If you've ever had a fervent desire to both run your own cult and farm berries with cute farm animals, Cult Of The Lamb has you sorted. You'll have to balance your time delicately, however, since your followers may starve or start dissenting whilst you're out crusading in the name of The One Who Waits.

Related: Cult Of The Lamb's Internal Clock Makes Running A Stressful Balancing Act

Like all roguelites, there is a certain knack to staying afloat as your ranks begin to swell. Here are some top-tier tips to ace this organised religion business and avoid a miserable defeat.

10/10 Scavenging Is Key

You don't have to rely on chopping trees around the cult grounds or gunning for those commodity chambers during crusades. Instead, try chopping down everything in the room and see what you get.

Mushrooms and crystals can sometimes hide behind the tall grass, and smashing up a campfire frequently rewards you with pieces of meat to cook up some tasty meals for your beloved followers.

You can use crusades as opportunities to go scavenging byunlocking the ability to focus and return to your cult mid-run.

You'll lose fewer items by returning to your cult instead of dying in battle, and your followers won't lose faith in you or find you weak for choosing to return from your trip early.

9/10 Unlock Anchordeep And Silk Cradle Early

Don't feel like you need to polish off each Heretic before moving onto a new zone.

It actually benefits you to have all four zones unlocked early as possible since you'll need items from each area in order to complete key missions. Gems from Anchordeep are needed to fuel the Lighthouse at Pilgrim's Pass, and Sozo the mushroom-obsessed king requires that you bring him plenty of fungi if you want to earn some talisman shards.

Related: Cult Of The Lamb - How To Beat The Silk Cradle Bosses

Unlock Anchordeep and Silk Cradle as soon as you build up enough followers by performing a ritual to open the doors. Silk Cradle requires a whopping 12 followers, but you can always sacrifice one of your faceless masses afterward if you don't wish to feed and clothe that many cultists.

8/10 Nice Lambs Finish Last

In the world of Cult Of The Lamb, you won't be rewarded for treating your followers as your friends. Rather, the game encourages you to be as ruthless and callous as possible, meaning that you can choose to give your followers the cannibal trait to make them actually gain faith in you when you make Minced Follower Meat using sacrificed or otherwise dead animals.

You'll find that brainwashing your followers using Sozo's mushroom ritual will give you a full Faith meter for three whole days, and it's much easier to simply murder and eat dissenters than it is to re-educate them for five days in a row. There's no real benefit to going easy on your followers, so you may as well reap the rewards of being as unhinged a cultist as possible.

7/10 Upgrade Beds Quickly

Although it costs a great deal more to build teepees for your followers, you'll want to upgrade as many beds as possible, as early as possible, to save yourself having to repair four sleeping bags every morning.

What's more, you can even build teepees over broken beds for the same price as building them over intact ones, meaning you'll actually save yourself lumber.

Your followers will get to work on the construction bit, and when they're all done, you'll see a perfectly put-together bed that any dedicated follower would be thankful to curl up in.

You can unlock the Materialistic trait for your followers, which will cause them to gain Faith when they sleep in an upgraded bed!

6/10 Farmageddon

Farming crops, catching fish, and cooking up meals for your flock is a surprisingly large part of the game.

If you don't make an effort to plant as much as you can, your people will quickly die out from starvation or start leaving in droves when their faith in you recedes.

To prevent this, keep yourself well-stocked with seeds by purchasing them from the seed-seller outside the door to Anchordeep.

She will start selling seeds for different crops as you unlock each Heretic's domain:

  • Darkwood gives you Camellia flower seeds.
  • Anura gives you mushroom spores.
  • Anchordeep gives you cauliflower and pumpkin seeds.
  • Silk Cradle gives you beetroot seeds.

Make sure you purchase the seed silo and farmhouse upgrades using your divine inspiration in order for your followers to farm your crops in your absence.

5/10 Go Fish

Not only is fishing a great way to switch up the meals you feed your flock, but it's a great way to make some coin if Knucklebones just isn't your speed.

You'll find that, unfortunately, you can't cook with all the fish you catch. What should you do with all that tuna and squid? Make offerings to The One Who Waits using the chest that appears in your cult grounds. Here you can trade fish, produce, bones, and other collectibles in exchange for gold, allowing you to clear your inventory whilst earning a bit of dough at the same time.

4/10 Easy Pickings

Is your headcount looking a little thin after leaving a pestilence to run rampant among your followers? Don't worry too much, you can buy followers from the spider outside the Silk Cradle entrance once per day.

This is the same spider that you sometimes meet out on your crusades. Sometimes the followers they have ensnared will be unwell, which makes them cheap (or free) to purchase, and other times they will cost you 50 gold coins apiece.

Related: Cult Of The Lamb - How To Beat The Anchordeep Heretic

Either way, it'll be worth the money or the time spent recuperating, given how much strength can be derived from numbers in this game, so you'll never have to worry about finding new recruits to rescue.

3/10 It Takes Two (Of Everything)

When in doubt, get two of every item in Cult Of The Lamb.

Building a prison? Two will do nicely, just in case you have multiple offenders or get confronted with a follower challenge to recruit dissenting followers.

Building a bed for that whiny new axolotl? Make that two beds since someone is definitely going to break their lodgings this evening, and you'll be smacked with a hefty faith penalty until you right that wrong anyway.

If you want to build an outhouse to stop your smelly flock from pooping everywhere, you're better off building two - and so on. It might seem unnecessary at first, but constructing more than you need in the early stages of the game will be a massive help if times get hard and you don't have as much lumber or stone to spare on repairs.

2/10 Get Cooking

A lot can happen whilst you're out swinging your blade of glory, including your followers starting to starve to death slowly.

To avoid having to martyr yourself to make a quick getaway, cook up a storm before heading out and leave your herd with plenty of food to spare.

Even if a few dishes go bad and you end up having to bin them, at least you'll have a failsafe just in case you take longer than you expect to. It might even be worth it to time your expeditions so that you always set off at night time, whilst most of your flock are asleep, so that no one gets up and immediately eats the many Berry Bowls you'll be churning out for their daily rations.

If you unlock the piece of doctrine that gets rid of the Faith penalty when followers eat the less-than palatable Grassy Gruel, you'll have even more to serve up without worrying about returning to a horde of usurpers.

1/10 Less Is More Is Less

There are a lot of interesting bells and whistles that you can build in Cult Of The Lamb, but a lot of these are rather useless baubles.

For example, missionaries are pretty unnecessary if you have a sizeable flock of eight to 12 members. There is plenty for them to be getting on with at base camp, and you should be able to make up any backlog by scavenging during your crusades.

In general, excess is unnecessary in this game. Don't worry - there are ways to cut the fat if need be. Try sacrificing or ascending your followers to get rid of them should your numbers swell too fast too soon - and make sure the rest of the herd doesn't get the wrong idea by unlocking the belief in the afterlife trait, helping them to step into the unknown without fear.

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