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  • Listen To Your Cultists And Followers
  • Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin
  • Feeling The Heat
  • The Power Of Speech
  • Do As The Wise One Wishes

While creating your own religion inHoney, I joined A Cult is a lot more fun than you might have expected, it is also hard work. You can’t simply dress up in an outlandish costume, give yourself a silly name, and wait for great quality (read: rich) followers to come to you.

Related: Honey, I Joined A Cult: Beginner's Guide

Instead, you have to do your research. The compound needs to be built up to offer more spiritual routes to redemption, you need to raise the number of followers and cultists you can accommodate, and new types of missions need to be unlocked. And let’s not forget your own private inner sanctum. But what should you research first?

Listen To Your Cultists And Followers

Bring up your Cultist Overview screen often and look for patterns in the negative effects. Do your cultists need more fun? It’s time to build or upgrade the Recreation Room. Do they think the food is terrible? Get that Kitchen working, or upgrade your food to Burgers, or Meat and Vegetables.

Similarly, keep an eye on the Follower Overview screen. You need followers to hang around to provide you with Money and Influence. So, when their Happiness starts to drop, something needs to be done. The likelihood is they’ve got all they can from the rooms they can access, so consider researching new options such as the Spirit Chamber and Pool of Revelations.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

It’s tempting to research as many buildings as possible, increasing the quality of your compound and the options available to you, but the majority of buildings need to have a cultist operating them.

So unless you want to do a lot of micromanagement, pausing often to reassign cultists to different buildings, you’ll want to largely balance the books. Both Cultist Cap One and Cultist Cap Two increase your maximum by two, giving you much more scope to expand.

Especially early in the game, the quantity of both cultists and followers is more important than quality. Other cap skills, such as Faith and Influence, may also look enticing, but you’ll be using Influence regularly for research, while you won’t really need more Faith until your cultists start to improve later in the game.

You can keep a close eye on your resources by opening Stats in the bottom left of your screen by clicking any of the resource icons.

Feeling The Heat

Going on missions and rotating your cultist roster will start to build Heat, which doesn’t seem like a big deal at first. But when you close in on 300 Heat, you’ll start to experience Protests.

Once they begin there’s nothing you can do about them. They last a full day, and your Heat goes down when they finish. But they really hit your cultists’ Moods. It’s easy for this to spill over into Mood Breaks, creating even more issues.

When the Heat starts creeping up, don’t be scared to hold off on missions while you research Heat Reduction Missions. Not only will these reduce Heat, but simply holding off on missions for a few days will also see a gradual Heat reduction.

Consider researching the Ministry of Propaganda building, which allows you to improve your PR while reducing Heat.

The Power Of Speech

While you may only be delivering one Sermon each day, the effect they have on your cultists can have a huge impact. For example, researching Sermon: Skill Boost gives all those attending a plus one bonus to each skill for two days.

Sermon: Trait Gain gives those attending a Trait. Sure, it might be a negative one, but it has a higher chance to be good than normal, so it's well worth a roll of the dice.

Combine this with the Ministry of Alteration upgrades, such as Positive Alteration and Advanced Alteration, making sure you turn that cultist’s frown upside down. And on those occasions when it doesn’t work, well, there are always fresh followers to replace the less worthy.

Do As The Wise One Wishes

If you click the Compound button at the bottom of the screen, you can bring up a separate list of quests called Leader Demands. These are research goals that you’ll probably end up completing anyway. But completing these objectives gives a quick one-hit boost to resources such as Influence and PR, so it can be worth pushing these projects up your schedule for instant gains.

You have a limit (four) on the number of Leader Demand quests you have.

So, even if you don't want to prioritize these needs, make sure to stay under it to keep new quests coming.

The first one you always get asks you to research and build the Leader’s Sanctum. This is a little pie in the sky in week one, as it requires almost 20 research projects to be completed before you can start it. It’s well worth doing, but don’t worry. There is no time limit to it, and you’ll suffer no ill effects from putting it off.

As long as you keep your Influence high, you can be constantly researching. Note that the Research Office is one of the few buildings you can staff 24 hours a day. If you have enough cultists, don’t be scared to make one of them work nights and cover the Research Office while your other cultists sleep. Because the faster you get those projects done, the better your compound becomes.

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