If you are searching the phrase NOT DEAD NOT YET on its own, you are almost certainly standing in Church Hill with a locked crate in front of you and no idea what the game wants.
The crate is in the dock tackle shed, and the code is 4514.
The words are on the crate itself, so there is nothing to hunt for in the rest of Church Hill.
What is the "not dead not yet" code?
4514. Four digits, entered at the crate in the tackle shed on the Church Hill dock.
The phrase is the clue and the crate is the container. There is no second crate, no alternate reading and no variation between saves — this one is fixed, so a number from a guide or a video will work in your game.
Where the phrase is written
The words are painted onto the crate, and the marking that gives the four letter positions sits underneath them.
Both are on the same face of the box: no document to carry over from another building, no separate room, no NPC to talk to first.
How the four marked letters work
The marking gives four positions: the 4th, 5th, 1st and 4th letters. Read them off the phrase and you get D, E, N, D.
Four letters, no word. There is no second crate on the dock, so this is as far as the clue goes — and the keypad takes digits, not letters. 4514 opens it.
The other Church Hill locks
Church Hill holds three containers, and the other two keep their clues away from the lock itself. Most locks in the game follow that pattern; the dock crate is the exception.
The funeral home keypad takes 752. The clue is the florist's price list: lily $7, rose $5, bluebell $2. Three flowers, three prices, three digits in that order. It is a clean example of the game's usual design, where the answer is assembled from a document rather than implied by it.
The church tower door does not take numbers at all. It uses the necklace symbols, read left to right: triangle, cross, cross, triangle. The necklace belongs to Father Foster. Four positions on a symbol wheel, same shape of puzzle as the Market Street alley door but a different source.
Three locks, three different kinds of answer in one small area: three prices, four symbols and four letters.
What Church Hill gives you
Church Hill is not a side area. Two of the game's five stuck-points live here.
The Sledgehammer is in the cemetery, next to the well. It is what breaks the lighthouse wall, and without it the lighthouse section stays closed.
The Crank Handle is also in Church Hill and is one half of the sewer sluice gate mechanism; the other half is the Heavy Mechanical Cog from the manhole room inside the sewers. Together they lower the water, and the flooded chambers open up.
Pick both tools up before you work the locks. The Sledgehammer is in the cemetery and the Crank Handle is on the hill itself, while the three containers sit indoors — clearing the outdoor items first means you cross the area once instead of twice.
Add the bell from the Church Hill siege and the area carries a weapon-adjacent tool, a route tool and one of the five cable-car bells. Skipping Church Hill does not just leave a crate locked. It leaves the cable car grounded.
Why Church Hill matters to the sewer route
The sewers have two entrances and it is worth knowing both.
The first is the broken boards east of the pet clinic in Downtown. The second is the Town Hall manhole in Town Square. Neither is in Church Hill — but the Crank Handle is, and the Crank Handle is what makes the sewer's flooded section passable.
That is the ordering trap. The sewers look like a Downtown area because that is where you fall into them, but the tool that opens their middle third comes from a different district entirely. Players who clear Downtown and dive straight in hit the sluice gate with no way through and assume they need a key they missed.
The walkthrough lists all five route-blocking items together for exactly this reason.
If 4514 does nothing
Three checks, in the order they usually solve it.
The crate is already empty. Containers do not respawn, and a spent crate stops offering an interaction. If you cannot focus it at all, this save has already opened it.
You are at a different Church Hill container. The funeral home keypad takes 752 and the church tower takes symbols. All three are walkable within a minute of each other, and mixing them up produces a keypad that silently refuses a correct-for-somewhere-else answer.
You are at the motel gate. That one is randomized per save and its code is written in the guest ledger at the Crimson Bear Motel reception, on the line for Eddie Velvet. It will never match 4514, and it is the only lock in the game whose correct answer differs between two players.
Past those three, the number is the number. There is no build-dependence here and no patch has changed it.
Next
Church Hill closes out the early map. After it the route runs into the sewers, then Mt. Siah Kopa for the cable car at 0441 and the five-bell sequence, then Thelend for the editing room at 0002 and the office safe at 66666.
The codes hub has all 22 containers in one table by area, including which single lock is randomized. If you are tracking the five bells rather than the locks, the map page shows where each district's collectibles sit.