Though a successful town may have little use for a graveyard at first, villagers will eventually succumb to old age if the ravages of the frontier don't lead to an earlier departure, creating the need for a final resting place.
Uses
While graveyards are not strictly necessary, they do provide three crucial benefits over alternatives:
- Untended corpses can attract hostile wildlife, leading to additional predator attacks
- Untended corpses can attract Rats, which both damage food stocks and can spread/cause Maladies
- Untended corpses anecdotally raise risk of Maladies generally, causing outbreaks in settlements
Should a graveyard not have available capacity (or if no graveyard has been placed), untended corpses will eventually deteriorate and disappear, but this process can take several years.
The corpses of slain hostile invading humans do not linger for the same duration as villagers and are not buried in graveyards.