Assassin’s Creed Odyssey guide to cultists and upgrading your spear

About 15 hours (or more) into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you’ll discover an entirely new mechanic, section to your menu, and reason to continue murderstabbing your way across ancient Greece. Like a lot of things about the game, though, this huge new aspect is kind of sprung on you without much explanation. And it has some wide-ranging implications about how you approach the rest of the game — specifically choosing new abilities.

But you’ve been practicing just about every aspect of this new gameplay aspect all along. Very quietly, through your first many hours, the game has been training you how to find and deal with cultists — through documents, restricted areas, and the mercenary mechanic — you just didn’t know it yet.

This guide will walk you through what the Cult of Kosmos means to you (gameplay-wise, not story-wise), and what that has to do with your spear.

Note: This guide contains mid-game spoilers.

Cultists menu

Once you uncover the cult as part of the “The Serpent’s Lair” quest, you’ll get a new tab in your menu helpfully titled “Cultists.” Here, you can track the seven cultist sub-groups and their members as you murder your way up the hierarchy.

Ubisoft via Polygon

There are five stages to a cult member node in this menu:

1. Most cult members will start off as the generic Medusa-like icon. This means you know they exist, but you don’t know anything about them.
2. If you have found (at least) one clue (more on clues below) about that member, but haven’t found all of that member’s clues, the node will switch to a grayed out, masked picture.
3. When you have found all the clues, the node will be highlighted with a blue-white ring and no longer grayed out. This means you’re ready to unveil and track the cultist.
4. Yellow nodes with unmasked pictures are cultists you have found all clues for and unveiled, but haven’t killed yet.
5. Finally, red nodes are the cultists you’ve murdered to death.

Finding (and killing) cultists

Ubisoft via Polygon

Every cultist has one or more clues about their identity and location scattered around the world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Some of these, you’ll just stumble onto (like documents) — you’ll even get a handy popup in the middle of your screen when one is nearby. Also, like Mercenaries, killing a cultist will usually give you a clue about another cultist.

Ubisoft via Polygon

Once you have all of a cultist’s clues (and their icon glows blue-white), you can check their details in the menu and unveil them. Doing this will put their icon on your map.

Cultists tend to be hiding in one of the various Restricted Areas you’ve encountered — like a fort, camp, or alpha animal lair. It’s up to you how to approach their hideout and how many people you kill along the way. Once you find the cultist, all that’s left is the stabbing.

Upgrading your spear

Ubisoft via Polygon

Cultists carry a valuable resource — an Isu artifact. These are the little triangle pieces that made up the pyramid in the “The Serpent’s Lair” cutscene. When you track down and murder a cultist, you’ll collect their artifact (and some other gear).

If you take these artifacts to the Ancient Forge (which you discover in quests after “The Serpent’s Lair”), you can use them to upgrade Leonidas’ spear. Doing so doesn’t make it better at stabbing, though. Instead, it adds segments to your Adrenaline gauge and unlocks new abilities — specifically, all of those “progress farther in the story” gated abilities.

The first spear upgrade only requires one artifact. The price quickly goes up from there, though — the second requires three and the third requires seven. There are a total of six spear levels to unlock, which will require a lot of artifacts.