Die Tür ist verschlossen, bis ich (happy)80 beim Ingenieur habe" — and the picture is
  the thing the sentence is about. Relationship, a grave part's quality, the merchant's fame, the
  refugee camp's happiness, water and camp quality, tavern quality and gratitude capacity now all
  get a spoken name, so that line becomes "…bis ich 80 Beziehung beim Ingenieur habe". Where the
  icon is only decoration next to the word it illustrates, it is dropped rather than said twice.

• Amounts written after the icon are picked up too. Task text like "Erreiche (rel) 100" puts a
  space between the two; that used to leave the number stranded with no idea what it counted.

• Crafting and building tabs have names. The game draws every tab as a bare icon and has no
  text for any of them, so the mod had been reading out the internal id — the stone grave decoration
  tab announced itself as "scross". All fifty of them are now named in both languages.

• Skull counts say what they are counting. A corpse used to read out as "1 red, 7 white", which
  only makes sense if you can see the two skull icons the numbers sit next to. It is now "1 red
  skull, 7 white skulls". The same applies to the autopsy grid, the cut-out and insert previews, the
  graveyard's zone score and the soul healer's organ readout.

• German counts one skull the way you would say it. The count sits inside the phrase rather than
  in front of it, so the adjective can agree with it — "ein roter Schädel, 7 weiße Schädel", and in
  the accusative where the sentence needs it ("verliert einen weißen Schädel"). The same singular
  now reads correctly wherever a skull is counted: the inline skull and cross icons, a zombie's
  efficiency, and the grave rating's "ein roter Schädel senkt sie".