Cult of the Lamb beginner’s guide, tips, and tricks

Cult of the Lamb is an adorable roguelite game that also includes a cult management aspect. You’ll hack-and-slash your way through a variety of areas while also cooking meals for dozens of your followers. Your end goal is to rescue The One Who Waits, a long-lost deity who’s given you your powers.

With so many different gameplay aspects, Cult of the Lamb has a lot for you to master. In this guide, we’ll walk you through eight Cult of the Lamb tips we wish we knew before starting, which will help you become the best cult leader you can be.

Build your own difficulty

One of the coolest aspects of Cult of the Lamb is that it’s two games in one — part cult management sim, part hack-and-slash roguelite. Both feed into each other, and you can focus on the one you prefer to make your life easier.

For example, if you prefer the cult management part of the game, you can stay home for multiple days at a time, growing your cult and increasing your in-combat power by teaching sermons and gaining XP. Then, the next time you go on a Crusade, you’ll find more powerful weapons waiting for you.

On the flipside, going on more Crusades will give you more resources and followers, speeding up your cult management considerably.

Leave for crusades in the morning

Image: Massive Monster/Devolver Digital via Polygon

Cult of the Lamb has a day-night cycle, and time passes whether you’re at home with your cult or out on a Crusade. Because of this, you want to time your Crusades carefully so you don’t miss an opportunity to preach a Sermon to your followers, which you can only do once per day.

The best idea is to wait for your followers to wake up in the morning, preach a Sermon to them, make sure they’re fed, and then leave on your Crusade. You likely won’t be home until the following evening, but that means you’ll be able to get another Sermon in before your cult goes off to bed.

Missing a Sermon isn’t the end of the world, but it’s a missed opportunity to gain some XP from your followers and keep their Faith in you, their glorious leader, high.

Explore every map

There aren’t any random events that can instantly kill your or halve your health in Cult of the Lamb, so it’s best to explore every nook and cranny while you’re Crusading.

The worst case scenario is that you’ll run into a group of enemies, which shouldn’t be much of a problem. The benefits — like finding more Tarot Cards or rare resources — far outweigh another room filled with critters to kill.

More followers equals more problems (and resources)

If you want to proceed through the main story in Cult of the Lamb, you’ll need to steadily increase your follower count. You’ll need a certain number of followers to gain entry to each new area, including the final boss. However, every new follower is another mouth to feed.

As you grow your cult, your resource needs grow accordingly. You’ll need to find and cook more food, and your cult will create even more mess. At the same time, you’ll also gain more experience when you preach Sermons, and many hands make light work.

Just be sure that you invest in the infrastructure of your cult according to its needs. If you recruit a bunch of followers at once without building any more beds or increasing your food yield, you’re going to have a lot of angry (or dead!) followers.

Visit all the areas — and Devotion totems — regularly

Image: Massive Monster/Devolver Digital via Polygon

As you adventure through Cult of the Lamb, you’ll open up several areas on the map. First you’ll be able to visit Ratau in his cabin, then you’ll discover a beach, and so on. Not only do many of these locations have quests for you to complete and items to purchase, some also have Devotion (XP for your cult) for you to collect.

As you complete more quests, you’ll gain followers outside your cult who will pledge their loyalty to you. This activates a totem in their area that will give you Devotion, just like the one back in your cult compound. Make sure to pop into these areas every few days and collect your Devotion, as the totems don’t have a very high capacity and fill up rather quickly.

Set up your farm as early as you can

One of the first upgrades you can buy for your cult is the Farming Bundle, which will help you create food for your followers. You’ll want to pick this up as early as you can, so you can build an excess of grub before you start to fill out your ranks.

The farm is easy to operate. You just need to put seeds you want to plant in the silo (you’ll get seeds from Crusading), assign a follower to tend the farm, and harvest the crop yourself once it’s ready. You can then turn that produce into cooked food for your cult and start the process over again.

You’ll eventually be able to automate more of the farming process, but getting the basics set up immediately is key to success in Cult of the Lamb.

Use elderly followers to your advantage

Unlike you, your followers aren’t blessed with everlasting life. They’ll become elderly in their late 40s and stop performing tasks for the cult. Instead, they’ll spend their golden years wandering around and eating your food before eventually dropping dead. But they aren’t completely useless.

Elderly cult members will still generate experience for you when you preach your sermons, or if you manage to level up their loyalty, which is great. However, they have another key purpose: sacrifice.

There are plenty of ways and reasons to sacrifice cult members. There are rituals that allow them to ascend, giving everyone Faith, or more violent rituals, which will scare your followers but net you some big XP. There are also NPCs who might ask you to sacrifice your followers to them in exchange for resources. There’s even an ability that allows you to kill off a follower to resurrect yourself mid-Crusade.

This is what elderly followers are for. Use them to your advantage before they die of natural causes and you have to bury them in your compound.

Be ruthless

Image: Massive Monster/Devolver Digital via Polygon

That note about the elderly may sound harsh — and it is! — but it’s what’s required of you if you want to be a successful and efficient cult leader.

Cult of the Lamb gives you plenty of opportunities to use your followers as resources. These are not villagers living on your Animal Crossing island that you can get to know and cherish. Your followers are living resources, like Pikmin, to do your bidding in the short time they have. They all eventually grow old and become useless, so use them while you’ve got them and discard them when they’re no longer of use to you.

There are always more followers out there waiting for you to indoctrinate them, and the ones you have will eventually die whether you sacrifice them for a noble cause or not.